In October, Bloomberg hired Business Insider’s Joe Weisenthal amid a wave of high-profile additions to its newsroom. At Business Insider, where he worked since 2008, Weisenthal rose from a blogger to executive editor. At Bloomberg, he’ll run a new finance and economics site and host a TV show. CJR’s Christopher Massie asked him about the challenges and potential of this venture.
The popular perception of Business Insider as a place to get entertaining and snappy political and economic analysis coincided with your tenure there. How did it evolve into that role?
The trick has always been–whether it’s covering tech news, economic news, or anything else–to cover it in a way that’s smart enough so that people in the industry will appreciate it, but also enthusiastically enough so that people outside will find it compelling. Business content, finance content, have historically not been presented in ways that are entertaining. Billions of dollars are made and lost every single day in the market, so there’s absolutely no reason why it can’t be a thrilling thing to follow, just like if you were following sports.
‘The Terminal is the greatest charting tool that’s ever been made.’
I’ve read a lot about how it matters a great deal to you to break news. Why does getting there first matter so much?
It’s about reliability. Whether it’s a piece of economic data or a move in the market, you want to continually reinforce the message that this is the place that has it. Otherwise, if readers start seeing that you’re not on top of it, then they’re going to have to follow someone else.
Bloomberg already has tons of people analyzing markets. What do you offer that it lacks?
One thing that I can bring to the table beyond my personality is lots of experience in what works well on digital. How to make content that may seem technical or arcane sing on the internet so that lots of people read it.
BuzzFeed ran a story last November that expressed some skepticism about how your style would translate to Bloomberg, which is known for being dry. Is that a cause for concern?
I feel very in-sync at Bloomberg. One of the reasons I was excited to come to Bloomberg is that a lot of the things that I personally care about as a journalist are the things that this company is built on: breaking news, data. I mean, the Terminal is the greatest charting tool that’s ever been made. I love charts, as anyone who follows me on Twitter knows.
So what are you going to change?
I think there are opportunities to take the reporting and chunk it up in some ways that makes it better for the internet. Visuals is a big one, both in terms of art and in terms of more charts. There are all kinds of ways to take the great reporting that’s being done and put it online in a way that really pops and makes you say, ‘Oh, this is something I want to share.’
What’s the biggest adjustment in moving to Bloomberg?
Naturally, at a small startup like Business Insider, things move extremely fast and are flexible. At a really large organization, that’s more of a challenge. But I’ve found that people are very entrepreneurial here. There’s a culture of saying ‘yes’ to ideas and ‘yes’ to projects. So I actually think it’s going to be less of an issue than I would’ve guessed.
What will constitute success for these projects?
Obviously, if you’re doing something online you want traffic and all that stuff. But I think the true thing is to create something that everyone recognizes is a compelling media product, whether it’s on the Web or on TV. I want people who are in finance or who are in markets to say, ‘This is an important place where I get news from.’ At Bloomberg News there’s coverage of a lot of things that most news organizations would consider quite arcane. But taking all that and hopefully gaining some people who never thought they would be interested in those subjects, that is a huge part of my mission here.
This story was published in the November/December 2014 issue of CJR.
Christopher Massie is a CJR contributing editor.