Bloomberg News Turns 35

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On Feb. 5, 1990, Matt Winkler began working for a little known entrepreneur named Mike Bloomberg who hired him to start a news organization. 

It’s not an exaggeration to say Bloomberg News did more than any outlet to shape financial media in the last decade of the 20th century. 

Matt hired more reporters and trained more editors and laid down more guidelines for how and when and what to write than anyone. 

Last week, Mike Bloomberg, Peter Grauer and dozens of colleagues surprised Matt at his desk with cupcakes to commemorate the occasion. He was awarded a lucite trophy marking 35 years, one of relatively few employees to reach that milestone. 

Matt told the story about how in 1988 he had co-written a Wall Street Journal article about Mike’s fast-growing data company. A year later, Mike took him to lunch at a Japanese restaurant and offered him a job. 

It was an extraordinary leap of faith for both men.

Matt was a 35-year-old reporter working at the newspaper that was then considered the pinnacle of financial journalism. Matt’s colleagues thought it was career suicide. Salary wasn’t discussed; Matt didn’t know what he would make until his first paycheck. 

Matt hired fifteen people that first year, none of them of any renown. 

A number had never been reporters, coming from jobs on Wall Street trading oil (Simon Walsh) and municipal bonds (Christa Sheehan) and mortgages (Joan Rogers). 

Others came from Institutional Investor (David Kleinbard, Ken Kohn, Tim Quinson, Gerard Meuchner), Standard & Poor’s (Nora Macaluso, Scott Schnipper) and Dow Jones (Mark Meneiro). There were a few walk-ins, including me. 

The next year, Matt hired 25 college graduates and put them in a class for months in the Princeton office to learn about markets and journalism. I doubt any media company has done anything like that before or since. 

And since we didn’t know much, he set down guidelines on everything from ethics (never let a source pay) to sourcing (no anonymous quotes) to grammar (a ban on the word “but.”)

He was innovative, creating a team that systematically summarized other papers before that became a widespread practice. We also used technology to write automated stories decades before others.

It was impossible then to know Bloomberg would become so big, but there were signs. 

Early on, Matt created a style guide called the Bloomberg Way. We were too young and ignorant to understand the hubris or importance of the gesture. 

But it was crucial to creating a culture. Matt knew that building a media brand was as much about process as prose. You cannot establish something enduring without a foundation. 

Matt ran Bloomberg News for 25 years before becoming editor emeritus a decade ago. Since then, he has continued to contribute, writing a column and teaching. 

He taught me — and many others — so much about journalism.

And for that we owe him an debt of gratitude.  

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BRIEF OBSERVATIONS

CHATGPT: The consensus is shifting from viewing LLMs magical creatures that can answer any question for free. Increasingly we are realizing that generative AI doesn’t work without deep and reliable content sets that cost money.

GISH GALLOP: This seems relevant to our current news and cultural climate.

THE FUTURE FORETOLD: Love this anecdote from Wikipedia but suspect that it would go over badly were Zuckerberg to do something similar at Meta.

PROBABILITY: Emanuel Derman is one of the best people to follow on social media. Here a reminder that we underappreciate the width of what could have happened.

KNOWN UNKNOWNS: The Rumsfeld emails should be required reading for young people entering the job market. They should be prepared for a boss asking them to prepare a list of all the bad and good things that could happen.