Bloomberg’s Business News Blitz   

In 1989, after seven years of providing reams of numbers to the business world via computers, Wall Street whiz Michael Bloomberg realized something was missing.

Bloomberg turned to Matthew Winkler, then a reporter at the Wall Street Journal, who recognized immediately what it was. "This was a company without wordsmiths that was doing everything a news company should do," he says. "Prose was missing. Stories were missing."

Winkler left the Journal to change that, and four years later Bloomberg Business News has become a serious competitor to larger business wires operated by Dow Jones, the Associated Press and Reuters.

Winkler, 38, who became editor in chief, launched the service with 25 reporters eight months after meeting with Bloomberg. The concept was simple: Provide an overwhelming amount of data, make it accurate and easy to use, add graphics and video and audio, and get it out quickly.

Today Winkler oversees 250 staffers, including two Pulitzer winners, who turn out as many as 3,000 stories and updates a day from 22 U.S. bureaus and another 22 in other spots such as Santiago, Stockholm and Sydney. About 80 newspapers subscribe, including the New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe.

"The volume of stuff is astonishing," says Tom Brew, an assistant business editor at the San Jose Mercury News, which has received the wire almost from its beginning. Adds Floyd Norris, an assistant business editor at the New York Times, "They cover a lot of companies that other people often don't."

Some say that comes at a price. In its hectic New York newsroom, Winkler and Bureau Chief Dave Wilson bark orders. Says one former reporter, "You can't crank out eight stories and have any degree of accuracy or insight... Winkler and Wilson are just abusing people to death."

Winkler admits Bloomberg isn't for everyone. "There are no quiet cubicles for thinking," he says. "We scream while we think."

The service has expanded at breakneck speed. Since it began, the number of terminals leased by Bloomberg's financial services company at $1,400 a month has jumped more than 400 percent, to 37,000 worldwide. A year ago, Bloomberg paid $13.5 million for New York radio station WBBR, which he converted into an all-business news outlet. In February, the firm announced a satellite TV news service called Bloomberg Direct. And this fall the company plans to launch a Sunday newspaper supplement devoted to personal finance.

Perhaps because of that rapid growth, the service has suffered its share of bugs. On February 25, its 37,000 terminals crashed just as final stock prices were being posted because so many subscribers retrieved a breaking story about skater Nancy Kerrigan. Earlier, requests for the results of the Lorena Bobbitt trial also broke the system.

But the heart of the service is its business news. Hit a few keys and up pops the history of Spectrum Information Technologies. Hit a few more and browse over stories about the computer firm. Hit another and read hundreds of pages of details such as its stock price, dividends, how it did in the last six months or six years, and the phone numbers of informed analysts.

That information could have been invaluable to John Sculley, the former Apple chief who recently left Spectrum after suing its president for allegedly lying about the firm's health. Wrote San Jose Mercury News columnist Rory O'Connor: "For nearly a year before Sculley joined the company, Bloomberg reporter David Evans..had woven an on-line chronicle of every shadowy twist in the Spectrum saga. A 10-minute search on the service would have shown Sculley plenty."