Sometimes professional ethics demand giving the customer
what he doesn’t want.
Take, as one dramatic example, the National Football League. For decades, what the NFL wanted from its medical
staff was to “get the player back on the field” as fast as possible. And for decades, that’s what NFL medicine
delivered, until (and for years after)
it became obvious that some players who had suffered concussions were being “rehabilitated”
too quickly, leading to repeated brain injuries, some of which were irreversible,
and in a few cases, led to incapacitation and suicide.
Starting in the 1980s (I know because, in 1983, for NBC’s pre-game
show, NLF ’83, I did the first TV report on the risks of football concussions),
a few team physicians started consulting their Hippocratic Oath, and warned the
league and its owners that preventive
measures were mandatory. Thus, slowly,
the NFL come around to recording brain activity baselines for its players and
comparing them with test results after someone “had his bell rung.” And doctors and coaches started delivering
the news nobody wanted to hear, “you can’t play this week.”
In the news business, professional ethics demand that
journalists serve, not just market demand, but their best calculation of the
public interest, in deciding what, and how much to report. This is one reason why news is more than just
data collection and distribution.
Data delivered quickly to a proprietary 2-screened terminal
has always been what Bloomberg LP’s services are all about. Over the past
decade, Bloomberg moved into the news business and acquitted itself well, still
providing lots of quick snapshots of financial information, but adding to them perceptive,
in depth, reporting on a wide variety of subjects.
The rewards in reputation came quickly; financial rewards
did not. Even worse, from Bloomberg L.P.’s
corporate perspective, some of that niche, long-form, expensive, investigative journalism caused exactly the
kind of trouble it should: it pissed off the parties it exposed, most recently
the “princelings” of China’s Communist Party elite and the “entrepreneurs” who
cut them a slice of the cake in exchange for political protection.
Faced, not just with hostility, but severe cutbacks in
orders of the Bloomberg terminals from China, Bloomberg LP did what any
unprincipled businessman would do: cut and ran, lopping “dangerous” stories off
China distribution of its global news feeds, and more recently, firing their
Polk-award winning Hong Kong-based investigative reporter Michael Forsythe.
This week, the Bloomberg trend back to basic data delivery
and out of the news business reached an inevitable conclusion, the firing of, a
reported 50 to 100 editorial staff.
The details of the firings confirm the movement away from
editorial credibility that first became visible months ago, when command of
Bloomberg’s media division was handed to Justin Smith, who then gave
responsibility for Bloomberg TV news to Josh Tyrangiel, and when the news
channel started pre-empting new coverage to run infomercials (paid content
which often masquerades as journalism).
According to Linette Lopez of Business Insider, “the infomercials are now on Sunday
nights from 11:00 pm to 12:00 am, Tuesday to Saturday from 2:00 am to 3:00 am,
and Monday from 12:00 am to 2:00 am.”
Smith summed up his “philosophy” of media in his “I’m your
new boss” memo to the staff: “Moving quickly is paramount: the faster you move, the more you learn, and
the sooner you can optimize for success. Fred Wilson, the VC behind Twitter,
Foursquare, Zynga and others, argues that ‘speed’” is the quality he seeks out
above all others in digital media entrepreneurs. I agree.”
Speed
may good for data distribution, but understanding comes more slowly, and in the
real world, and for the journalism which feeds on it, “moving quickly” often
means misstepping in the wrong direction.
Events have their own tempo and will not be rushed for some
fact-marketer’s convenience.
In the
same memo, Smith also asserted, “There will always be a robust market for
quality content. No technology will ever erode this demand. It’s our job to
keep our standards high as we experiment. Bloomberg was built on accuracy and
insight. We must build on this strength.”
And
then he hired as his TV guy, Tourangiel, whose only prior experience in that
medium was at MTV, fabled “for quality content,” in its news.
Today,
Bloomberg News’ long-time editor in chief Matthew Winkler fired dozens of
employees in what is not a cutback in resources, but a series of shifts in deployment
of resources. Gone from cultural
coverage are the Muse brand and its emphasis on covering books and performances
that matter. In its place there will be
heightened coverage of “luxury” pursuits.
It is as if Architectural Digest became Luxe Magazine, or Consumer
Reports became the Nieman-Marcus Catalog.
Sports
at Bloomberg News will no longer cover actual events, just the financials
behind them.
And investigative journalism?
Winkler, is his own memo announcing the firings of several of his top
editors and writers, said: “We also have high ambitions for beat and investigative reporting. Our commitment to the best journalism — both
this-just-in and in-depth narratives — has never been greater.”
Of course, in the same paragraph he said, that hiring in 2014
would focus on “First Word and Emerging Markets,” both Twittery fast tip and data
services.”
To be fair, analyst Felix Salmon, blogging for Reuters, called
today’s events the latest setback for Winkler, long a respected traditional
newsman, and further evidence of the ascent of Smith and Tourangiel, and Tom
Secunda, who Salmon said, is “a
co-founder of the company, the other Bloomberg billionaire,
the man in charge of basically everything which makes money at Bloomberg, [and]
the opposite of a romantic press baron: all he’s interested in is profitability.
Salmon continued, “[Secunda’s] only priority is client service,
and giving Bloomberg subscribers whatever they want. And it turns out that
Bloomberg subscribers, although they definitely want market-moving news ahead
of anybody else, are much less fussed about the broad mass of news stories
which don’t move
markets”
Sure enough: Bloomberg’s clients want data, numbers, trends. These are the “market movers” who saw a
housing boom, with rising numbers of home buyers, rising rates of interest,
rising profits for lenders and funders, but stopped searching right there. They never cared about the lack of economic
fitness of many of those buyers, the lack of basic honesty among many of the
mortgage-sellers, and the complete divorce from reality that characterized a
financial industry (rightfully, alas) confident of its own impunity.
Bloomberg’s bottom line tickers don’t talk about that shit.
So, if Secunda and Smith and Tourangiel really do rule Bloomberg
now, it should get out of the news business entirely. Data dumping, at high speed, with high energy
– that’s what they are good for. Let
them make their money that way, just as the NFL spent generations raking in
profits from entertaining fans with as the league’s most successful salesman
John Madden used to put it, WHAM, BAM, POW, OOF.
Who the hell wants to
know about brain damage?
Intelligence is a terrible thing to lay waste, or in Bloomberg
News’ own news of the day, lay off.
Selling off the news division is better than
selling out the news.
