The last time Norman Pearlstine had a job in journalism, he spent his days across the street from Radio City Music Hall on the 34th floor of the Time-Life Building, a lofty realm he mockingly refers to as magazine heaven because mere mortals never get to breathe its rarefied air. As editor in chief of Time Inc., the largest magazine publisher in the country, Pearlstine oversaw a stable of 154 titles, including Entertainment Weekly, Fortune, People, and Sports Illustrated. His office, with its leather couches and postcard-worthy city views, was larger than many studio apartments.
Pearlstine, who was raised and educated in Philadelphia and its suburbs, has long been a major figure in the Manhattan media world. After graduating from Haverford College and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, he joined the staff of The Wall Street Journal, and over the next quarter-century he ran the paper’s Asian edition, launched its European edition, and served as the managing editor and executive editor of the Journal itself. He pays careful attention to his attire, favoring English spread-collar dress shirts, eye-catching cuff links, and preening ties. Pearlstine remains, at 66, intensely competitive, and when he becomes particularly excited about a topic, his eyes bug out slightly from behind his glasses.
[#image: /photos/54cbfda72cba652122d93aab]|||Michael Bloomberg answers the Proust Questionnaire. Illlustration by Risko.|||
After retiring from Time Inc., in 2006, Pearlstine took a position at the global private-equity firm the Carlyle Group, but he didn’t stay out of the game for long: last June he started a new job as the “chief content officer” at Bloomberg News. Bloomberg L.P.’s headquarters are on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in a neighborhood that is at a distinct remove from the rectangular swatch of Midtown real estate that’s home to the majority of the city’s major media players. Instead of CNN, The New York Times, and the New York Post, Pearlstine’s new neighbors are Barneys, Bergdorf Goodman, and Bloomingdale’s. The culture is as different as the locale: at Bloomberg, Pearlstine has to wear his corporate dog tags on a lanyard around his neck just to get through security. As a general rule, using elevators is against company policy—Michael Bloomberg, the company’s founder (now exploring a run for a third term as New York City’s mayor), feels elevators cut down on the type of human interactions that breed collaborative work—so if Pearlstine wants to meet with someone on a different floor, he has to either take the stairs or hop on an escalator along with the hoi polloi. Gone is the private office; here, both of Pearlstine’s workstations are smaller, and have less privacy, than that of his former secretary.
All of which is fine by him. As far as Pearlstine is concerned, what really differentiates Bloomberg News from all of the Establishment outlets he’s been at in the past is the fact that it is still making money. “I haven’t felt this energized in a long time,” he told me on his second day in his new digs. “I can’t stress enough the excitement.”
The news that Pearlstine had taken the Bloomberg job prompted a rush of articles in the city’s media pages. By bringing on one of the best-known members of the Old Guard, Bloomberg News got more attention than it had received in the 18 years since Michael Bloomberg created it after realizing that his eponymous financial-information company had to start producing exclusive editorial content if it wanted to safeguard against an erosion of subscribers to its computer terminals. Even today, after a two-year period in which Mike Bloomberg flirted with a presidential run and in which secretive negotiations concerning a possible sale of his company valued it at upwards of $20 billion, very little is known about an operation with one of the largest editorial staffs in the world. (Bloomberg himself owns just about 90 percent of Bloomberg L.P. Based on recent valuations, its annual operating profit is estimated to be more than $1.5 billion.) Still, Pearlstine’s hiring seemed to prompt more snobbish curiosity than anything else. To wit: when asked about Pearlstine’s new job, Paul Steiger, who succeeded Pearlstine at the top of the *Journal’*s masthead in 1991, told the Times that Bloomberg News was “not fundamentally a journalistic organization.”
The reaction among his former colleagues didn’t surprise Pearlstine; in fact, before his job discussions began, he hadn’t known all that much about his future employer, either. He hadn’t known, for instance, that Bloomberg News’s 2,300-person staff is larger than the combined editorial operations of the Times and The Washington Post, or that included among its 135 bureaus are 30 in the Asia-Pacific region alone, or that Bloomberg had not so much been bucking the industry-wide trend toward contractions as obliterating it. While Pearlstine’s successor at Time Inc. has had to cut staff, Bloomberg News has added more than 300 in the past several years. A number of those have been high-profile defections from the decimated world of print media, including former Wall Street Journal Washington editor Al Hunt, former Philadelphia Inquirer executive editor Amanda Bennett, and former Time political columnist Margaret Carlson.
