A veteran of network television, Lack sits in his small office in
Bloomberg’s gleaming New York headquarters, which is stocked with signs
of the company’s largesse: expensive artwork, oversized fish tanks, a
state-of-the-art TV studio. “Most of the other news organizations I’ve
worked at are fighting the delusion factor,” says the former news
executive for both CBS and NBC. “There’s enormous pressure of economics
on journalism. It’s an expensive, tough game to be in.”
Awash in subscriber revenue, Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters are those
truly rare things: news organizations that not only are healthy but also
are on a hiring spree. Bloomberg boasts about 2,400 edit staffers, up
from 2,100 three years ago, while Thomson Reuters has added 600
full-time journalists over the past four years for a total of 3,000.
Each employs more newspeople than The New York Times and The Washington Post combined.
In Bloomberg’s case, the handsome newsroom salaries are legendary.
“They’re spending like drunken sailors on all these top-flight
journalists,” grumbles an exec at a competing media company. “It’s
allowed them to corner the talent market.” That’s because Bloomberg and
Reuters have something no other player in the news business does:
subscription-only financial data and services that pull in billions of
dollars.
Compare that to the calamitous newspaper industry, where some
13,400—about one-fourth—of newsroom jobs were lost between 2006 and
2010, according to Pew’s State of News Media 2012 report. As that
carnage continues, consumers remain steadfast in their refusal to pay
for news online—and news outfits are left scrambling to figure out a
profitable future.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg and Reuters, with the vast majority of their
journalism paid for by non-advertising revenue, are already there. With
their global footprint and vast distribution system, they are an
enviable model. While print brands still struggle to adapt their content
to digital platforms, these companies are churning out articles and
sharing editorial costs across multiple outlets, from Web to TV to
print. “This is the newsroom of the future, where television, print and
digital are really connected,” says Larry Kramer, founder of CBS
MarketWatch. “Each one may not have to be profitable, but they will all
contribute.”
News is actually a relatively small factor in the bottom line of both
Bloomberg and Reuters...
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