Bloomberg News

• 1. Introduction

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  Bloomberg News began with a phone call. In November 1989, Michael Bloomberg picked up the phone and dialed Matthew Winkler, then a writer at The Wall Street Journal. His question was blunt: "What would it take to get into the news business?" That single call set in motion an organization that would grow from a team of six people into a global news agency with more than 2,300 editors and reporters across 72 countries. But the story of Bloomberg News is not simply one of growth. It is also a story about what happens when the business of news collides with the business of business. Who gets to decide what stories run? What does editorial independence look like inside a company built to sell financial terminals? And what happens when the owner of the newsroom wants to be president?

• 2. Built on a Terminal

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  When Bloomberg Business News launched in 1990, its purpose was narrow and practical. The news service existed to expand what Bloomberg's financial terminals could offer subscribers, and to spread the company name far enough to sell more of them. The founders wanted to end their dependence on the Dow Jones News Services. That original goal was met by the mid-1990s, and the company began pushing beyond terminal users to compete with media groups like Reuters and Dow Jones.

  Getting there required a fight for credibility. The Standing Committee of Correspondents in Washington initially blocked Bloomberg Business News from formal accreditation as a legitimate news source. The agency only secured its standing after agreeing to provide free terminals to major newspapers in exchange for space in their publications. From that foothold, the organization moved quickly. It opened a small television station in New York, purchased radio station WNEW, launched weekday business news programs on PBS, and opened offices in Hong Kong and Frankfurt, Germany.

  By 1994, Bloomberg had launched a 24-hour financial news service through Bloomberg Information Television, broadcasting on DirecTV. A year later came Bloomberg Personal, a magazine carried in the Sunday edition of 18 U.S. papers. Bloomberg Business News was renamed Bloomberg News in 1997. By 2000, the television network was reaching 200 million households.

• 3. The Winkler Standard

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  Before Matthew Winkler agreed to help build Bloomberg News, he put a hypothetical to Michael Bloomberg. He described a scenario in his book The Bloomberg Way: imagine you have published a story revealing that the chairman of your largest customer stole from the company till and fled to a resort in Rio de Janeiro with his secretary. The customer's public-relations representative calls and says, "Kill the story or we will return all the terminals we currently rent from you." Winkler wanted to know what Bloomberg would do.

  Bloomberg's answer was immediate: "Go with the story. Our lawyers will love the fees you generate." Winkler later described this exchange as his "deciding moment," the instant he became willing to join the project. The anecdote established an early principle for the organization: editorial integrity came before commercial relationships, at least in theory.

  Winkler served as the first editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, shaping its culture and standards from the outset. His tenure would last until 2015, when John Micklethwait took over the role.

• 4. China and the Self-Censorship Controversy

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  In 2012, Bloomberg News published an investigative series called "Revolution to Riches," which examined the wealth of China's political elite. The series won the George Polk Award for International Reporting that year. One story scrutinized the family finances of Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Before the Xi story ran, Bloomberg executives and senior editors held two meetings with Chinese diplomats without telling the journalists working on the piece. Zhang Yesui, the Chinese ambassador to the United States, reportedly warned of consequences for Bloomberg's Chinese operations if the story appeared.

  Editor-in-chief Matthew Winkler reportedly refused to kill the story. Then-CEO Daniel Doctoroff also defended publishing it, though he pushed for changes to soften its impact. After the story ran in June 2012, the Chinese government ordered state enterprises to cancel Bloomberg subscriptions. The company's website was blocked on Chinese servers, and journalists Bloomberg sought to send to China were denied visas.

  The following year, Bloomberg shut down a separate investigation into financial ties between a wealthy Chinese businessman and top Chinese leaders' families. A planned article about the children of senior Chinese officials employed by foreign banks was also killed. At least five journalists and editors, including the lead writer on the Xi story, left the company after this became public. One said Bloomberg had disparaged the team that produced the original work and claimed the company threatened legal action against journalists who spoke about the incident.