This growth is likely to continue: company chairman Peter Grauer and president Dan Doctoroff, the two former investment bankers who run Bloomberg L.P., have been taking advantage of the retrenching in the rest of the print media by finding ways to fill the resultant voids. Today, 10 papers around the world, including the Spanish-language edition of The Miami Herald and Tages-Anzeiger, the second-largest daily in Switzerland, run branded Bloomberg News pages on topics that these newspapers can no longer afford to cover. Over the past several years, as big-city dailies, including the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, have either killed off or dramatically cut the size of their book-review sections, Bloomberg’s arts division has expanded its culture coverage with an eye toward placing more of its content in daily newspapers. One of the country’s metro dailies is looking into outsourcing all of its health reporting to Bloomberg News as a way of meeting corporate-mandated budget cuts without decreasing its coverage areas.
Finally, after years of what resembled a policy of institutionalized neglect, Bloomberg’s multi-media divisions are being beefed up in a major way. In October, the company hired Andrew Lack, the former president and chief operating officer of NBC, to run Bloomberg’s Internet and radio operations and its 11 television channels, based everywhere from Germany to Japan. Like Pearlstine, Lack had been enormously successful—he transformed NBC News into the country’s highest-rated network news division in the 1990s—and like Pearlstine, he jumped at the chance to join up with an organization that was focused on expanding its reach instead of stanching its losses.
These ambitious efforts are in part driven by concerns about Bloomberg’s near-complete dependence on its terminals. While subscriptions are up around 8 percent over last year, the economic turmoil roiling the country does not augur well for the immediate future of any company that is so intimately entwined with the world of high finance. (Lehman Brothers alone had more than 3,000 subscribers, although some of those users will presumably end up with new jobs.) But diversifying also carries significant risks. By expanding its mandate, Bloomberg News is deviating from a mission that has proved to be so successful for so long: obsessively and single-mindedly providing content for the company’s core customers. But for the moment at least, it looks as if we’re moving toward a world in which more people will get their information from Bloomberg News than from any other single source. That might sound fantastical, but if you had speculated in 1980 that in less than 25 years a bare-bones start-up launched by an unemployed, five-foot-six-inch Jewish man from Medford, Massachusetts, would supplant Dow Jones and Reuters as the world’s primary distributor of financial data—which Bloomberg L.P. did in April 2004—well, that would have sounded pretty fantastical, too.
All of this—the higher profile, the big-name hires, the active expansion—should represent a crowning achievement for Matthew Winkler, Bloomberg News’s volatile founding editor in chief. But it’s more complicated than that. In the last half-century, only a handful of visionaries could claim to have created a new journalistic paradigm through sheer force of will. There’s Hugh Hefner’s Playboy and Jann Wenner’s Rolling Stone. Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch gave birth to CNN and Fox News, respectively. Then there’s Winkler and Bloomberg News. But while Wenner’s obsession with order and Turner’s mood swings are well documented, very little is known about Winkler; when the city’s boldfaced columns do acknowledge him, it’s usually to chronicle his abusive tirades or to mock his penchant for bow ties (or both). Since Pearlstine, who had given Winkler his first big break back in 1982, was hired, the top echelon at Bloomberg has consistently maintained that Winkler would remain the person running the show. By this fall, despite the company’s protestations, that pretense had been all but dropped: in July, three months before Lack’s arrival, Winkler lost control of Bloomberg News’s multi-media operation. (The company-wide meeting about those changes was set to the Beatles song “Revolution.”) Then, in September, the 52-year-old Winkler revealed that he was stepping back from a chunk of his responsibilities on the print side as well. “A good part of my day, every day, when I’m not on the road, has been in story meetings,” he explained. “There are at this point better ways for me to spend my time.”
