Bloomberg LP has the sales and news service to field one of the best financial websites in the country. Analysts estimate that the site’s parent had revenue of $6.25 billion in 2009 and that number is likely to move closer to $7 billion in 2010. Bloomberg’s news operation has over 2,000 employees, which certainly makes it larger than The Wall Street Journal’s.
However, for the last several years, Bloomberg’s flagship website, Bloomberg.com, had a funereal look with black borders and jaundiced text. The story headlines were cheerless and tiny. Video from Bloomberg TV was buried at the bottom of the page.
Recently, there have been signs that Bloomberg is trying to improve the appeal of its online operations. Last October, the company bought BusinessWeek. Although some of the BusinessWeek staff were subsequently fired, the volume and quality of the stories at BusinessWeek.com did not suggest the loss of talent. And now, Bloomberg appears to have learned something from the layout of the busy BusinessWeek online presence. As a consequence, the new Bloomberg.com is decidedly less cluttered than its sister site.
The lack of clutter is only one of two strengths of the new Bloomberg.com. The layout of the site does not include an overwhelming amount of numerical data about the stock market indexes – Bloomberg knows that kind of information is a commodity that runs at all other financial sites. What Bloomberg.com does run in the form of statistics is now in the right rail of the site and does not interrupt the flow of news copy.
The greatest appeal to the new site is what was always its greatest strength: coverage. Only now it displays the breadth of Bloomberg’s existing news coverage more clearly. Unlike news sites which look like newspapers or magazines transplanted to the Internet, Bloomberg.com is spartan and favors written copy over photos or video. It is clear what the editors think is important because text runs down the center of the site in a series of headlines with brief summaries for each story. Old news is quickly pushed off the page by the most recent information.
The only real quarrel with the design is that there are so many stories in the main well that valuable sections like “Opinion,” “Politics,” and “Economy” get pushed to the bottom of the page. However, that is a minor blemish in what turned out to be an overwhelmingly successful redesign.
Douglas A. McIntyre
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