Bloomberg Plans a Data Service on the Business of Government

Ambition and confidence have never been in short supply at Bloomberg L.P.

Chapter 4 of Michael R. Bloomberg’s autobiography, the part in which he describes conceiving the idea for Bloomberg News in the late 1980s, is titled “We Can Do That: Elementary Journalism, Not Rocket Science.”

Now Bloomberg is taking that entrepreneurial ethos and making an aggressive push into the Washington media terrain long dominated by trade publications and news outlets like Congressional Quarterly and National Journal, which charge high subscription fees to provide lobbyists and Capitol Hill insiders with information on the nuts-and-bolts of lawmaking and government regulation.

In the same way that Bloomberg terminals have become a ubiquitous presence on the desks of Wall Street traders, Bloomberg executives aim to make their new service an indispensable tool for lobbyists, Capitol Hill staff members and government contractors.

The service, called Bloomberg Government, is based on the same guiding principle that spawned the original Bloomberg financial data machine: people need an aggregator and filter for information, and they will pay a lot of money for that convenience.

Bloomberg Government is an information behemoth — a news aggregator, government contract database, Congressional staff directory and source for policy research and analysis all in one Web site.

Unlike the Bloomberg financial information service, Bloomberg Government will not require separate hardware to operate. For $5,700 a year for each user (a discount will be available for government users), subscribers will be able to gain access to the system through their personal computers.

The idea for the service was born in part from what Bloomberg executives saw as an opening in the Washington media market. As numerous Web sites, blogs and even traditional policy-focused outlets like National Journal have ramped up their coverage of political news, reporting on the less glamorous aspects — how the legislative sausage is made — has become less of a priority for many news organizations.

“There has been a bloom in news around political reporting,” said Kevin Sheekey, chairman of Bloomberg Government. “There’s been at the same time a sort of hidden but very sharp decline in coverage of government apart from politics, in terms of what government is doing and regulating, and the impact that will have on segments of the economy. That part of press coverage of our society has probably dropped off tenfold. That’s where Bloomberg is stepping in.”

Many news organizations are coy about their ambitions, preferring to let their journalism speak for itself and content to let others speculate about what designs they have on the future. Not Bloomberg. And Bloomberg Government is an unmistakable signal that the company is positioning itself to be not only a major media player in Washington, but the dominant one.

“Our aspiration is to be the most influential news organization in the world,” said Mike Riley, the managing editor of Bloomberg Government in Washington. “I think Bloomberg sees a great opportunity here, and they are wisely investing on the front end,” he added, declining to say exactly how much the company has spent building the service over the last nine months. “Suffice it to say, it’s not inexpensive.”

Bloomberg’s existing Washington bureau employs 175 journalists apart from the nearly 40 journalists and analysts Mr. Riley has hired so far for Bloomberg Government. He plans to hire 60 more by the end of the year, half of them journalists, half policy experts like trained economists.

By the end of 2011, Bloomberg Government expects to have 150 journalists and analysts on staff. Counting nonjournalists, plans call for Bloomberg Government to expand to 300, which would make the company’s Washington office the largest for a news organization not based in the capital.

Bloomberg’s investment in the staff alone will be in the area of $30 million a year.