The Bloomberg Lesson, by Jack Shafer

Shafer doesn’t explain why traders abandoned their pricey Reuters and Telerate terminals for the Bloomberg; it wasn’t the babes in sales. [emphasis is mine]

That Michael Bloomberg created in a little over two decades a news and information giant worth $5 billion-plus speaks as much to his enterprise as it does to the sloth and myopia of the conventional press. [ed. especially the sloth and myopia at Reuters.]

Better than anyone, Bloomberg perceived in the early 1980s an untapped need for instantly transmitted, market-moving news for traders of stocks and bonds. He understood that with new and affordable computer technologies he could leapfrog the old guard at Reuters and Telerate (once owned by Dow Jones). A 10-second advantage over a competitor on a market-moving morsel of data could easily translate into substantial profits. Stock and bond traders rushed to rent the pricey Bloomberg Terminal, which now costs users about $1,425 a month.

Newspapers derive most of their revenue from advertisers, but the estimated 200,000 Bloomberg Terminal subscribers provide upward of 95 percent of the company’s revenues.