Bloomberg News lays off about 80 to reorganize newsroom
Bloomberg L.P. began laying off editorial employees Tuesday as part of its effort to reorganize its news operation, according to people familiar with the matter.
About 80 positions are being targeted for cuts companywide, including roughly a dozen employees in the Washington, D.C., bureau. The company, whose holdings include its lucrative financial news terminal, Bloomberg Businessweek, Bloomberg.com, Bloomberg TV and lifestyle magazine Pursuits, employs about 2,400 journalists.
The layoffs had been expected since last month, when the New York Post initially reported about the impending cuts.
"Friends and colleagues have lost their jobs," wrote John Micklethwait, Bloomberg's editor in chief, in a staff memo obtained by USA TODAY. "It always hurts to let talented, dedicated people go, and no journalist likes to tell other journalists that they are losing their jobs. But this is not about downsizing; it is about refocusing our considerable resources."
Among those laid off were national security editor John Walcott and Dawn Kopecki, a reporter who wrote an eight-page memo in June about "a climate of fear and mistrust" at Bloomberg and the need for the company to trim staffing to cut through bureaucracy, the sources said, requesting anonymity to speak freely about the development.
Micklethwait, who was top editor of The Economist, joined Bloomberg in February to help company founder Michael Bloomberg reorganize the news operation after the former New York mayor returned after a 12-year absence. Micklethwait was given wide latitude to reshape the organization, including further consolidation of the terminal news operation and the consumer media unit.
While Bloomberg has been seeking in recent years to broaden its reach to a wider audience beyond the financial community with more consumer-friendly media initiatives, the founder's return seems to have triggered a shift back to a stronger focus on the company's core mission of serving traders, analysts, investment bankers and other fans of serious business news, the sources said.
In a staff memo earlier this year, Micklethwait urged reporters and editors to write more tightly and said that the newsroom will focus on six areas — business, finance, markets, technology, economics and power (government and politics). Micklethwait repeated the message in the memo Tuesday. "One of my first crusades at Bloomberg was to cut back on lengthy self-indulgent stories," he wrote.
The hiring of Financial Times Washington bureau chief Megan Murphy last month to head Bloomberg's D.C. bureau also is a signal that Bloomberg is reemphasizing its terminal business and reversing the inroads it made in coverage of Washington politics, the sources said.
Micklethwait told staffers Tuesday that Bloomberg’s news operation will keep its “headcount flat over the next year” after many years of expansion.
Its mission is to be “the definitive ‘chronicle of capitalism’ – to capture everything that matters in global business and finance,” Micklethwait said. And it means concentrating its resources to support the mission and ending some coverage areas, including education and sports. “People don’t turn to us first for news on schools or baseball,” he wrote.
Bloomberg plans to spend more on developing the "fast commentary" team, morning briefing, data journalism, social media monitoring, its new markets TV show, the radio operation and “better coverage of venture capital, market structure and campaign finance,” he said.
"I have said many times that I come from the Toyota school of journalism, not the 1970s Detroit one," Micklethwait said. "You have to be responsible for a beat; you have to be close to copy. You have to be a journalist not a bureaucrat...I would like to make Bloomberg far less hierarchical: we have far too many titles and ranks."
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