Bloomberg’s Dubious Claim: Three Times Scoopier This Year

Bloomberg retains a reputation as the most brutal and authoritarian of the news wires, so it’s no wonder the company is churning out internal memos that could pass for North Korean propaganda. Scoop production increased threefold, says the glorious regime.

A Bloomberg source passed along the financial information company’s internal memo on its first quarter. (Click here to read the whole thing.) The news division not only beat all first-quarter targets, it also increased “its headline speed against the main real-time competition.” We have no idea what that means; maybe ask a Scientologist.

We do get this part, though, where Bloomberg clearly brags about nearly tripling the number of stories broken in Q1 and getting double the number of “follows” in competing media:

“Competitors followed Bloomberg News stories more than 2,700 times —

more than twice as often as in all of 2008({NI FOLLOW }. The Wall

Street Journal alone cited us 235 times. The New York Times mentioned

us 135 times. Reuters followed 520 times.”

The 1,492 journalists at Bloomberg News broke more than 13,000

stories, almost three times the total for all of 2008. Our speed

increased, too: Bloomberg News beat its main real-time competitor on

more than 70 percent of all major stories, compared with 54 percent at

the beginning of the year.”

The trouble with these stats: They’re generated by the very Bloomberg staff who the stats are later used to evaluate. As the company grows more metrics conscious, the stakes grow higher, creating an incentive to attach to stories the “FIRST” and “FOLLOW” tags that allow Bloomberg to crow about its performance. Bloomberg, which has set a goal of reaching $US10 billion in annual revenue, ties an employee performance bonuses to the metrics.

Our tipster said the tags are now applied more generously than last year, an observation that would seem self-evident in Bloomberg’s own memo. But managers may have ended up burning themselves: the company will purportedly use Q1 2009 as a benchmark for future performance, despite what we’re told was previous guidance that a period from 2008, when the new metrics push was just beginning, would be used.

We’ve asked Bloomberg for comment and will update the post when we hear back.

[Full Memo]

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