  Bloomberg's senior editors, including Laurie Hays and Winkler, denied any stories had been killed. Anonymous employees contradicted that. One said Winkler had stated, "If we run the story, we'll be kicked out of China." Michael Bloomberg denied the accusations but noted he had recused himself from company operations while serving as mayor of New York.

  In 2015, Bloomberg Chairman Peter Grauer told staff at the Hong Kong bureau that the sales team had done a "heroic job" repairing relations with Chinese officials. He also warned that if Bloomberg "were to do anything like" the Xi story again, they would "be straight back in the shit-box." Howard French, a journalism professor, wrote that Bloomberg had "tainted its corporate identity and journalism brand to a degree that could last for years."

• 5. When the Owner Ran for President

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  In November 2019, Michael Bloomberg announced he was running for president. That same day, editor-in-chief John Micklethwait instructed the newsroom not to investigate Bloomberg himself, nor any other Democratic candidates, while investigations into Donald Trump would continue as "the government of the day." The distinction Micklethwait drew was between a specialized team of investigative reporters and the broader political team, but he declined to clarify this publicly even as his own staff called for him to do so.

  The Houston Chronicle dropped Bloomberg News as a source for 2020 presidential campaign coverage after the announcement. Former Bloomberg News DC Bureau Chief Megan Murphy criticized the decision publicly, saying it prevented talented reporters from covering "massive, crucial aspects of one of the defining elections of our time" and calling the policy "not journalism." Michael Bloomberg responded to the backlash by telling CBS News: "We just have to learn to live with some things." He also said his reporters "get a paycheck. But with your paycheck comes some restrictions and responsibilities."

  Bloomberg suspended his campaign on the 4th of March 2020, the day after Super Tuesday.

• 6. Errors, Fines, and Disputed Stories

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  In 2016, Bloomberg published what turned out to be a hoax press release claiming to be from Vinci SA, a French construction company. The fake release alleged accounting irregularities and a need to revise earnings. Vinci's stock briefly fell by 18% before the hoax was exposed and the price recovered. France's financial markets regulator, the Autorité des marchés financiers, fined Bloomberg 5 million euros in 2019 for publishing the report, ruling that the agency should have recognized it as false. An appeals court reduced the fine to 3 million euros in 2021.

  Two years later, in 2018, Bloomberg Businessweek published an article alleging that the Chinese government had embedded secret integrated circuits in computers used by Apple and Amazon. Both companies denied the allegations forcefully. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.K. National Cyber Security Centre issued statements supporting those denials. Bloomberg stood by the story in a follow-up article published in 2021, and the dispute remained unresolved.

  In 2024, Bloomberg News broke a White House news embargo while a Russian prisoner exchange was still in progress. Other publications, including the Wall Street Journal, criticized the decision, saying it risked jeopardizing the exchange, and noted that a Bloomberg editor appeared to boast about being first to publish the breaking story.

• 7. Editorial Power and Opinion

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  Bloomberg Opinion, previously called Bloomberg View, launched in May 2011 as an editorial division providing commentary from columnists and editors on current news. Timothy L. O'Brien, a former reporter and editor at the New York Times, serves as its senior executive editor.

  Editor-in-chief John Micklethwait later admitted in an email to staff that Michael Bloomberg controls the editorial output of the Opinion section, stating that "our editorials have reflected his views." In 2015, Bloomberg threatened to shut down Bloomberg View after billionaire hedge fund manager John Paulson called him to complain about a column by Matt Levine. Levine had written that Paulson's record-breaking donation to Harvard should have gone to "literally any other charity." Bloomberg changed his mind over the weekend, but the columnist received a reprimand. The incident surfaced an internal tension that the organization would continue to navigate: what it means for a news outlet's opinion pages to reflect the founder's views.

  A 2015 internal memo from Micklethwait, which was leaked to the public, outlined a plan to refocus Bloomberg News on what he called "the clever customer who is short of time" with the goal of becoming "the definitive 'chronicle of capitalism.'" That refocus meant pulling back from general-interest reporting in favor of business and economics coverage, a shift that shaped the editorial direction of the agency in the years that followed.