Matthew Winkler has been editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News for eight years but the time certainly hasn’t stood still. When he started in 1990 he was the only member of staff. Now he has over 700 reporters and editors working for him, in 78 bureaus worldwide. Winkler puts the news-gathering operation’s tremendous growth down to good timing.
‘So far the 1990s have been the greatest decade for wealth creation ever. That’s according to every stock index, in every country, in terms of appreciation,’ he explains. ‘What’s gone along with that is a growing demand for information. We were very lucky: we set up at the time when all this was taking off.’
According to Winkler, Bloomberg’s audience has not really changed in nature since then, except of course to get much bigger; it’s now twelve times what it was in 1990. ‘The online Bloomberg customer is very similar to who he or she was eight years ago, namely money managers, traders, chief financial officers and a smattering of investor relations officers and public relations people. The real difference is the reach the service has now. Because so many different media are part of Bloomberg, millions of people have access to Bloomberg News through other outlets, whether it’s print, radio, TV or the internet,’ Winkler explains.
Bloomberg itself has been around for much more than eight years. The addition of a news service, Winkler says, was intended to fill a gaping hole in the market. ‘Historically money has been a subject journalists have been uninterested in. War and airplane crashes have dominated on the agenda. Money, though, is the greatest story. It’s the story not just of investing but issues like housing and jobs. In today’s world everyone’s a capitalist so everyone needs to know about this stuff.’
According to Winkler, Bloomberg’s aim is to provide its users with data on relative value. ‘People want to know what is the relative value of one security compared to another, one company to another, one industry to another. Which is more valuable? And when, today or tomorrow? In the US or Asian markets?’ And the important thing is to get the information out on a real-time basis so people can act on it. But getting the message out as quickly as possible is not the only priority. News is meaningless unless there is a level of analysis that goes along with it, Winkler says, adding that perhaps it was the years he spent working at the Wall Street Journal that gave him his respect for providing context and perspective. ‘Readers want to be shown not just what’s happened but why it matters. The most important thing we do is to be diligent and pay attention to the clarity of the message we are sending out,’ Winkler says.
And the single most important audience of that message is the shareholder, according to Winkler, who believes newswires have added a new dimension to investor relations. ‘Publicly traded corporations have an obligation to make shareholders aware of anything materially to do with their business. They’re not, however, always in the best position to do it themselves. Our whole job is to figure out what exactly shareholders need to know – we spend every working hour thinking about it – so companies have come more and more to make use of our knowledge base,’ Winkler claims.
Replacing IROs?
So does the existence of news services like Bloomberg, dedicated to providing investors with all the information they want to know, cut out the need for an investor relations function? Absolutely not, says Winkler. He argues that although the Bloomberg news service is a useful tool for IR officers to get their message out, it certainly shouldn’t replace them. ‘There’s clearly a need for companies themselves to explain to shareholders what they’re doing. We are reporters who offer a wider perspective, we’re not spokespeople for the company with knowledge of the real detail,’ Winkler says.
As well as providing an extra information source for investors, newswires have an important role to play in helping implement IROs’ goals by offering a quick and efficient way of getting their message out to a large and targeted audience, Winkler maintains. All an investor relations officer needs to do is to send a press release or statement, to Winkler himself if they choose. ‘You’ll probably get a more efficient service if you go to a news editor or to a reporter but if you’ve got something to tell me, go ahead. I’m as close as a telephone or e-mail.’
Winkler says Bloomberg’s relationship with investor relations officers is generally good. Even if investor relations officers don’t like the news it is reporting about their company, at least it’s not sensationalized or taken out of context. Indeed Bloomberg prides itself on its accuracy, clarity and discipline. This comes down a lot to the style of writing it uses. The ‘Bloomberg Way’ is to use only nouns and verbs, cutting out any adjectives and adverbs. ‘We’d say that Matt Winkler is 350 pounds rather than writing that he’s fat. That’s giving the facts, leaving it up to the reader to provide the interpretation. If we get something wrong, we’ll apologize publicly but we never talk things up,’ Winkler says. The only interpretation that does appear in articles on Bloomberg News comes from the people being written about, in the form of quotes from companies or their competitors, investors or regulators. ‘The quotations may express a judgement but the reader will know where the judgement is coming from,’ Winkler says.
But he admits to the power the wire has simply by virtue of writing the news. Bloomberg may just repeat things that were said by other commentators in its news articles, but its journalists are selecting which quotes go in, which are omitted. ‘Journalists are undoubtedly the ones writing the history books. But at the end of the day, the best historians are measured by the amount of detail they produce and by how much they can justify their rendering of events by providing real evidence. We want to be judged as one of the best,’ Winkler says.
Open to scrutiny
Alongside the wish to provide clarity is a wish to get as much information as possible, even if that means tapping into companies’ analyst conference calls and rebroadcasting them – without permission. Winkler says that this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do and that most companies understand the rationale – if only because their shares fluctuate as a consequence. ‘Whenever companies speak to analysts, the potential exists for something that’s meaningful to shareholders to be said. If we say we want to cover everything that’s pertinent to shareholders, this is an area where we need to know what’s going on,’ he explains. And those companies that have a problem with it, well, Winkler says they should listen to what SEC commissioner Arthur Levitt has to say on the matter. ‘He agrees with us. He wants to make sure the market is as transparent as possible and that all shareholders are treated equally. We live in a free market which means the free flow of information.’ And with the increasing globalization of capital, more and more companies have to lay themselves open to scrutiny by agents like Bloomberg. If they are not prepared to, they simply won’t be able to compete, comments Winkler.
In this increasingly competitive environment, the need for investor relations is becoming more important than ever, Winkler adds. ‘Even North Korea is talking about capitalism now. We’ve become a shareholder world. You’ve got people putting more and more of their savings into shares, investing more and more in industry. Investor relations is now absolutely essential.’ Alongside that, of course, goes the demand for knowledge about companies, markets and industries that is Bloomberg’s bread and butter.
All in all, Winkler is very optimistic about the future. ‘Whoever can provide news you can use in a timely fashion is going to do well.’ Even the growth of the internet, offering potential investors access to an even wider body of information than the newswires, doesn’t worry him. ‘That’s a matter of plumbing. Most people already use the internet to access Bloomberg News and, yes, those numbers will probably increase in the coming years. But that’s just about distribution. What really counts is the content and that’s what we’re all about.’