According to Bloomberg L.P. spokeswoman Judith Czelusniak, all of these moves originated with Winkler himself. “They are part of Matt’s own plan to reorganize the news department,” she said. “He wants to be more involved in training and passing on his wisdom to new staffers. He is doing more public speaking.” If that sounds a bit like the hoary line about some fallen C.E.O. stepping aside to “spend more time with his family,” that’s because in essence it is; in fact, it directly contradicted some of what Winkler had told me less than four months earlier, after I asked him how he and Pearlstine would divide their duties now that they were working together again. Winkler, sitting in the glass cube that serves as a semi-private meeting area behind his desk in the company’s newsroom, told me that he would be happy even if he was doing nothing more than leading the daily news meetings and editing stories. “I can’t imagine [doing anything else],” he said. “I live every day for the story. It’s the one part of all this that really gets me excited.… I go to bed thinking about the stories we’re going to have tomorrow, and I wake up wanting to see what they look like and what the reaction is.… I love stories. It’s as simple as that.”
Now it looks as if he’s being written out of his own masterpiece. Regardless of people’s opinions of Winkler—and over the years he’s been called everything from ruthless to batshit insane—there’s a certain poignancy to his current situation. It’s almost as if Winkler, having led his people through the desert, is being told he’s not allowed into the promised land.
Bloomberg L.P.’s horseshoe-shaped headquarters look and feel like a cross between the worlds of Terry Gilliam’s dystopian classic Brazil and Pixar’s Toy Story. There’s so much glass that it seems at times as if the only rooms without transparent walls are the restrooms. Upon entering the operation’s main floor, visitors are greeted by a BlackBerry-toting employee—more often than not a winsome young woman—who is wirelessly alerted by one of the security guards at the building’s entrance to every impending arrival. The walls are inlaid with fishtanks stocked with exotic, brightly colored species from around the world. Neon news zippers fight for attention with high-concept, ultra-modern art, including a chandelier programmed to blink out text by a Welsh Marxist writer, and an 11-by-16-foot titanium-alloy cloud, which is suspended from the ceiling. Every 10 minutes or so, a techno-inflected jingle rings out over a building-wide intercom, signifying that someone, somewhere, is being paged.
This mandated whimsy obscures what’s long been the company’s ruling ethos: we’ll provide you with everything you could ever need, which means you won’t ever have to leave. Bloomberg L.P.’s offices around the world offer free food—in New York there is everything from Cup-a-Soups and microwavable Chinese lunches to Rice Krispie Treats and Oreos. Emergency survival kits, complete with hand-cranked radios and gas masks, are located under every desk. “There was a part of it I sort of liked,” says one former employee, who requested anonymity because he writes finance-themed books and has appeared on Bloomberg Radio as part of his promotional tours. “The mentality is that, if you’re there, you’ll get taken care of. That’s part Orwellian and part paternalism.” The free junk food was great, he said, “but it was there to keep us from going out for coffee.”
This approach is also reflected in what has been Bloomberg News’s sui generis business model. Virtually every print outlet makes its money through some combination of single-copy sales, subscriptions, and advertising. Now, with consumers less willing to pay for content, and advertisers migrating to the Web, that old-school approach is looking less viable with every passing day. Bloomberg News doesn’t run ads, and it doesn’t charge its customers for content—at least not directly. The four million stories it runs every year are fed directly to the company’s 290,000 terminal users as part of the only subscription option Bloomberg offers, an all-you-can-eat package that caters to the international financial community by featuring the company’s ever growing array of data and proprietary analytics. Historically, the news division’s worth has derived from the notion that every new story represents another morsel of added value to its customers, and nowhere is up-to-the-minute knowledge more powerful than in a world in which a one-cent change in a security’s price can result in billions of dollars in profits—or losses. (Bloomberg News also functions as a more traditional wire service, selling its content to newspapers worldwide.)
Not surprisingly, the news division was designed to mirror the working environment in high finance. Reporters sit cheek by jowl in partitionless workstations, a simulacrum of the Wall Street trading floors on which Mike Bloomberg made his fortune. For years, the ideal Bloomberg employee was one who was at his desk at seven a.m. and didn’t get up until he left for the day. (Reto Gregori, Bloomberg News’s chief of staff, says he’s broken himself of the habit of eating lunch since he started working here.) Bloombergers, as they sometimes call themselves, tend to be well put together, with the women in smart pantsuits and the men with their zippers and belt buckles carefully lined up. They also do well for themselves: in the past, it wasn’t uncommon for refugees from the newspaper world to come close to doubling their salaries. The difference these days is not quite so stark; still, Bloomberg News reporters can count on making more than they would elsewhere.
