Bloomberg LP is folding Bloomberg Law into its Bloomberg Bureau of National Affairs unit and is expected to lay off an undisclosed number of journalists as part of “rebranding.”
BBNA was built around Bloomberg’s acquisition of the Bureau of National Affairs in 2011 for $990 million, the largest purchase in its history.
The company is insisting that many of the 250 journalists at Bloomberg Law will be offered jobs at Arlington, Va.-based BBNA, a provider of legal and regulatory news and information.
Shutting Bloomberg Law represents a rare retreat for the company, founded by Mayor Mike Bloomberg, which has been trying to diversify its base beyond its core financial news and data business for five years.
Bloomberg Law was seen as a way to get away from the desktop terminal business and make some inroads into the legal research field dominated by Thomson Reuters’ Westlaw and Reed Elsevier’s Lexis/Nexis.
But even Lexis/Nexis has stumbled recently, announcing that its once-dominant legal publishing subsidiary, Martindale-Hubbell, and lawyers.com were merging with Internet Brands.
The future of Bloomberg — both the man and the company — is the subject of growing speculation.
As Mayor Bloomberg’s term draws to a close, many wonder what his next move will be, with guesses ranging from advocating political causes to taking a top government position to pursuing a buyout of the New York Times.
Bloomberg has said in the past he is not going to buy the Times, but that has not shut down the rumor mill.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ recent move to buy the Washington Post for $250 million has ramped up chatter that Bloomberg could follow the same path and use his personal fortune to buy the Times. The controlling Sulzberger clan has insisted that the paper is not for sale. Bloomberg has also said he has no intention of returning to day-to-day management of the company.
Separately yesterday, Bezos gave his first major post-acquisition interview since he agreed to buy the Washington Post from the controlling Graham family.
“It’s important for the Post not just to survive but to grow,” he said in the interview with the Washington Post’s Paul Farhi.
“The Post is still great. The piece that’s missing is that it’s still a challenged business. No business can continue to shrink. That can only go on for so long before irrelevancy sets in.”
The Amazon boss has been a master of figuring out what consumers want, in the process building a personal fortune that is estimated at more than $24 billion — roughly on a par with Bloomberg’s net worth.
Still, Bezos admitted he has no magical solution to the newspaper industry’s circulation and advertising woes.
“In my experience, the way invention, innovation and change happen is [through] team effort. There’s no lone genius who figures it all out and sends down the magic formula. You study, you debate, you brainstorm and the answers start to emerge.
“It takes time. Nothing happens quickly in this mode. You develop theories and hypotheses, but you don’t know if readers will respond. You do as many experiments as rapidly as possible. Quickly in my mind would be years.”
He said the formula of asking readers to pay for news that they can get free elsewhere is flawed. On the other hand, he said it is important to have readers at the centerpiece.
“I’m skeptical of any mission that has advertisers as its centerpiece. Whatever the mission is, it has news at its heart,” he said.