Bloomberg Expanding Tech Coverage
The financial news giant is launching a tech vertical, several new blogs, and creating original video content. — The crowded tech news scene will become even more crowded this week—Bloomberg has announced a major overhaul of their tech coverage.
Context & Ripple Effects
Bloomberg's move formalizes a push that began a year earlier with the February 2011 launch of Bloomberg West, its daily live Silicon Valley-based TV show — the 2012 overhaul extends that beachhead into a full web vertical, multiple blogs, and original video. The pickup was modest (TPM Idea Lab among the few syndicators), suggesting the trade press saw it as an incremental escalation rather than a shock.
First-order effects
- Blog-native tech outlets gain a rival backed by Bloomberg's terminal distribution and existing broadcast infrastructure, competing on both text and video from day one.
- Bloomberg West's on-air talent becomes the nucleus of a broader editorial operation, stretching the same reporters across TV, blogs, and the new vertical.
Second-order effects
- Other financial-news incumbents — Dow Jones/WSJ chief among them — face pressure to answer with their own dedicated tech products rather than scattered coverage.
- Original-video investment raises the bar for ad inventory around tech content, forcing pure-play blogs without studios to consider partnerships or licensing.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the structural shift is toward financial-data companies treating tech news as a bundled product — terminal subscribers getting coverage that once belonged to independent blogs — blurring the line between news vendor and media brand.
The trend: Legacy financial-information publishers are converting tech coverage from a side beat into vertically integrated product lines spanning terminals, television, and the open web.