March 29, 2024

Bloomberg Media Recruits a New Chief From The Atlantic

On Monday, Bloomberg will announce that Mr. Smith, the president of Atlantic Media, will be named chief executive of the Bloomberg Media Group. He will report to Daniel L. Doctoroff, chief executive of Bloomberg. Andrew Lack, who managed the media division for five years, will become chairman.

After joining The Atlantic in 2007, Mr. Smith developed a reputation as an aggressive promoter of digital media who was able to reconfigure a 156-year-old magazine into a genuine multiplatform property.

In a letter to the staff about Mr. Smith’s departure, David Bradley, the owner of Atlantic Media, credited Mr. Smith with bringing the company to profitability for the first time under his ownership; doubling revenue; and creating a number of successful digital start-ups, including The Atlantic Wire and Quartz.

His quick results at the Atlantic Media Company drew the attention of executives at Bloomberg, who began talking to him at the end of last year.

“We know that every part of media is being disrupted by technology, and we need someone who understands that,” Mr. Doctoroff said. “Justin can drive things forward here because he has an incredibly digital sensibility with a unique understanding of the confluence of journalism and multiple platforms.”

The move will give Mr. Smith significant scale and a connection with Bloomberg’s lucrative terminal business, which produces revenue that allows the company to invest aggressively in media properties. The company has had success in moving from a linear television business to a more diverse model of video distribution, while the acquisition of Businessweek gave Bloomberg an editorial cachet it historically lacked.

Even with those successes, the media division has long been treated as a marketing amenity for subscribers to the terminal business. Despite its recent growth, the media division has struggled to gain a consumer base for its properties, which include television, print, radio, mobile, events and digital media.

The company was heavily criticized several months ago after revelations that some of its reporters had used the Bloomberg terminals to gain access to data about its users, prompting Eric T. Schneiderman, attorney general of New York, to begin looking into the practice, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The company’s assets — its success, its size and a hard-driving business culture — might make bringing about change difficult. But Mr. Smith said the fit was a natural one.

“If you look at the entrepreneurial roots of this company and its history of market disruption and innovation, I think it is the best positioned media company there is,” he said. The theory that large companies cannot innovate, he said, “has not been historically true at Bloomberg.” He added, “This is a company where you can take big risks with longer horizons.”

Before joining Atlantic Media, Mr. Smith opened the American edition of the British newsmagazine The Week in 2001. Before that, he was head of corporate strategy for The Economist in London, Hong Kong and New York. He also founded Breaking Media, a collection of Web sites that includes Above the Law, Dealbreaker and Fashionista.

Mr. Smith has no experience in the television business and said he would work closely with Mr. Lack in that area. He said he was interested in creating new products, including ones aimed at the global market, while bringing additional digital muscle to Bloomberg’s existing businesses.

Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, met Mr. Smith at one of Atlantic Media’s conferences and they became friends.

“How many people have really managed to be successful in digital media?” Mr. Schmidt said in a phone call. “Everyone has tried and few have been successful. Justin is one of them. He is moving very fast, but this is the next logical step. It’s a serious gain for Bloomberg.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 28, 2013

An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that the New York attorney general was investigating how reporters at Bloomberg had gained access to customer data. There is no formal investigation as this time.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/29/business/media/bloomberg-media-recruits-a-new-chief-from-the-atlantic.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Google’s to Face Congressional Antitrust Hearing

This week, those concerns — especially whether Google gives its own businesses preferred placement in search results, thwarting competition and harming consumers — will have their most public airing to date, when Google’s chairman, Eric E. Schmidt, testifies before a Senate antitrust panel. Some of Google’s competitors will also testify.

The Senate proceeding is just one of an array of inquiries into Google’s behavior by various federal and state authorities in this country, as well as by regulators in Europe and Asia. And though the company and the times are different, there are echoes of a hearing before the same Senate body, the Judiciary antitrust subcommittee, 13 years ago and the last sweeping antitrust investigation of an American technology powerhouse, Microsoft. Later, the federal government, joined by 20 states, filed suit against Microsoft.

“Google is a great American success story, but its size, position and power in the marketplace have raised concerns about its business practices, and raised the question of what responsibilities come with that power,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, who is a member of the antitrust subcommittee and who as the attorney general of Connecticut played a leading role among the states that sued Microsoft.

Today Google, like Microsoft then, is both admired and feared. Google has used the riches from its dominance in search and search advertising to expand into video distribution with YouTube, smartphone software with Android and Web browsers with Chrome. It has added online commerce offerings in local retail and restaurants, comparison shopping and travel, and folded them into its search engine, prompting complaints that Google is giving its businesses preferred placement in search results.

Google executives have consistently replied that its search results are the product of extensive user testing, and do not favor its own offerings. If users become dissatisfied with Google search results, the company argues, they will go elsewhere, to rival search engines like Microsoft’s Bing, sites that focus on specific products or services like Yelp, or social networks like Facebook.

“Using Google is a choice,” Amit Singhal, a senior engineering manager at Google, wrote on the company’s blog in June, after the Federal Trade Commission began its investigation. “And there are lots of other choices available to you for getting information.”

Competitors disagree. Yelp, the popular Web site for user reviews and recommendations for restaurants and other businesses, has noticed a difference in search rankings since Google established its own online businesses, said Jeremy Stoppelman, co-founder and chief executive of Yelp, which gets half its traffic from Google searches.

Two years ago, Google offered to buy Yelp, but the talks broke down. Last year, Google introduced Places, a Yelp-like service for listing businesses and collecting consumer reviews. A Google search for a restaurant often displays the Places entry — linked to a map, user reviews and other services — ahead of Yelp.

“Google develops its own in-house properties and it preferences those, so it’s leveraging its dominance in Web search,” he said.

Mr. Stoppelman, who is scheduled to testify at the Senate hearing on Wednesday, added, “When it comes to Web search, Google says you have great content, you rise to the top and that’s historically been true for us. But we do feel like that world is changing because Google has decided it’s not enough to own and dominate Web search.”

This month, Google acquired Zagat, the restaurant listing and review service, to strengthen its local commerce offering. Yelp is Zagat’s leading online rival.

Google, legal experts say, presents some challenges for the traditional doctrine of antitrust. The Microsoft case, too, required adapting antitrust principles to modern technology, and the complaint filed against the company was filled with technical computing terms like “cross-platform middleware” and “application programming interfaces.”

Yet Microsoft’s dominant product — the Windows personal computer operating system — was something consumers and companies paid for, as with any conventional good.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=59d121aec5b1142ad3b05fa22cf49aef