This is a recent picture of Rupert Murdoch and NY mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Murdoch hosted the 9th annual presentation of the Eric Breindel awards for opinion writing.
And it is an interesting one because Bloomberg could offer more than $5 billion for Dow Jones.
Bloomberg is a private company, but its value must be around $20 billion.
Bloomberg has all kinds of media: real-time computer financial news, radio, television, magazines… but not a newspaper.
Ten years ago, my wife, Deborah Withey, was asked to develop a prototype for a Bloomberg newspaper.
Very factual.
Very graphic.
Short stories.
A few pages.
Broadsheet.
She did a great prototype with the help of a Bloomberg journalist in Detroit, our friend Doran Levin, a former business columnist for the Detroit Free Press.
But the project didn’t go ahead.
So… perhaps now is the perfect time for a business newspaper.
Bloomberg needs to confront the threat of the new Thompson-Reuters.
Right now, nothing would add more value to Bloomberg than The Wall Street Journal.
And if not the WSJ, what about the Financial Times?
In big media consolidation times, Bloomberg needs to expand.
At the end of the day, for Murdoch… Bloomberg could become a more difficult dealmaker to handle than the poor Brancrofts.
(Photo by Getty Images)
