Now is the time we juxtapose!
First up, from the Bloomberg blog:All aboard the Bloomberg Career Express
This year marks Bloomberg 25th years in Singapore and as part of our anniversary celebrations; we are launching a one-of-a kind recruitment drive targeted at students in local educational institutions.
On September 7th, the Bloomberg Career Express — a specially outfitted vehicle — will hit the roads for the first time, kicking off a month long mobile recruitment outreach that will bring Bloomberg’s state of the art fintech experience to students in over 10 campuses across Singapore.
Designed specifically to educate and inspire students to careers in business and finance, the bus replicates signature elements of our culture with the latest technology employed at Bloomberg.
For the first time, students will get a taste of the inner workings of one of the world’s largest providers of financial data, information and news, and gain access to the same platform used by top financial professionals worldwide....MOREAnd from Wired:
Bloomberg’s Future Is the Future of News for Everyone
BLOOMBERG NEWS IS going through some big changes.
The company laid off dozens of journalists yesterday. And in a leaked internal memo, the business news behemoth outlined how it will be reorganizing in an effort to both capitalize on its strengths and further adapt to the continually changing media landscape.
“This is not about downsizing; it is about refocusing our considerable resources,” editor-in-chief John Micklethwait wrote in the memo. “Our purpose is to be the definitive ‘chronicle of capitalism’—to capture everything that matters in global business and finance.”
The lengthy memo goes on to describe how the editorial and research arms of the company, to which founder Michael Bloomberg notably returned in September of last year, plan to refocus. Micklethwait says the company will stick with reporting on its key areas of interest—business, finance, markets, economics, technology, and power (namely, government and politics)—while staying ever mindful of its core audience (“the clever customer who is short of time”).
In essence, Bloomberg will follow what seems like the paradoxical imperatives for any media company, especially those that aren’t flush with venture capital cash: become more niche but also more global; and get leaner while also spreading to as many platforms as possible.
The Broad Niche
In reorganizing, Bloomberg will eschew general interest reporting on topics like sports and education in favor of a stricter focus on business and markets. To stay competitive, Bloomberg seems to feel it must resist the broad industry trend of homogenization in favor of becoming more like itself—the essential source, especially for paying Bloomberg terminal users, for business, markets, and financial news.
This isn’t so different from The New York Times‘ recent efforts to remind its audience of its signature investigative reporting in recent months via news alerts highlighting its biggest stories. Bloomberg bearing down on business is also somewhat like BuzzFeed expanding its video offerings. By focusing on its strengths, all three hope to differentiate to reach the broadest possible audience.
Micklethwait‘s call to remember who Bloomberg News’ audience is—the kind of people for whom, quite literally, time is money—also doesn’t sound all that different from BuzzFeed honing in on young people and then reaching them where they want to be reached, like, say, Snapchat, or from The New York Times using its NYT Now app to offer daily digests of the news of record that readers look to the Times to provide....MORE
