Bloomberg

Bloomberg News is a news service based out of New York operated by Bloomberg L.P. that in the past two decades has increased the competition among business news wires. Although it is best known for providing business and economic news to investors, it also carries content in other areas, including the arts, politics, and sports. In 2008, Bloomberg News had more than 2,200 reporters and editors in 130 bureaus and published more than 5,500 stories per day. It has become a well-known news-gathering organization that has won dozens of awards and now includes television, radio, magazines, and book publishing divisions.

Former Salomon Brothers general partner Michael Bloomberg founded the company that became Bloomberg L.P. with his severance pay in 1981. Originally, the company just sold computer terminals to Wall Street investment banks that included financial data about stocks, bonds, and other investments. Those financial data still provide the bulk of the company's revenue.

The name changed (1986), and the company began what was originally called Bloomberg Business News (1990) with a six-person editorial team. Bloomberg hired Wall Street Journal reporter Matthew Winkler, who had written a story about Bloomberg for the Journal, to run the operation. The news service was—and still is—provided on the terminals, which are leased for about $1,800 per month. The first Bloomberg news story was published in June 1990.

During its first year, Bloomberg Business News opened bureaus in New York, Washington, London, Tokyo, Toronto, and Princeton, New Jersey, writing about the stock market and company news that had previously been covered by other wire services such as Dow Jones, the Associated Press, and Reuters. By early 1995, the organization had grown to 325 reporters and editors in 54 bureaus and had started an investing magazine called Bloomberg Personal that was distributed as a Sunday newspaper supplement. The two main newsrooms at that time were in Princeton—for business and company news—and New York—for markets and financial news.

In its early years, Bloomberg Business News distributed its editorial content to other media organizations as a way to improve its name recognition, giving terminals for free to newspapers in virtually every U.S. city. Those newspapers then pulled Bloomberg stories off the wire and ran them in their business sections. In many cases, Bloomberg helped the newspapers by creating an index of local stocks that could run each day in the business section.

Bloomberg attracted business journalists from daily newspapers and other media organizations by offering them higher salaries and stock certificates that fluctuated in value based on the number of terminals sold by the company. The number of installed terminals reached 10,000 in 1990 and doubled by 1992, the same year that the company introduced Bloomberg Markets magazine. The fifty thousandth terminal was installed in 1995, and the company leased its seventy-five thousandth terminal in 1997. In 2004, the company surpassed the 200,000 installed terminals mark.

The organization purchased WBBR-AM, a New York–based radio station with a business focus, and launched a show on several New York area television stations in the 1990s. WBBR is the flagship radio station of Bloomberg Radio (1993), which syndicates reports to more than 840 radio stations around the world. Bloomberg Television (1994) operates 24 hours a day, competing against CNBC and Fox Business Network, and reaches more than 200 million homes worldwide, operating in seven languages. The company also launched Bloomberg Morning News, a daily financial news program on 155 public television stations.

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