Both past and present employees love to complain about the endless hours, but it’s hard to argue with the results. Ask people in the business world and they’ll tell you that Bloomberg has long been the industry gold standard. “One of the big reasons you need that terminal,” explains a spokesman for one of the city’s major financial firms, “is that everyone talks about what [news stories are] running on Bloomberg.” (He asked to remain anonymous for fear of offending other news organizations that cover his company.) “We don’t think about Dow Jones or Reuters or the A.P. in anywhere near the same kind of way, or as carrying the same type of magnitude. If I have a choice between giving an interview to Bloomberg or someone else, I never think twice about it.”
Over the years, the company has gained a grudging respect from the rest of the media world as well. In 1999, Bloomberg News was awarded one of the White House’s three coveted wire-service seats. Bloomberg News’s coverage of Washington is recognized for its foresight and clarity, and there are any number of stories the organization has led the way on, from the tobacco settlements of the late 1990s to the recent collapse of Bear Stearns. The company’s magazine, which started as a monthly user manual for terminal subscribers, is today known for its investigative reporting: in the past three years alone, Bloomberg Markets has won a George Polk award for health reporting, a Gerald Loeb award for excellence in business journalism, and two Investigative Reporters and Editors awards. Last year, it was a National Magazine Award finalist for “Toxic Debt,” a remarkably prescient three-part series published in July 2007 that detailed how bundled subprime mortgages were putting every aspect of the American economy at risk. In their own ways, each of those accomplishments is a testament to Matt Winkler’s ferocious will to succeed.
More than a quarter-century has passed since Winkler and Norman Pearlstine first crossed paths. At the time, the already renowned Pearlstine was assembling a staff for a new, Brussels-based European edition of The Wall Street Journal, and Winkler was a 26-year-old Dow Jones wire reporter. Intrigued by Winkler’s reputation as someone who got “wildly excited and emotional” about stories, Pearlstine decided to take a chance on the driven young man who had mastered the arcana of foreign-debt securities.
It didn’t take long for Pearlstine to learn firsthand about Winkler’s operating procedure. Every day, after Pearlstine finished his work in the newsroom, he made the 90-minute drive to the paper’s printing plant in the Netherlands, where he’d paste up that day’s pages in advance of a midnight deadline. One night at 11:55, a call was routed to Pearlstine from an editor in Brussels. It was Winkler. “He was yelling, ‘You’ve gotta stop the presses! I’ve got a great scoop!,’” Pearlstine says. “And I said, ‘O.K., Matt—what’s the story?’ And he said, ‘The Swedish Euro bond is going off at a half-point over the libor!’” Pearlstine was nonplussed. “None of us had a clue what he was talking about,” he says affectionately. “We just looked at each other and said, ‘Who is this guy Winkler?’” The presses ran as scheduled that night.
A half-decade later, both men were back in New York—Pearlstine as the *Journal’*s top editor, Winkler as a bonds reporter. Neither Winkler’s nose for news nor his sense of outrage had dulled any, and when he learned that the Journal was contracting with a company called Bloomberg Financial Markets to provide the paper with the price of Treasury issues, he was incredulous. Why, he wanted to know, was the best-known financial-information company in the world paying another company for data? After an abortive effort at persuading his bosses to cancel the *Journal’*s contract with Bloomberg, Winkler decided to figure out exactly what the hell was going on.
On September 22, 1988, he and co-writer Michael W. Miller published their findings in the form of a glowing, 2,400-word front-page story about Mike Bloomberg and his six-year-old financial-information-services company. Despite the fact that Bloomberg provided its data and analytics to a total of only 5,000 terminals around the world—compared with 165,000 for Reuters and 67,000 for the Dow Jones–owned Telerate—few people, according to the story, were “as cagey about guiding the flow of information as Mr. Bloomberg, a 46-year-old with a puckish sense of humor and a prodigious temper.” In the article, Winkler deftly identified Bloomberg’s business model: if he created an all-purpose, proprietary system through which he could give finance professionals all the information they needed in the course of their days, he could muscle in on his competitors’ well-established turf. Bloomberg didn’t sell a physical product, per se—the company’s terminals were leased out at a flat monthly rate—but the unique information those subscriptions provided was quickly becoming essential for any trader who didn’t want to lose a step on his rivals.
