Bloomberg News, the giant financial news company founded by billionaire Michael R. Bloomberg, will lay off dozens of employees while restructuring its newsroom.
Bloomberg’s editor-in-chief, John Micklethwait, announced the changes in a memo sent to the team on Thursday, saying the newsroom had “‘lost’ stories because we moved too slowly” and needed to take more responsibility. The memo was reviewed by The New York Times.
“The teams waited for someone to read an article retroactively or ignored the News Desk’s requests to get it out quickly,” he said, referring to the newsroom’s term for editing an article’s text or a news flash. “Managers spent a lot of time setting up conference calls when they were supposed to be writing.”
Mr. Micklethwait wrote that the reorganization of the newsroom would include layoffs. The company will cut about 90 newsroom jobs globally, according to a person with knowledge of the subject. Most of those who will lose their jobs will be a publisher, the person said, asking not to be named because the information was not public.
“This was not a step we took lightly,” wrote Micklethwait. “But we always seek to make the newsroom better – to become more agile, to improve our content and to help us ‘chronicize capitalism’ in an even more comprehensive way.”
He said the new system would mean that most editors would now report to managing editors, who would allocate them to individual stories, and also get rid of “unnecessary re-readings or reissues.”
Micklethwait said that, despite the layoffs, the company was looking to hire in priority areas, such as data journalism, and intended to end the year with the same number of journalists as it had before the pandemic.
Bloomberg News has more than 3,100 editorial and research employees, making it one of the largest news organizations in the world. It largely avoided the mass layoffs that plagued the media industry last year. Bloomberg LP, its parent company, has about 20,000 employees.
Bloomberg LP earns most of its money from expensive subscriptions to its terminal business, but Axios reported this week that Bloomberg Media expects to raise at least $ 100 million this year from consumer digital subscription revenue.