Bloomberg LP has launched a plan to take over Washington the same way it took over Wall Street. The Bloomberg Terminal, the machine that made the mayor’s company indispensable to traders, has been revamped for lobbyists, Capitol Hill insiders, and government contractors. The new service, called Bloomberg Government, will provide information on “the nuts-and-bolts of lawmaking and government regulation.” This is bad news for the trade pubs and news organizations like Congressional Quarterly and National Journal, which heretofore charged high subscription fees for access to that info. The company’s betting that government-sector folks will pay $5,700 a year for the same aggregate-and-filter approach that it applied to finance. Bloomberg executives say the recent bloom in political reporting has left an opening in the unsexy business of government regulations and how Congress made its legislative doughnuts. “Our aspiration is to be the most influential news organization in the world,” says Mike Riley, the managing editor of Bloomberg Government in Washington, who plans to hire 60 additional half-reporter, half-policy wonks to plug into the Matrix by the end of the year.
Bloomberg Plans a Data Service on the Business of Government [NYT]