As his company continued to grow, Mike Bloomberg became worried that his competitors would smarten up and kneecap his ability to supply his customers with news. Bloomberg’s secret sauce might have been its analytics, but it also needed a constant stream of news—traders, after all, had to know what was happening around the globe. Without a wire service of his own, Bloomberg was forced to pay Dow Jones and Reuters for their news feeds. The day they realized what they stood to gain by cutting him off was the day his all-in-one business model would fall apart.
Left, the editor: Matthew Winkler, who conceived Bloomberg News and retains the title editor in chief. Right, the multi-media man: Andrew Lack, recently hired as Bloomberg’s chief executive officer for television, radio, and interactive operations. Photographs by Nigel Parry.
A little more than a year after Winkler’s Journal article ran, the reporter’s phone rang. “It’s Bloomberg,” the voice on the other end of the line announced. “I need some advice. What would it take to get into the news business?” The more Winkler thought about it, the more convinced he became that the answer was nothing more than a handful of warm bodies and a lot of hard work. Mike Bloomberg had been able to get a toehold in the financial-data business because the rest of the industry had been too complacent to look for ways to increase efficiency. Similarly, Reuters and Dow Jones’s effective 100-year duopoly had resulted in what Winkler says was a “journalistic wasteland” as far as breaking stories was concerned. Within days, Winkler had begun to game out the possibilities. “What would it be like,” he wondered, “if the person who was depending on those economic figures to make a decision gets, at 8:30, precisely the moment when the numbers are released, a thousand words that is comparable to what he’s going to read in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal?” It wasn’t long before Winkler told Bloomberg that he was the man to put this plan into effect.
When Winkler told Pearlstine of his job offer, Pearlstine didn’t try to dissuade him. “There was a career path at the Journal,” Pearlstine says, “but it wasn’t a career path where I could say … ‘There’s no job you can’t aspire to.’” Besides, bond coverage “wasn’t that important for the Journal. And I didn’t know what a Bloomberg was.” Winkler gave notice. “I thought it was a sustainable hit for the Journal, frankly,” Pearlstine says.
When Winkler started at Bloomberg, he had little of substance with which to persuade his former colleagues to join him on what seemed like, at best, a valiantly quixotic effort. As a result, his early hires tended to be rookie reporters, and Winkler made abundantly clear that their futures at the company depended on an ironclad adherence to his edicts. This began with Winkler’s “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” approach to writing stories. At the time, the vast majority of Bloomberg News’s articles concerned calendar-driven events—earnings reports, quarterly statements, and the like. “It’s either going to be better than expectations or worse than expectations, or it’s going to be exactly what people [thought],” Winkler says. “We can get ready for all three scenarios” by writing three variations of the same story before the event occurs. That way, when it unfolded, “we [would] know, Oh, that’s Scenario B, or that’s Scenario C or Scenario A, and we have a story right away. So, the preparation part was key.”
That preparation translated into grueling hours and onerous strictures. Midnight phone calls from Winkler himself were not uncommon. Every morning, the staff conducted a postmortem in which it reviewed all of its competitors’ stories and then went through every instance in which Bloomberg’s had not come out on top. Staffers were forbidden to speak to the press. (To this day, it is company policy that interviews—even with the company’s chairman and president—are not to be done without a member of Bloomberg’s P.R. staff being present. Even sanctioned phone discussions I had with Bloomberg employees were conducted with a spokesperson on the line.) Winkler’s exacting approach was eventually codified in an often mocked companywide stylebook titled The Bloomberg Way. Bloomberg News stories, it declared, “have a structure that is as immutable as the rules that govern sonnets and symphonies.” Every story needed to include “the Five Fs”: first, fastest, factual, final, and future. Leads were to be exactly four paragraphs long, comprising the stating of a theme, a quotation in “plain English from someone who backs up that theme,” numbers-based details that further support it, and an explanation of what’s at stake. The use of “but” was banned—it forced readers “to deal with conflicting ideas in the same sentence.” Words such as “despite” and “however” were to be avoided for the same reason.
