Bloomberg Reporters’ Practices Become Crucial Issue for Company

Most journalists dream of uncovering government corruption, landing a big interview or winning a Pulitzer Prize. But those are not the goals that Thomas F. Secunda, who co-founded Bloomberg L.P. in 1982 with Michael R. Bloomberg, has in mind. “The only journalism that matters is the kind that moves markets,” Secunda told the senior staff of Bloomberg News during a recent discussion in the seventh-floor auditorium of the company’s Lexington Avenue headquarters, according to one former Bloomberg journalist in attendance.

The question of how exactly some of those Bloomberg reporters may have uncovered market-moving information has become a critical one for the company. In April, Goldman Sachs complained that a reporter had monitored an executive’s activities on the Bloomberg machine, the ubiquitous financial terminal that contains a mind-boggling array of information about economies, companies, markets and people, including Bloomberg’s own customers. The revelation prompted inquiries from more than 20 customers, including Bank of America, the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department and the European Central Bank. Daniel L. Doctoroff, chief executive of Bloomberg, apologized, calling the reporting practice a “mistake.” Interviews with more than 30 current and former Bloomberg employees paint a picture of an aggressive, hyperkinetic organization that not only tolerated but encouraged an unusual symbiotic relationship between the company’s news operation and its business interests, including the use of the terminals to break news. Many of these reporters say they routinely used the terminal’s function, called the UUID command, to find background information on subscribers, including contact information, when the subscriber had last logged on, and weekly statistics on how often customers used a particular function, like equity shares or currency markets.