NPR’s On The Media has an interesting story about Bloomberg News and how the organization may target regional business stories for newspapers, almost like an outside contractor:
SETH MNOOKIN: Well, right now, Bloomberg News has more editorial employees than The New York Times and The Washington Post combined which, when I found out, astounded me because they are not dependent on models that clearly are not working, advertising based, subscription based models.Just in the last several weeks we’ve seen a complete bloodbath at magazines and newspapers around the country. The largest newspaper in New Jersey almost closed, which is astounding, and Bloomberg News is not only not being killed but is still doing active expansion.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Here’s the money line from your story, I think, Seth. You wrote, “For the moment, at least, it looks as if we’re moving towards a world in which more people will get their information from Bloomberg News than from any other single source.” Really?
SETH MNOOKIN: Now, for really the first time, they are starting to look at diversifying their products and moving it slightly outside of the sort of Terminal umbrella. An example of how that could work is, right now, regional papers are not able to cover industry the way they used to. The San Jose Mercury News can’t cover the tech industry the way it could 10 years ago. The Boston Globe can’t cover biotech the way it used to.
Bloomberg News could potentially go in, cover those industries, sell that content to The Boston Globe, to The San Jose Mercury News, and, by putting it on their terminals, attract that many more subscribers from Boston or from San Jose.
And I think one of the big questions right now is whether they will be able to do that and continue to be financially successful or whether deviating from what has always been their sort of core mission is going to end up being problematic for them.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, this is what’s interesting. Dan Doctoroff, who took over as president when Bloomberg’s mayoral responsibilities took over his schedule, Doctoroff called the Bloomberg model the journalism as capitalism approach and told you that Bloomberg’s not, quote, “burdened by the old broken business models that almost every other news organization is.”
SETH MNOOKIN: What he meant was that the news division never made a financial decision that was not going to directly impact their readership. The New York Times’ Iraq Bureau, which costs around three million dollars a year — if they closed that bureau, The New York Times would not lose three million dollars in revenue.
Bloomberg News would never make that decision to spend that three million dollars. They would look at Iraq and say, how many of our customers would either subscribe or stop their subscription if they don’t get this information? So there’s always that very direct relationship at Bloomberg.
In other news, it’s a great time to start an open source company, says Dana Blankenhorn. Now may be just the right time to launch an open source project into the commercial world, he submits, and offers one example why.
How about the back-end of a Web-based News Operation incorporating citizen-enabled news maps. CBC Radio3 once had a bi-weekly magazine (archive) that featured local musicians, photo stories and interviews that might work in the new mobile environment. Listen (and watch) on the bus. URmedia.