“You can’t be effective as a businessman, as a trader, unless you get the truth,” Winkler told me, explaining the importance of the system he had put in place. He pointed to his own years as a reporter as a way of demonstrating that he had never asked his staff “to do anything that I haven’t already done. I wouldn’t dare do that, because that wouldn’t be fair. [I told them] I know this can be done. We just have to figure out how we’re going to get it done here.” But expecting that level of performance from his novice reporters meant Winkler was setting himself up to be disappointed. When that occurred, the results were ugly. His screaming jags soon became the stuff of legend. He’d erupt in the middle of meetings, on the phone, while editing a story. In 1993, Winkler lit into two Washington reporters who hadn’t returned a call from a colleague during a stretch in which they’d been working 15-hour days. His memo on the incident was titled “Proud to Be Stupid” and it labeled the offending parties “the antithesis of what this news organization stands for.” In the late 1990s, he pushed a reporter in the newsroom. (The reporter, who left the organization, was paid a settlement.) Perhaps most embarrassingly, late last year, an audio recording of one of Winkler’s tirades was posted on Gawker. In it, Winkler is heard screaming maniacally at a female editor.
editor: The enemy that day was … the computer.
winkler: No.
editor: Didn’t he …
winkler: No. The enemy was not the computer.
editor: Didn’t he …
winkler: No! That’s wrong! No!
editor: Can I ask you something?
winkler: Excuse me! Excuse me! The enemy was not the computer! That’s why we’re having this meeting! I figured, I figured, a lot of you were going to think this way! It’s wrong! It’s not the computer! It’s not the computer! It’s the human!
Within minutes of the posting, former employees were trading e-mails. “That was a Category 2 Winkler hurricane,” one told me. “That was nothing. You should hear a Category 4.”
Throughout all of this, Bloomberg’s news division continued to grow. By 2000, Winkler was in charge of 1,200 employees. These were no longer all 22-year-olds in their first jobs in journalism. Time and again, editors told either Winkler or Bloomberg himself that Winkler’s behavior was unacceptable. Increasingly, high-level staffers quit rather than deal with the invective. None of this seemed to have any effect. “There’s a culture of verbal abuse and terror,” a mid-level editor told me a month before Pearlstine was hired, “and it all starts with Matt. You live in terror because you never know what’s going to set him off.” (This editor asked not to be identified—even by gender—and requested that all communication be over non-Bloomberg phone lines for fear that the company might have access to employees’ private e-mail accounts.) “He may well have an anger-management problem,” says a former employee who is now in public relations. “Once that switch goes off, he can’t moderate it. Matt is not sadistic—he is driven. From his point of view, he [could always] say, ‘Look at the results. We’ve created a news organization that does x, y, and z. We have growing revenue. We are what’s next. We are the future. So why should I let up?’”
Winkler’s simpatico relationship with Mike Bloomberg helps explain how Winkler escaped serious repercussions for so long. Their bond is perhaps best exemplified in Bloomberg by Bloomberg, Mike Bloomberg’s 1997 quasi-autobiography, which Winkler wrote after taking notes as Bloomberg talked about his past. Part personal history, part management guide, the book’s 250 pages are filled with half-baked aphorisms, many of which are punctuated with jarringly exuberant exclamation points. (“In life, unlike in children’s games, second place is first loser!” “Think about the percentage of your life spent working and commuting. If you’re not content doing it, you’re probably a pretty miserable person. Change it!”)
Even more striking is the manner in which the book frames the company’s relationship to the outside world: “When someone departs, those of us who stay are hurt.… We’re trying to feed our families, and his or her leaving makes that task more difficult. Him or her, or my kids? That’s an easy choice!” Later, Bloomberg/Winkler writes, “The Bloomberg philosophy may sound strange to ‘outsiders,’ but not to those who matter—us. We’ve always assumed that even if we’re paranoid, they probably are out to get us. While you’re reading this, we’re thinking about how our competitors are plotting to take the food from our children’s mouths.” If employees left to work for a competitor, “they’ve become bad people. Period. We have a loyalty to us. Leave, and you’re them.” There was even a policy against rehiring anyone who quit for anything other than family reasons: “How could we ever again look in the eye the one who stayed if we let the ‘traitor’ come back?”
