Mike Bloomberg is facing a near-revolt by frustrated employees at his financial news and data giant — his biggest challenge yet since returning as the boss of the company he founded almost 34 years ago.
After retaking the reins last year, the former New York mayor has shaken up his eponymous company, bringing in top editor John Micklethwait to oversee content across all divisions and unite the notoriously fractious newsroom.
But instead of putting an end to low-level infighting at Bloomberg LP, the new regime has exposed rifts within the newsroom.
Tensions spilled into full view Thursday when a scathing, 3,222-word email from a senior reporter in Bloomberg’s Washington bureau laid bare the crisis in the newsroom.
Dawn Kopecki described a “climate of fear” at the company’s news operations, where tone-deaf editors pit reporters against one another, stifle reporting on major issues and cause staffers to trip over unnecessary hurdles placed in their way by a bloated management.
“I’ve personally been at Bloomberg News for seven years now, three of which have been in DC, and I’ve never seen morale lower,” Kopecki wrote in the email to the two senior editors of the news operation.
“I’ve never seen the organization more bloated, never seen more redundancy and unnecessary overlap on beats, among editors and across platforms,” she wrote.
Tensions are reaching the boiling point as Micklethwait has tried to put his stamp on the organization he joined six months ago.
“I’ve never seen the organization more bloated, never seen more redundancy and unnecessary overlap on beats, among editors and across platforms.”
- Dawn Kopecki, in an email to editors
In April, he sent two top lieutenants — Josh Tyrangiel and Marty Schenker — to “straighten out the DC bureau,” where staffers were both fearful and frustrated at being overshadowed by beefed-up political coverage out of New York, according to one insider.
The insurrectionist email came just two days after Bloomberg News, at its New York headquarters, celebrated its 25th anniversary. At the fete, the former mayor, Micklethwait and Editor Emeritus Matt Winkler gave high-flying speeches and broke out the bubbly for afternoon toasts.
Little did they know as they raised the flutes that the festering unrest was about to burst into the open.
The morale was made worse when Bloomberg brass shunted aside some of its top Washington reporters, like Annie Linskey and Jeanne Cummings, as the former mayor pressed for an expansion of a New York-based politics team.
The reporters there resented that they had to answer to two of the editors who were seen as instrumental in pushing out their colleagues.
“My very capable friend’s out and now you want me to bare my soul to you? No way,” another Bloomberg employee said, summing up the DC bureau’s frustration.
Tyrangiel, a favorite of the former mayor, is catching much of the blame for the unrest.
“People are starting to make bets on how long he’s going to last,” a Bloomberg veteran told The Post, estimating that he’d last around two years. “You can’t be so universally hated among the rank and file and last long.”