Bloomberg announces newsroom layoffs

Bloomberg News announced dozens of layoffs in its newsroom on Thursday.

A source familiar with the matter told The Hill that about 90 Bloomberg editorial and research employees are expected to leave the company, roughly 3 percent of its 3,100 editorial and research staff.

The cuts are global, but the majority will take place across the Europe, Middle East and Africa region, as well as the Americas, the source said. The majority of the cuts will affect editors.

Bloomberg LP has roughly 20,000 employees globally.

The layoffs come as part of an effort to restructure the newsroom’s editing process. In a memo to staff obtained by The Hill, Bloomberg’s editor-in-chief John Micklethwait said he was restructuring the newsroom in an effort to “elevate editing.”

“For the most part, we will stick to the principle of one story, one editor. No more unnecessary back-reading or re-editing. Yes, of course there will be more complicated pieces that require senior managers to be involved, but those are the exceptions,” he wrote. “We either trust an editor to handle a story, or we don’t. If we don’t like the end result, we give the editor candid feedback.”

Micklethwait said that the newsroom needed more “ownership and accountability,” pointing to “lost stories” where he said “we moved too slowly.”

“Teams waited for somebody to back-read a piece or ignored the requests from the News Desk to get a blast out quickly. Managers spent too much time setting up conference calls when they should just have been writing. Or teams suddenly delivered enterprise pieces that nobody wanted,” he wrote.

Bloomberg is the latest media company to announce cuts in recent months. The Atlantic, Bustle, Group Nine Media and Vox Media, among others, have announced layoffs or furloughs amid the coronavirus pandemic.