Left, the president: Dan Doctoroff. “The economics are incredibly compelling.” Right, the chairman: Peter Grauer. “Write one shitty, Jayson Blair–type story and you’re screwed.” Photographs by Nigel Parry.
Late last year, Mike Bloomberg announced what everyone had long surmised: that he wasn’t going to return to active management of the company he had founded. Soon afterward, Bloomberg L.P. named Dan Doctoroff the company’s new president. Doctoroff is a trim, affable man, who, despite the retreat of his graying curls, seems younger than his 50 years. He grew up outside of Detroit and went to Harvard and the University of Chicago Law School, and made his fortune running the private-equity firm Oak Hill Capital Partners. In 1998 he founded NYC2012 in an effort to bring the Olympic Games to New York. Three years later, Bloomberg hired Doctoroff as New York City’s deputy mayor for economic development. (Mike Bloomberg insists he has had very little involvement with the day-to-day operations of Bloomberg L.P. since he was elected mayor in 2001. News accounts have at times painted a different picture. Bloomberg has acknowledged that he did play a role in Doctoroff’s hiring.)
Unlike Winkler, or Pearlstine for that matter, Doctoroff doesn’t get excited discussing the nuts and bolts of a felicitous lead. What he does get excited about is discussing how Winkler created a whole new business model for news. “Matt’s unique achievement,” Doctoroff says, “is really to recognize the symbiotic relationship between news and the rest of [Bloomberg L.P.’s] business”—essentially to think of a journalistic organization as a capitalistic one. “He has been absolutely brilliant at conceptualizing that.”
As an example, Doctoroff tells of a recent meeting he had with a senior manager at a large investment bank in London. Bloomberg, the banker said, was seriously lagging in commodities coverage. It was Winkler who followed up on the conversation, and after hearing exactly what it was that commodities traders were looking for, he went out and hired 32 new reporters and editors. Adding that amount of staff comes at considerable expense, but the result, according to Doctoroff, was several thousand new customers, each of whom now pays between $1,500 and $1,800 a month for his terminal subscription. As Doctoroff puts it, “The economics are incredibly compelling.”
The company’s specialized relationships with individual newspapers also fit into this journalism-as-capitalism approach. “Because we’re not burdened by [the] old, broken business models that almost every other news organization is,” he says, Bloomberg News can cover regional core industries and sell that content for a price that’s significantly less than what newspapers would need to pay their own staffs to do the same thing. “I don’t need to make money off of that operation,” Doctoroff says. “If I take the money and invest it in additional reporters … I just provided much greater value to my terminal customers,” because, presumably, more local biotech stories will make a Bloomberg terminal subscription that much more appealing to a customer in, say, Boston. “Everybody wins. That’s the kind of opportunity that we uniquely have. And it doesn’t have to just be true for business or financial news either.”
Or just for print. Doctoroff readily admits that Bloomberg’s multi-media operations have “underperformed” as a result of a laserlike focus on producing content for terminal customers. That, too, is changing—as best evidenced by the arrival of Andrew Lack. “We believe we should be the best at everything we decide to do,” Doctoroff says. “I’d be lying if I told you, either on the Internet or on TV, that’s where we are today.” Lack, who came to Bloomberg after a rocky stint at Sony-BMG Music, said in a conversation less than two hours after his hiring was announced that he’ll be “making some bets and putting some ideas on the board,” which is the sound-bite version of “Watch this space.” For the moment, the specifics of those bets were less important to Lack than what Bloomberg represents for the future. “In this particular environment, to hear words like growth, change, expansion—those are words you don’t hear a lot in news organizations these days,” he said. “I don’t mean to sound harsh. But there are declining audiences in newspapers and declining audiences in broadcast platforms and in some cases in cable platforms. There are fewer resources to do the job. But here, this is an organization that has 140 bureaus around the world. There are two-thousand-something employees.” He sounded just as surprised as Pearlstine had been four months earlier.
