A high-volume, international news organization

Our Client: Bloomberg News

Our team focused on the financial news component of Bloomberg, otherwise known as Bloomberg News. The Bloomberg News team was created in 1990 to provide fast, accurate news to the financial community. At the time, the organization was 6 people, but as of early 2015, the organization has grown to over 2,400 news professionals in 73 countries producing over 5,000 stories a day. Bloomberg News strives to be the first to report news 24 hours a day, 365 days a year with complete context, perspective, and accuracy.

The Complicated Workflows of Breaking News

Within Bloomberg News, the Breaking News team has an important and challenging role providing users with fast and accurate market-moving financial news. Breaking News coverage is split into three teams: The Speed Desk, Bloomberg First Word, and Social Media. All teams alongside an intricate automation system share duties monitoring press wires, market data, websites, Twitter, emails, other news organizations, TV/Radio stations, teleconferences, and web events to report breaking financial news quickly and accurately. Our team was brought on to evaluate existing tools used by Breaking News and to streamline their current news monitoring and publishing workflows.

Breaking News

Within the Bloomberg News organization, the Breaking News Team’s role is to be the first to identify potential market-moving news and report it to their global client base quickly and accurately at all hours of the day. The team releases news in both individual headlines and short bullet points of key information, designed to be consumed rapidly by traders who can then directly perform an action based upon that news.

The team is comprised of a global network of reporters and automation systems that continuously monitor press wires, market data, websites, social media, emails, other news organizations, TV/Radio stations, teleconferences, and web events.

Bloomberg Professional

Bloomberg Professional (the terminal) is a $20,000+ annual subscription service that provides over 300,000 users with up-to-date financial data news, chat functionality, and the ability to buy and sell financial assets. Bloomberg’s software system is often paired with a proprietary keyboard which is optimized for speed. Users rarely use a mouse and become experts at commands and keyboard shortcuts that allow them to navigate between functions. Terminal functions are individual applications that handle one feature, like opening up a chat window or viewing a company’s stock. The terminal is also used internally by the Breaking News team to distribute news. Our team’s primary constraint is to work within the confines of the terminal to deliver a solution that will improve the process of delivering news to Bloomberg’s users.

The Importance of Speed

Consumers of Bloomberg’s Breaking News include sales and traders, government officials, consultants, financial analysts, and a myriad of other employees in the business world. While all users of the Bloomberg Terminal care about the accuracy of breaking news, a core group of Breaking News readers care about the milliseconds in which the news is delivered. Algorithmic traders, who create formulas that make trades automatically based on the news, make up a substantive portion of this group and illustrate the fact that within the Bloomberg Breaking News world, milliseconds matter. Milliseconds are the difference between making and losing millions of dollars in a day for Bloomberg Breaking News consumers.

Mission Statement

To increase the efficiency and speed of Bloomberg's Breaking News coverage by evaluating the existing processes and reimagining the tools that will be used by the breaking news teams of the future.