After Business and Politics, Mayor Tests Opinion
Michael Nagle for The New York Times
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, shown touring a new city data center, is adding opinion journalism to his media company.
By MICHAEL BARBARO
Published: February 28, 2011
Over the last year, representatives of Mayor Michael R. Bloombergquietly reached out to a handful of the country’s top journalists with an intriguing job offer: Divine and distill his unique brand of political philosophy and disseminate it around the globe for an annual salary of close to $500,000.
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Times Topic: Michael Bloomberg
In interviews inside a grand Beaux-Arts town house on the Upper East Side, he spoke with candidates about education reform, post-partisan politics and urban affairs. And in a slightly startling admission for a man of abundant self-certainty, he acknowledged that there remained essential areas where he had yet to develop convictions. “I don’t know what to do about Afghanistan,” he said during the process, according to a person familiar with that conversation.
After conquering Wall Street in the 1970s, crushing competitors in the information-technology industry in the ’80s and reigning over New York City politics for the past decade, the ever-ambitious Mr. Bloomberg now wants to dominate a new sphere — the world of opinion.
At the mayor’s urging, his giant media company will soon make a splashy foray into opinion, churning out columns and essays on issues as varied as gun control and deficit spending. At the center: up to two editorials a day that channel the views of Mr. Bloomberg himself.
The mayor, a keen student of power, is privately conceding to friends that he will not be a candidate for president, a position he covets, and he is coming to grips with the reality that philanthropy, even on the sky-is-the-limit scale that he is planning, will not be enough to make him a potent force in national and international affairs.
So Mr. Bloomberg, 69, is trying on yet another new suit, that of policy-shaping publisher. He has told associates that his new op-ed project, called Bloomberg View, will allow him to maintain, and perhaps even deepen, his influence, long after the 24-hour spotlight of public office recedes.
The venture is emerging as his involvement with the company he founded 30 years ago appears to be growing. He hand-picked the editors of Bloomberg View, and two dozen interviews indicate that he played a greater role than previously known in Bloomberg L.P.’s purchase of BusinessWeek 18 months ago.
At the time, Mr. Bloomberg cast aside the warnings of consultants and executives who told him that the magazine was a financial millstone that would cost the company, at best, $25 million a year. “Do I look like a guy worried about losing $25 million?” Mr. Bloomberg asked the naysayers, according to three of these people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the talks were confidential.
The mayor’s entry into the realm of opinion could intensify concerns about his overlapping roles, and the concentration of so much power in the hands of a single man. It may require the kind of frequent interactions with his company that are discouraged by an agreement he has with the city to avoid conflicts of interest, and allow him to use his editorials to advance his local financial and political agendas.
Mr. Bloomberg places himself in the same league as Henry R. Luce, B. C. Forbes and Ted Turner. But none of those media moguls ever commanded his level of influence in government, politics, philanthropy, business and the media.
Matthew Winkler, the head of the news division at Bloomberg L.P., acknowledged that the new enterprise “certainly is a benefit to the founder of the company, the man.”
But Mr. Winkler suggested that Bloomberg View would deliberately avoid tackling topics that converged with the mayor’s business and political life. “I don’t think we’re going to wade into subject areas where there would be an appearance of a conflict or an actual conflict of interest,” he said in a recent interview.
As with all of his undertakings, Mr. Bloomberg is sparing no expense. Offering outsized salaries, Bloomberg View has hired editors away from a variety of national publications, like The New York Times, The Atlantic and The Week. And it has begun recruiting a stable of well-known contributors, like Peter R. Orszag, President Obama’s former budget director, who briefly wrote a column for The Times last year. Several new writers are likely to be announced this month.
The move reflects a broader frustration by the mayor and his company that, despite hiring binges, acquisitions and $7 billion a year in revenue, Bloomberg’s content is consumed mainly by stock and bond traders and does not dominate conversation in the corner offices of America.
Mr. Bloomberg seems especially sensitive to the slight. When he learned that Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, had a low opinion of BusinessWeek in the past, the mayor asked, “What do I have to do to make you read it?” a person with knowledge of the conversation said. (A spokesman said Mr. Dimon did not recall the exchange.)
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Times Topic: Michael Bloomberg
Bloomberg L.P. executives began discussing the creation of an opinion journalism operation about two years ago. At the time, the company had about two dozen columnists — several of them well-known names like Margaret Carlsonand Michael Lewis — yet many wrote sporadically, and the department was viewed as something of a backwater.
Late last year, the executives agreed on a plan: Create the kind of distinguished, agenda-setting op-ed section that resides in the pages of The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Times. According to people involved in the process, the company contacted several high-profile journalists about leading the organization: Chrystia Freeland, a former managing editor of Financial Times, now at Thomson Reuters; Rik Kirkland, the former editor of Fortune magazine, who works at McKinsey & Company; and Alix M. Freedman, a deputy managing editor at The Journal and a Pulitzer Prize winner. All three declined to comment.
In the end, Bloomberg L.P. hired David Shipley, the op-ed editor of The Times, and James P. Rubin, a former assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration. Mr. Shipley will focus on topics in the United States and Canada; Mr. Rubin on the rest of the world. Both will earn in the area of half a million dollars. The venture has an estimated annual budget of $5 million.
Those involved said the editorials would mirror the kind of data-driven, nonpartisan, centrist thinking that has defined Mr. Bloomberg’s career, even as it has become rare in public discourse. Other news organizations are undertaking similar expansions in opinion journalism. The Times is overhauling its Week in Review section and broadening its Op-Ed report. Thomson Reuters bought a company that provides commentary on finance.
Not everyone inside Bloomberg L.P. is enthusiastic: its news arm is known for bleaching stories of extraneous adjectives, conjunctions and descriptions, adopting a just-the-facts ethos that has earned it a reputation for fairness.
Some fear that could be undermined if the news organization begins publishing unsigned editorials that may be viewed as the opinion of the entire Bloomberg brand.
The company seems to be taking precautions to avoid that. It is housing Bloomberg View about a mile from the headquarters of the company, inside a town house on East 78th Street where Mr. Bloomberg has put his philanthropic foundation and an investment business that manages his wealth, estimated at about $17 billion. (Bloomberg View employees will not want for amenities: the town house was recently decorated with a giant whale sculpture, called Mocha Dick, and manuscripts by Herman Melville.)
At the same time, Mr. Bloomberg has called a handful of prominent journalists and editors, seeking advice on how to create a credible editorial organization that still authentically conveys his thinking.
Much of their advice boiled down to this: Give your editors space and independence.
Mr. Bloomberg’s longtime friend and fellow publisher, Mortimer B. Zuckerman, the owner of The Daily News and U.S. News & World Report, said he could identify with the mayor’s desire to affect the issues of the day.
“It is something I have always enjoyed,” said Mr. Zuckerman, who researches and writes many opinion articles himself. But he cautioned that the work, for all its ego-boosting prestige, has its limitations. “You know your voice is out there,” he said, “but it’s hard to measure the impact.”
