Bloomberg’s EIC shuffles management to ‘unite’ news factions

Bloomberg’s new Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait has unleashed a sweeping overhaul of the editorial hierarchy at the business news provider in a bid to unify the newsroom and eliminate the company’s notorious fiefdoms.

In the process, two rising stars — Reto Gregori and Josh Tyrangiel, who were at one time seen as potential successors to the ousted EIC Matthew Winkler — are pulled into the inner circle as part of a new Editorial Management Team.

Gregori was one of Winkler’s right-hand men on the news side that cranks out the info for the company’s terminal users worldwide. Tyrangiel, recruited from Time magazine, was heading most of the consumer-facing media, including magazines Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Bloomberg Markets and Pursuits and the TV and radio operations.

The company is estimated to have about $9 billion in revenues, with about 80 percent coming from serving news to the company’s 320,000 terminal users who pay roughly $20,000 a year to stay plugged into the news-data terminals.

The consumer-facing media operations loses an estimated $100 million to $130 million a year, with about $25 million in losses estimated to flow from Bloomberg BusinessWeek alone.

“In the last few years, there have been competing news operations within Bloomberg, all sorts of different silos almost going at one another,” said one insider. “The way I read it, this guy [Micklethwait] is saying, ‘We are all going to play nice with each other, right?’ ”

The media side rarely worked with the news side, which fed the profitable piece of the business, sources said.

Former Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who has returned to the company after 12 years in City Hall, was dismayed at how archaic the editorial reporting lines had become, sources said.

In the new lineup, all editors across the various news operations will report to the editorial management committee of Micklethwait, Tyrangiel and Gregori.