In the six years since Peter Grauer was named chairman of Bloomberg L.P., the most idiosyncratic excesses of the company’s culture have been steadily toned down. That trend has accelerated dramatically since Doctoroff came on board. The notorious White House Correspondents’ Dinner after-parties, which in years past attracted the likes of Jennifer Love Hewitt and Chloë Sevigny and featured ice-luge vodka shots, heaps of caviar, sushi bars, and sundae stations, are now staid to the point of being boring. Over the summer, Lex Fenwick, the most flamboyant of Bloomberg’s Old Guard, stepped down as C.E.O. to “pursue new business opportunities” through an offshoot called Bloomberg Ventures. Fenwick is known for purple suits and his insistence that the back of Bloomberg business cards be bright orange. In 2003 he installed a boxing ring, complete with scoreboard and hanging mike, in Bloomberg’s London sales office as a way of spurring his salespeople’s competitive juices when they cold-called prospective clients. He’s also at the center of a class-action lawsuit alleging that the company discriminated against pregnant employees, and is accused in court papers of ordering the firing of two employees by saying, “I’m not having any pregnant bitches working for me.” The company has said that the suit, which is expected to go to trial next year, “sounds like an effort to damage reputations and … pressure the company for financial gain.”
Recently, even the relentless demands the company puts on its employees have been eased. Last August, Bloomberg L.P. began allowing employees to request flextime, shorter workweeks, and the ability to work from home. This is a radical shift from the ethos laid out in Bloomberg by Bloomberg, which holds that “you’ve got to come in early, stay late, lunch at your desk, take projects home nights and weekends. The time you put in is the single most important controllable variable determining your future.” The rigid stylistic restrictions have been loosened, and the daily postmortems have been done away with as well.
These changes are partly, Grauer says, the result of dealing with “issues associated with being a big, growing, visible, important news source,” and he insists that a softening of the culture does not mean a softening of standards. “The keepers of our reputation are all the people who work for us around the world,” he says. “Write one shitty, Jayson Blair–type story and you’re screwed.”
[#image: /photos/54cbfda72cba652122d93aab]|||Michael Bloomberg answers the Proust Questionnaire. Illlustration by Risko.|||
To be sure, there have not been any Jayson Blair–type fiascoes. Still, not long after my conversation with Grauer—and in the very period during which Winkler’s day-to-day responsibilities were being pared back—Bloomberg News did make a number of embarrassing, high-profile errors. In late August, it ran an obituary for Apple Inc. C.E.O. and pancreatic-cancer survivor Steve Jobs, a misstep that mercifully occurred after trading had closed for the day and was corrected in short order. Ten days later, United Airlines was not so lucky: the company lost more than $1 billion in value when Bloomberg sent out a news alert based on a five-year-old article that had been erroneously posted on the South Florida *Sun-Sentinel’*s Web site claiming that the airline was filing for bankruptcy. (Share prices recovered somewhat after the report was retracted.) In between those two blunders was another false dispatch, this one claiming that Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin had once been arrested for drunken driving. It’s possible that all of those mistakes would have occurred if Winkler were still Bloomberg News’s all-powerful majordomo. But there’s no way some heads wouldn’t have rolled.
If Bloomberg News really has found a new paradigm for journalistic success and solvency, it only heightens the pathos of the situation in which Winkler finds himself. There seems, in retrospect, something almost wistful about our conversation last spring. “Everything I learned as a journalist I learned in the decade that I was at The Wall Street Journal,” he told me. “Mostly working for Norm.” Now that he and Pearlstine were working together again, he said, “it feels great. It always felt great; it feels even better now. It feels better because I know so much more than I did then, and, actually, I can appreciate a lot of the things instinctively that, perhaps, he was trying to do.” There were times when Winkler seemed impatient with or annoyed by my questions, but as soon as he began talking about Pearlstine, his whole demeanor changed. He sat forward in his chair. His gestures grew more expansive.
“Even if everything was exactly like it was then, only carried forward, you know, 30 years, I’d still think it would be terrific I was just one of those guys happily toiling on his behalf. It was a thrill. And I’d do it again if I was asked to.”
Seth Mnookin is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.
