Bloomberg News Going Mainstream

The New York Times ran a really interesting feature story on Bloomberg L.P. It’s an unbelievable company in today’s media environment. Consider this paragraph:

[Bloomberg's] headquarters, on the East Side, has the crystalline look and smooth textures of an airport terminal from the 22nd century. It has sleek, elegantly curved glass walls, outdoor patios, art installations hanging over escalators, fish tanks filled with exotic species and digital screens overhead that display the weather — with lightning flashes — and trading levels for the Nasdaq. Employees snack on free kiwis and pomegranates and gulp fancy sodas. The company even employs full-time bathroom attendants to wipe up errant droplets of water on the countertops.

If asked if that existed ANYWHERE today I would’ve said, without hesitation, not at all. I’m skeptical how long these bathroom attendants will last, and the article helps fuel that skepticism, but as to the larger question of the article, How’s Bloomberg doing? Is it expanding or contracting? Things are looking up for the the business company. And I agree that optimism is fairly well warranted for news companies that don’t depend on paper to distribute its content, especially ones like Reuters Thomson Reuters or Bloomberg. Still, Bloomberg has a few kinks to figure out:

Although Bloomberg, which is privately held, draws attention for its media ambitions, a vast majority of the company’s projected $6.3 billion in revenue — and nearly all of its profit — derives from financial information systems. These software packages, still known as “terminals” from when Bloomberg made the hardware, can be found on virtually all Wall Street trading desks, housing huge amounts of data and analytics, from price quotations for fixed-income and derivative products to complex risk analysis — making Bloomberg a live-on-Wall-Street, die-on-Wall-Street enterprise.

That’s no surprise. But the real edge Bloomberg has today is a steady revenue base from which it can expand elsewhere. It’s only a matter of time before lower tax-bracket readers start going to Reuters or Bloomberg for news and Bloomberg knows this. The trick is picking lucrative markets where media companies are contracting:

On the hunt for new customers, Bloomberg is testing a Web-based product aimed at law firms. Executives are also looking at the sports arena, sussing out interest among team owners or even fantasy leagues for a system to analyze sports statistics.

Bloomberg now has 142 journalists in Washington, 196 in Tokyo and 30 in Paris. It recently opened bureaus in Nigeria, Ghana and Cyprus. It has won numerous journalism awards and, to cite just one example, has offered some of the shrewdest coverage of the financial crisis over the last couple of years.