A statistic from the hack gossip line:
The average salary – the average! – of a Bloomberg reader is $500,000 a year.
The hacks are also well paid – high six-figure salaries are commonplace, almost routine.
A pal just applied for what he called an entry-level job, one up from emptying the bins.
Salary? £90,000.
I’m not saying the readers and the hacks aren’t worth it, good luck to them, but these numbers have a distorting effect on what is regarded as news and what other publications must do to replace the staff they keep losing.
Maybe Bloomberg has just got the best business model of any news organisation.
It sells high end news to people who are loaded and who work for organisations where the cost of a subscription to a Bloomberg terminal is neither here nor there.
Let’s say Bloomberg has 350,000 users paying £25k a year. (These are not official figures, Bloomberg didn’t reply to a request to chat, doesn’t release much information about itself. But they are in the ballpark.)
That’s a reliable income stream of £8.75 billion just for starters.
No one is paying Bloomberg for the news to be clear, they are paying for the data on the boxes that lets them do their $500,000 a year jobs.
(More on this tomorrow.)
For years Bloomberg – the Borg, in hack parlance, a Star Trek reference – had a reputation as an awful place to work.
Those who did looked like they were permanently in shock, like something awful had just happened.
You’d ask how they were doing and get mile-long stares.
That’s changed for the better – though its editorial processes are still laborious.
Hacks complain of meetings where 20 people discuss how a story will be approached, when it would be better if the one person actually writing the story was left to crack on.
All this money must affect content, in ways good and bad.
Stories on luxury goods do well. Stories about how we might deal with a social problem, much less so.
So one organisation that might really be able to get to the bottom of some serious issues, doesn’t, because its readers don’t have to deal with those issues themselves.
But if Bloomberg decides something is important, it is able to throw huge resources behind hunting it down.
A while ago – again this is not official – it started tracking deforestation. It did so by buying up satellite time, a fairly extraordinary journalistic adventure.
The money flow means Bloomberg can be highly ethical about its hacks accepting freebies.
They don’t.
I think that’s the right stance, but some of us feel we deserve a day out at the cricket.
In the meantime, the Borg just grows.
It is a massively powerful organisation.
It should keep hacks and flaks in work for a good while yet.
Please send candidates for press release of the day to:
Simon.english@roxhillmedia.com
