At editorial meetings in Bloomberg LP's headquarters this week, Michael R Bloomberg gave clear signs that he would not be taking a hands-off approach as he returned to his old company.
Just two week's removed from City Hall, and in his first days back at the media giant that he owns and that carries his name, Bloomberg surprised many employees by showing up at all of the 7:30 am meetings where the day's big journalistic decisions are made.
At the gatherings, in a glass-walled conference room, he spoke up to indicate what coverage interested him, like the traffic scandal involving Gov. Chris Christie in New Jersey and the romantic problems of the French president, François Hollande, and what did not, like the suspension of Alex Rodriguez from baseball, according to three people briefed on the meetings.
This is not what employees at the company had expected upon Bloomberg's return after three terms as the mayor of New York City. While in office, Bloomberg said publicly that he would never go back to running his old company. And, only a few months ago, the company's chief executive, Daniel L Doctoroff, said in an interview that Bloomberg did not want "to get involved in the day-to-day at all."
Bloomberg's dive back into the news side of the organisation has not only caught employees by surprise, but it has also worried some that the division's editorial independence could be called into question. Generally, the owners of news organisations try to avoid any appearance of influencing coverage, particularly when they have political affiliations.
"There's a discussion of the ethics of it," said one current employee, who was at the editorial meetings and spoke on the condition of anonymity. "There's this feeling that no one is there to say no to him."
Before entering City Hall, Bloomberg did not have a reputation for being overly involved in Bloomberg News. He sat on a floor with Bloomberg's much more lucrative data terminal business, and was not known for attending editorial meetings.
But Bloomberg has signaled that his interests have changed. Now, he sits with the TV operation and media group on the fifth floor of the Bloomberg tower on Lexington Avenue and 59th Street, in the same cluster of desks as Justin B Smith, the new chief executive of Bloomberg Media.
On Thursday, at a meeting with the staff of Bloomberg Businessweek magazine, Bloomberg spoke for 20 minutes about the publication and the news industry more broadly, according to people who attended. When asked if he would be interested in buying The New York Times, he joked that he was not, partly because he would not be able to influence the coverage, these people said. At the same meeting, though, he said that while he found that the magazine articles were sometimes too long, "I'm not going to tell you what to write."
A company spokesman, Ty Trippet, said, "After more than a decade away from his company, Mike Bloomberg enjoyed the opportunity to sit down with a wide variety of employees this week, including editors and reporters, to get a sense of the great innovations they work on every day."
Bloomberg's return is likely to stoke conversations about how the company approaches its journalism. Kelly McBride, a journalism ethics expert at the Poynter Institute, said it would be very unusual for most media magnates to attend editorial meetings - and even more unusual for them to express opinions about coverage.
"The news meetings are places where the editorial vision is put into execution," she said. "You want the editors to have confidence that they could protect the journalism without risking their jobs. You'd want the owner to be very circumspect and self-aware."
Even as Bloomberg was preparing to leave office, there was a lively debate both inside and outside Bloomberg LP about the proper role of the news operation.
While Bloomberg created the news division in 1990, it was during his absence that the unit grew into a more serious journalistic outfit, with 2,400 editorial employees. Its ambitions were fuelled by revenue from sales of the company's $20,000-a-year data terminals.
Recently, though, terminal sales have slowed and there has been a reorganisation of the newsroom, leading to the departure of some of the company's most respected journalists.
In the spring, the news organisation was criticised after revelations that some reporters had used a function on the data terminals to monitor client activity.
Then in November, several news organisations reported that top editors had killed an investigative article about a Chinese tycoon, saying they did not want to jeopardise Bloomberg's ability to report in China. The company has said that the article was held only because it was not ready for publication.
As mayor, Bloomberg generally stayed out of these sorts of issues. He maintained his majority ownership stake in the company, but was barred from participating in the daily operations.
In his final months in office, he did not convey any great interest in becoming involved in Bloomberg News or in the company more broadly.
In an interview with Forbes published in October, he spoke about his interest in working for political change in areas like gun control, immigration and climate control. "I'm not going back to Bloomberg LP" he said.
On Monday, though, employees at the company received an email in which Doctoroff welcomed his old boss back.
"When he's in New York, Mike will most likely spend a few hours a day working from his new desk on the fifth floor," the message said.
On Wednesday, employees in the company's Washington bureau learned that Bloomberg would be visiting the next day. Managers recommended that staff members clean up their desks so as not to catch the notice of the famously neat former mayor, according to employees.
Bloomberg ended up postponing that trip and met instead with the entire Businessweek staff. He spoke about how much he loved the magazine, and how he wanted to see more things like it in the rest of the news organisation.
The one public picture from his first week was posted on Twitter by the editor of Businessweek, Josh Tyrangiel, and showed Bloomberg, in a suit, making a point to Tyrangiel and Smith - looking very much at home.
© 2014 The New York Times News Service
