Using technology to enhance news coverage

Throughout the company’s 90-year history, Bloomberg Industry Group reporters have been covering the news in ways that help our customers better understand the issues of the day. Beyond the basic chasing of facts, they think about the impact on professionals in legal, tax, and government, offering thoughtful analysis and outlining practical implications, alongside their coverage of the big picture.

As Cesca Antonelli , our editor-in-chief, well knows, leading one of the largest newsrooms in Washington, D.C. comes with a unique set of challenges. Chief among them is delivering news that is urgent, relevant, and thorough. There’s also the ever-looming adage that I wrote about here in September: if you’re not innovating, you’re falling behind.

As we’ve thought about how to grow our coverage, we’ve tried several things – but one place we’ve seen great progress is with technology. We’ve made strategic investments in technology to support – and in some cases drive – the significant growth we wanted for our news coverage. It has been exciting to watch how our newsroom worked hand in hand with our product development and engineering teams to come up with better ways to gather and deliver news.

More time to cover what matters

Last year, we introduced automation to help us cover more routine things like press releases and personnel announcements. We’ve really ramped these efforts up in 2022. Using AI for the first draft of these stories allows us to release them more quickly, add new areas of coverage, and more importantly, frees up time for reporters to spend on more substantive articles.

We’ve also invested in technology that improves workflows in the newsroom, specifically within our CMS. We’ve attracted a lot of great talent to our newsroom, and through technology, our goal is to provide them with the right tools to write great stories more efficiently than ever.

Cesca is enthusiastic about this growth, and the opportunities it gives to both her team of journalists and the engineers who support them.

“Our newsroom is a hotbed of innovation – a great sandbox,” she tells me. “Being able to use machine learning for straightforward reporting frees up our journalists to do better, deeper, tougher journalism that requires a human brain and a source list.”

A good example of a journalist who takes advantage of the time and opportunities technology offers him is Roy Strom , our correspondent who covers the business of big law firms. On a given morning, he may receive 20 press releases about partners changing firms, and in the past, he would have written four or five stories about the most significant lateral partner moves. Now that AI gives him a head start, he can devote himself to more high-impact articles. He also has more time to devote to his weekly column, as well as frequent podcasts.

“Automation has changed the way I do my job,” Roy says. “We can unearth more valuable news about big law firms because we’re not focused on simple stories that a machine can write. I’m now able to spend more time generating ideas, talking with sources, and writing interesting, lively columns readers enjoy.”

Different ways to tell the story

As our customers’ news consumption patterns and information needs have evolved, so has our news delivery. For example, personalization has been another major theme of our product development efforts. Like Netflix, we’ve built a recommendation engine that delivers stories to our customers based on their preferences and engagement with our news.

This saves users from having to search for relevant news, and even surfaces content they might not otherwise have known to search for.

Furthermore, because we know our customers engage with our news on many platforms, and often consume different content depending on the platform, our newsroom meets readers where they are.

With dedicated teams in social media, podcasting, video production, graphics, and data journalism, we’re able to go beyond the written word and tell stories in compelling ways.

We’ve also expanded what we cover. For example, earlier this year, we launched a?crypto news channel, where customers can go to keep pace with the legal, tax, regulatory, and business implications of this quickly-evolving industry.

Expansion opportunities abound

In the past, when we thought about expansion and growth of our coverage, we had limited choices – either add more people or pull back in another area. At Bloomberg Industry Group, we realized we could use the ingenuity of our team to cover more, while delivering a better product and a better experience for our journalists.

As I wrote previously about innovation coming from anywhere, the development of the advanced technology we’re using in the newsroom also started small – just a handful of folks started experimenting, and their work showed some good early results. Given the space and support to iterate and test, they eventually built something scalable that’s making a real impact on the daily workflows of our reporters and editors.

Most importantly, it’s paying off for our customers. As we’ve expanded and fine-tuned what we cover and how we cover it, we’re covering more areas than ever before, and our customers are consuming more of what we write too. In fact, readership of our news has more than doubled since 2020.

Looking ahead, we’ll continue to take advantage of this work to allow us to cover even more topics – more efficiently – than we ever could before. For example, in 2023, we’ll be significantly increasing our coverage of litigation, taking advantage of the talents of our team and our technology, and making key investments in both areas.