Bloomberg News, the financial news company and one of the world’s largest news organisation, will be laying off around 90 journalists to restructure its newsroom The New York Times reported.
A memo was sent to the staff on Thursday informing them about the changes. The memo mentioned that the restructuring of the newsroom would include laying off mostly senior editors.
John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, announced the changes and declared the need for more accountability. He said that that the newsroom had “lost stories because 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,” Micklethwait wrote. He said that “managers spent too much time setting up conference calls when they should just have been writing”.
Writing that this step wasn’t taken “lightly”, Micklethwait wrote, “But we have always sought to make the newsroom better — to make us more nimble, to improve our content, and to help us ‘chronicle capitalism’ in an even more comprehensive way.”
Micklethwait mentioned in the new system, most editors will be assigned individual stories. They will be reporting to managing editors directly to avoid “unnecessary back-reading or re-editing”.
He said that the company was looking to hire in priority areas like data journalism, and aimed to end the year with same number of journalists as it had before the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2020.
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With around 3,100 editorial and research employees, Bloomberg News had initially avoided laying off its employees during the mass layoffs that had loomed over the media industry during the pandemic.
The media industry suffered a massive setback during the pandemic-induced economic crisis in 2020, with numerous journalists across the globe losing their jobs. In India, HuffPost India, Mumbai Mirror, Pune Mirror, The Economic Times, The Hindu, and Business Standard were among some of the organisations to either shut editions or downsize existing teams and lay off staff.