Why Did Michael Bloomberg Start Bloomberg News?

David Senra, reading Bloomberg by Bloomberg, says Michael Bloomberg started Bloomberg News after Matt Winkler told him to put text on top of the bond information already on the terminal. Bloomberg had asked, on a phone call, whether the company should enter text news so the terminal would matter to stock traders as well as bond traders. Winkler said the terminal already explained why bonds move each minute, each day, and each week better than any collection of reporters, and already supplied the charts and graphs behind major debt trades. Add text, he said, and the result would not exist anywhere else. No one in debt or equity would be able to live without it.

Bloomberg checked that move against history first. Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, Henry Luce, B.C. Forbes, Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch, and Oprah Winfrey were the examples that a gutsy entrepreneur can enter news at any time. Terminal-rental revenue meant the news service did not have to pay for itself as a standalone product, which he called one heck of an advantage. Bloomberg builds rather than buys, so acquiring a newsroom never came up. Starting from scratch was more fun and less risky. He handed Winkler a three-page list. The job was to do more than collect and relay news. Each story would also show what the terminal could compute, which would bring in more readers, more revenue, and then more reporters.