From a New York Times story by Katie Robertson headlined “Bloomberg News Is Laying Off Nearly 100 Journalists”:
Bloomberg News, the giant financial news company founded by the billionaire Michael R. Bloomberg, will lay off dozens of employees as it restructures its newsroom.
Bloomberg’s editor in chief, John Micklethwait, announced the changes in a memo sent to staff on Thursday, saying that the newsroom had “‘lost’ stories because we moved too slowly”. . . .
“Teams waited for somebody to back-read a piece or ignored the requests from the News Desk to get a blast out quickly,” he said, referring to the newsroom’s term for copy-editing an article or a news flash. “Managers spent too much time setting up conference calls when they should just have been writing.”
Mr. Micklethwait wrote that the reorganization of the newsroom would include layoffs. The company will cut about 90 newsroom positions. . . .Most of those to lose their jobs will be editors. . . .
He said that the new system would mean most editors would now report to managing editors, who would allocate them to individual stories, and would also get rid of “unnecessary back-reading or re-editing.”
Mr. Micklethwait said that despite the layoffs, the company was looking to hire in priority areas like data journalism. . . .Bloomberg News has more than 3,100 editorial and research employees, making it one of the largest news organizations in the world.
Bloomberg L.P. makes the majority of its money from expensive subscriptions to its terminal business, but Axios reported this week that Bloomberg Media expected to bring in a minimum of $100 million this year from consumer digital subscription revenue.
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Katie Robertson is a media reporter. She previously worked as an editor and reporter at Bloomberg and News Corporation Australia
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