Champagne flowed last Monday night as Hong Kong's business elite gathered with top Bloomberg L.P. executives at a dinner for 100 guests at a cultural center in a former British colonial military complex.
Bryan Thomas for The New York Times
Bloomberg L.P. in Manhattan. The growth of the company's terminal sales worldwide has softened over the last several years.
Daniel L. Doctoroff, the company's chief executive and the steward of the business empire behind the wealth of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, had flown in to toast a corporate milestone: In 20 years, sales of Bloomberg's financial data terminals in Hong Kong had ballooned into a business bringing in more than half a billion dollars a year.
But behind the celebration were some troubling developments. The growth of Bloomberg's terminal sales worldwide had softened over the last several years, and had dropped significantly in the last year in mainland China, a vast untapped market. Bloomberg News's tough reporting last year about China had prompted officials to cancel subscriptions for the lucrative terminals, frustrating the company's Beijing sales staff.
And, just blocks from last week's celebratory dinner, at the Hong Kong bureau of Bloomberg News, anxious journalists were still dealing with the implications of a decision by top editors weeks earlier not to publish a hard-hitting article about a Chinese tycoon. Bloomberg employees had asserted in published reports that Matthew Winkler, the editor in chief, had justified killing the piece, citing concerns that Bloomberg journalists would be expelled from China in retaliation.
Later that night, just hours after Mr. Doctoroff raised his glass, the company confirmed that one of the writers of the article was no longer an employee.
As Mr. Bloomberg prepares to leave office and resume a more direct role in the company he founded, he rejoins an operation whose core business, after two decades of heady growth, has slowed, and whose news division has more than doubled since he left. Interviews with current and former employees show that the business and news operations exist in uneasy tension, and occasionally collide.
Bloomberg suddenly faces newsroom layoffs, a shift in emphasis back to financial news and skepticism from the business side that investigative journalism might not be worth the potential problems it could create for terminal sales.
Mr. Winkler and other senior editors denied that the article from China was killed, saying it was still active but not ready for publication. The episode, however, brought more unwanted attention after embarrassing revelations this spring that some reporters had used a function on the terminals to monitor some customer activity, angering some of Bloomberg's biggest clients.
Against this backdrop, some top executives have begun to question the role of the company's news operation. Executives on the business side insist that short bursts of market-moving news, not prize-winning investigative journalism, are what Bloomberg's paying customers want. Editors are increasingly asked to send only brief, bullet-point news reports to terminals — easily digestible facts for traders and hedge fund managers.
"To the bankers that run the place, you have a redheaded stepchild that is a rounding error in the scheme of things that is managing to create a lot of trouble," one news employee said.
This person, like the more than two dozen current and former business and news executives interviewed for this article, agreed to discuss the company's operations but insisted on anonymity, citing strict nondisclosure agreements.
In an interview last week, Mr. Doctoroff said the backlash this spring over reporters' monitoring of clients "did prompt self-reflection," and one senior executive said the mayor's return would be a "reset" moment for the company.
Last Monday, Bloomberg began to lay off roughly 40 people, about 2 percent of its news staff. Coverage of culture and sports would be scaled back, and the investigative unit had losses as well. The signal accompanying the announcement was clear: "We must have the courage to say no to certain areas of coverage in order to have enough firepower in areas we want to own," Mr. Winkler wrote to the staff.
Bloomberg said it would add around 100 newsroom positions next year, many in a division called First Word, which produces a Twitter-like burst of short-form news of market-moving importance. (A spokesman said that even with the recent cuts, the number of employees at Bloomberg News by the end of 2013 would be up from last year.)
Mr. Doctoroff said the terminals' users are a "very narrow audience" for news articles. (One of the most popular articles on Friday was "Day J.F.K. Died We Traded Through Tears as N.Y.S.E. Shut.") But, he added, the company's journalism serves a vital role in bringing credibility to Bloomberg, and added value to the terminals, which make up about 85 percent of the company's revenue.
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