La lección de Bloomberg

Jack Shafer analiza en Slate las cláves del éxito de Bloomberg: ¿por qué crece cuando otras empresas informativas disminuyen?

Bloomberg News, now employs 1,700 reporters and editors in 127 bureaus worldwide, and its wire service routinely supplies most top papers with business news and briefs. As other publications have shed older, high-paid journalists, Bloomberg News has hired them: Al Hunt (Wall Street Journal), John M. Berry and Charles Babcock (Washington Post), Margaret Carlson (Time), and Roger Simon (U.S. News & World Report), just to name a few. Yes, dinosaurs all, but each conveys to readers credibility and cachet that only money can buy.
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Bloomberg perceived in the early 1980s an untapped need for instantly transmitted, market-moving news for traders of stocks and bonds. He understood that with new and affordable computer technologies he could leapfrog the old guard at Reuters and Telerate (once owned by the Wall Street Journal's parent, Dow Jones). A 10-second advantage over a competitor on a market-moving morsel of data could easily translate into substantial profits: One testament to Bloomberg's power is that every major American newspaper business page now has a terminal or two doing heavy lifting for its reporters who cover the markets.
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Bloomberg added the news division in 1990 because numbers aren't the only thing that moves markets. By hiring journalists to staff what he calls his "electronic newspaper," Bloomberg gained access to the same events and raw material that Reuters and the Wall Street Journal had long enjoyed—the market-moving business news contained in corporate conference calls and government proceedings.
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Newspapers derive most of their revenue from advertisers, but the estimated 200,000 Bloomberg Terminal subscribers provide upward of 95 percent of the company's revenues. Bloomberg regards the trickle of Bloomberg News stories running outside the terminal—in pages of the Post or Times, on the Web, on cable TV, in its books and magazines, and on his New York City radio station—as high-profile advertisements for potential terminal customers.
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Daily newspapers didn't see the lucrative news and information opportunity Bloomberg did for the same reason they didn't enter the Web search business when it was green. As mature and graying industries, newspapers are mortified by the creative destruction of changing markets, so they take only tiny and confused steps—mostly backwards. Years after the Web had made newspaper stock tables obsolete, the dailies started to prune and discontinue them, but how many added something of greater value in the form of new columnists or graphs that explained changing markets? Bloomberg's genius, and I don't use that term lightly, was to exploit how deeply people who need information will dig into their pockets to pay for it.
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"Our principal mandate is to cover anything that has money written on it, anything that affects markets," Hunt said. That sounds like Congress, the White House, the courts, and the regulatory agencies. At $1,425 per month, Bloomberg ain't the people's news. But at a time when newspaper readership is declining and newspapers are shriveling, Bloomberg is growing. There's a lesson in that.