Bloomberg’s new regime and tensions over the editorial vision
In April, Zachary Mider’s groundbreaking story on corporate tax inversions won Bloomberg News the first Pulitzer Prize in its 25-year history. When Mider collected his award a month later, at the annual Pulitzer luncheon at Columbia University, the rest of his team was there to applaud him, as were the highest-ranking editors from other winning newsrooms, including Dean Baquet at The New York Times, Marty Baron from The Washington Post, and Gerard Baker of The Wall Street Journal. The missing editors? Bloomberg’s top ranks, including editor-in-chief John Micklethwait and chief content officer Josh Tyrangiel.
Company officials, it turns out, offer quite plausible reasons for not attending. Micklethwait, for example, was said to be visiting the UK for his son’s graduation, while Tyrangiel was said to be in Hong Kong. But fair or not, several editors and reporters in the newsroom took their absence from the lunch as a snub. To them, it symbolized what they fear are the shifting priorities of the new top editors at Bloomberg, ever since Michael Bloomberg returned to the helm in January.**
In the intervening months, the former mayor’s homecoming has reshaped the newsroom, giving rise to dramatic changes to the masthead and a tense struggle over its editorial vision. The regime change has also produced a series of resignations, bitter disagreements over what stories to pursue, and an intricate Kremlinology of the newsroom’s future. One of the chief concerns is that Micklethwait, who replaced Matt Winkler seven months ago, may not be as committed to pursuing the kind of ambitious, hard-edged journalism that brings home Pulitzer Prizes.
The departures in recent months have included several highly respected journalists. The team that Winkler brought in to raise investigative ambitions at Bloomberg News, many lured away from The Wall Street Journal, have been either sidelined or pushed out. Among them were senior executive editor Laurie Hays, who was at one point in line for Winkler’s job until she got nudged aside in favor of Micklethwait; executive editor of enterprise John Brecher, who quit in April, around the same time that Tyrangiel was promoted to chief content officer of Bloomberg LP; and Jonathan Kaufman, the executive editor for company news, who resigned earlier this month after overseeing Mider’s Pulitzer project. Friday’s resignation of star reporter Renee Dudley was the most recent to draw newsroom attention. After her newsy scoop on a Wal-Mart executive, Dudley was hired away to do investigations for Reuters. In September, Daniel Golden, the celebrated investigative journalist who directly edited Mider’s series, will be taking a leave of absence to write a book.
These developments have all but dismantled an approach that Winkler and Hays created, a system that paired Bloomberg News reporters, some of whom had never written more than 1,000 words before, with experienced enterprise editors who nurtured their skills and ideas into award-winning investigative series. Modeled after legacy newsrooms, it was an approach that yielded investigative series that explored a broad range of issues, and typically took months to report. Notable examples were “Education Inc.,” which was supervised by Kauffman and won Polk and Loeb awards, and Mehul Srivastava’s award-winning series about malnutrition and political corruption in India. Winkler is now editor in chief emeritus.*...MORE
