Matthew Winkler, Founding Editor, Reflects on the Launch of Bloomberg News 30 Years Ago

DENVER, June 10, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- It was 30 years ago, on Thursday, June 14, 1990, that Matthew Winkler and a tiny cohort of reporters and editors launched Bloomberg News and began a journey that would revolutionize financial journalism.

Winkler, now editor-in-chief emeritus, shared his reflections on the origins and growth of Bloomberg News in a newly released NewsLuminaries.com oral history.

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Matthew A. Winkler, editor-in-chief emeritus, Bloomberg News. (Photo: Avital Rotbart, TimeinaBottlePhotography.com)

Dean Rotbart, chair and editor-in-chief, NewsLuminaries.com (Photo: Avital Rotbart, TimeinaBottlePhotography.com)

The oral history is available at https://tinyurl.com/NewsLuminary-Winkler

Winkler had not yet reached his 35th birthday when Michael R. Bloomberg, a former Salomon Brothers partner, recruited the bow-tie wearing, bond-savvy, Wall Street Journal reporter to develop a news organization to complement his Bloomberg financial data terminals.

"What would it take to get in the news business?" Winkler recalls Bloomberg asking him over lunch one afternoon in late 1989. Winkler spelled out his vision, which, at that early date, involved hiring five reporters each in New York, London, and Tokyo. "And then he [Bloomberg] said, 'I'm going to do it, you're going to do it for me. When can you start?'" Winkler remembers.

Together, Winkler and Bloomberg would radically change the landscape of financial news, marrying voluminous data — both real-time and historical — with the context and analysis that only talented journalists could provide.

Skeptics, of course, were abundant, asking how Bloomberg and Winkler could hope to take on the likes of Dow Jones & Company, Reuters, The New York Times, and Nikkei. In fact, Winkler notes, any one of those companies could readily have owned the field had they had the vision ahead of Bloomberg. But they didn't.

"Winkler and Bloomberg defied the odds and naysayers to orchestrate the ascension of Bloomberg News to the pinnacle of global financial journalism," notes Dean Rotbart, chair and editor-in-chief of NewsLuminaries.com and the Business News Visionary Awards. Today, employing approximately 3,000 journalists and analysts worldwide, Bloomberg has expanded its franchise to include magazines, television, radio, digital video, live events, and a syndication service providing content to other major news outlets.

In March 2000, Winkler was honored by his peers as one of the Top 100 business and financial journalists of the 20th century.

"Matt's influence, from Day One through his succession by current editor-in-chief John Micklethwait in early 2015, continues to shape the business and financial news profession to this day," Rotbart says.

Rotbart, who is conducting a series of oral histories with prominent active and retired journalists for a commemorative book to be published in 2021, interviewed Winkler earlier this year.

Other oral histories available at NewsLuminaries.com include those of Stephen J. Adler, editor-in-chief of Reuters, Nina Easton of Fortune Magazine's Most Powerful Women conferences, Myron "Mike" Kandel, retired financial editor of CNN, Henry Dubroff, founder of the Pacific Coast Business Times, and Neil Cavuto and Maria Bartiromo of FOX Business Network.

New oral histories are added weekly to NewsLuminaries.com.

The News Luminary and Business News Visionary Awards are made possible, in part, by the support of Monday Morning Radio, a weekly podcast produced in cooperation with the nonprofit Wizard Academy and its founders, Roy H. and Pennie Williams; and Robert L. Dilenschneider and Joan Avagliano of The Dilenschneider Group, providing an unsurpassed level of communications counsel to global clients.

Additional support comes from SmallBusinessParamedics.com, a community of small business consultants and owners providing free advice on topics including human resources, financing, planning, taxes, inventory control, fraud, intellectual property, marketing, public relations, supply chains, facilities management, government regulations, and exit strategies.

Media Contact:
Dean Rotbart
303-800-6081
[email protected]

SOURCE NewsLuminaries.com