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Business News/ Industry / Media/  It’s difficult to believe the Asian focus will not grow: Bloomberg editor-in-chief
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It’s difficult to believe the Asian focus will not grow: Bloomberg editor-in-chief

John Micklethwait on growing importance of regional economies, India and products such as Gadfly, Daybreak and the Bloomberg Terminal

John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief, Bloomberg. Photo: Abhijit Bhatlekar/MintPremium
John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief, Bloomberg. Photo: Abhijit Bhatlekar/Mint

Mumbai: Bloomberg LP’s launch of an Asia-focused website this week is as much a reflection of the growing importance of regional economies as it is a consequence of an increase in the number of its clients and readers, editor-in-chief John Micklethwait said in an interview. After joining the US-based financial data and news provider this year from The Economist, Micklethwait has introduced new products like a fast commentary service called Bloomberg Gadfly and a customized product called Daybreak, available to subscribers of the Bloomberg terminal. In an interview during a visit to Mumbai, Micklethwait explained the thinking behind some of these products and also shared his views on India. Edited excerpts:

You launched the Asia-focused Bloomberg Business website this week. Why now?

Why now? Because we are ready. When I came in, we had an American website, but we didn’t have a European one or an Asian one. And I think you need to have some degree of regional additionalizing of content for different regions. Actually I think it’s more than that. It’s good for the journalists as well because you see much more of your content going out and there is a huge audience out here, and there is so much to cover. When I look at the world, and I tend to look at these things over a 10-15-year horizon, then over that period, it is very difficult to believe that the Asian focus will not grow, both in terms of the coverage and the breadth of what we offer. You would also expect the terminals (Bloomberg terminals) and the Web audience to grow in Asia.

Is it possible to see Asia as one market, editorially? Or do you have to further localize?

When I arrived, we only had an American website. We had plans of having a London website, we changed that to a European website. We now have an Asian website. Going forward, I would like to look at things like having a Middle East and Africa website, a Latin American website and maybe looking at a Chinese website. But if I was an Indian businessperson, I would want to know enormously what is happening in China. So you mustn’t become too local. There are very good local publications. We have to think about where we can add the most value and that may be in the ability to set things in a global or regional context, and that I think is a big deal.

John Micklethwait, 53Micklethwait is editor-in-chief at Bloomberg LP, where he oversees editorial content across all platforms of the US-based financial data and news provider, including the Bloomberg terminal, and television, radio and digital properties. Prior to joining Bloomberg in February, Micklethwait was editor-in-chief of The Economist—a position he held since 2006.

Specific to India, there were some layoffs as part of the global refocusing that you have undertaken.

I think the crucial point to note is that this wasn’t downsizing. We still have the same number of journalists as we had and within that there will be a greater focus on Asia. So I think India will end up gaining people in the end.

Are you renewing your partnership with the Anil Ambani-led Reliance Group for the Bloomberg TV India venture? There has been some talk that the partnership may not be extended?

I think we have the partner at the moment. In every market where we have partners, people always ask questions. Sometimes we keep them, sometimes we change them.

Globally, you are launching two new products including an opinion-based product called Bloomberg Gadfly. What is the thinking behind that?

Gadfly will appear both on the terminal and on the website. Like a lot of our other content, there will be a delay before it comes on the website. The aim is to deliver a fast commentary service. Because at the moment what happens is that we break a huge number of stories. But sometimes when we break a story, we lose it straight afterwards.

So what happens is that we break the story, we do follow it up with products like First Word, but then a whole series of people from the Internet jump in on—what does this mean? We do quite a lot of “What does this mean" kind of journalism, but Gadfly is a way of branding it. The aim is to try and dominate that market for fast commentary within an hour or so, which explains news breaks. Because it will be slightly opinionated, we are keeping it slightly separate from the rest of Bloomberg news journalism.

How do you distinguish it from other fast views products out there which are grabbing eyeballs through clickbait journalism?

I think the areas I would like us to distinguish ourselves are things like data. We have more data, more facts than other people. I’d like us to use that. I’d like us to use and leverage the network of 2,500 journalists. The other bit you really want is to have an “inside the market" element. Bloomberg sits right in the middle of the market and quite a lot of commentary journalism is somewhat divorced from that, and is vague and general. I’d like us to be more precise.

You also have something called Daybreak coming up.

Daybreak is very interesting. The idea there is that it picks up on the two big trends in modern media at the moment, which is customization and the mobile phone. A huge amount of media is drifting towards the mobile phone and customization is the ability to be able to say—you are interested in a certain subject and I can tell you all this about it. Daybreak will initially be for Bloomberg terminal clients. It will have three segments, starting with a general segment which has all the key stories. Then it has something called My Daybreak, which has information on what you are interested in. Finally it has a “nice to know" element, the stuff you don’t need to read, but might like to in any case.

This is aimed at bringing people up to speed very rapidly in the morning. It’s published at 6am. It allows them to be on it on trains before you get into work. If you look around you on your morning commute, no one has a newspaper, but everyone is looking into their phones. That, I think, is becoming the new competitive landscape for a lot of journalism.

On a different note, when you were at ‘The Economist’, the paper did some fairly dramatic cover stories on Narendra Modi before he was elected. What would be the cover now if you had to do one.

I think India is an interesting place. We saw Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi in New Delhi. I think India politics is interesting. I think what’s happening in Bihar is interesting. I think some of the fears that I had about Modi, when he first came in, those haven’t fully manifested yet, though there have been some instances of communal violence. I think in terms of economic reform, he has done good things with the civil service, but you would have liked to see him get the GST (goods and services tax) through. You would have liked him to have done more of the land reform and the labour reform. I think the next year or so is very important for the Modi revolution. I’m struck by the good things he has done; for instance, there seems to be much less corruption at the top.

At the risk of sounding like a cop out, I think it’s too early to judge. He’s managed to infuse some life into the Indian economy, although a lot of credit for that should also go to (the Reserve Bank of India governor) Raghuram Rajan. On the politics side and on the communal violence side, that is an issue, as Moody’s recently pointed out.

So those instances are catching the world’s attention?

Some. But it certainly hasn’t hit the rest of the world’s press in the way previous big instances have. Fundamentally, Modi is of interest to the rest of the world firstly because India is hugely important and getting ever more important. Secondly, Modi is an interesting polarizing figure. Thirdly, somewhere you go into this big debate about authoritarian governments versus democracies. You have this very long-standing thing—if you were poor 25 years ago, you’d have done much better being in China than India. If you are poor today, would you do better in India than China? I think there is at least that chance again of that happening. For all those reasons, people will focus on Modi. But I do think it’s too early to say.

The Modi government has certainly engaged very actively with the rest of the world through his foreign visits. Are those seen as image-building exercises or more?

I think you have to give him credit there because he does these foreign trips, but he is also focused at home. He is a bit of a workoholic. I am actually, personally, quite in favour of Modi’s increased effort on diplomacy. One of the things about India was that it didn’t particularly take a leading role. You do have a changing Asian landscape. You have the world’s most populous country bumping up against the world’s second-most populous country and the world’s third- biggest economy. And there are tensions between all of them. In that world, an India which does not take part has less use than the one that does. So from that perspective, an increased engagement is a good thing. Whether Modi is doing good in every case, I don’t know. But the desire to do things is a good thing.

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Published: 04 Nov 2015, 12:51 AM IST
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