An outside review of Bloomberg L.P.’s practices found that the company’s journalists had access to private data about the company’s clients until earlier this year, long after the issue first came to the attention of Bloomberg’s top executives, according to a report on the review released Wednesday.
Bloomberg hired the law firm Hogan Lovells and the consulting firm Promontory Group to review its internal policies after a few banks complained that Bloomberg journalists could see private information about the way bank employees were using their Bloomberg data terminals.
The report released on Wednesday said that Bloomberg journalists were able to see information that was not available to other users of the Bloomberg terminals and that this information was occasionally used to inform Bloomberg’s articles. The investigators found that when the issue was first brought to the company’s attention in 2011, top executives decided to stop giving journalists access to the data but that no concrete steps were taken to shut down the access “due to misunderstandings about who was responsible for doing so.â€
The primary complaint voiced by banks earlier this year was that Bloomberg journalists could see when bank employees had last used their Bloomberg terminals. But the review also found that some journalists were given access to a supposedly anonymous chat room for commodities traders, and, in one case, to
information about an financial product that was about to be issued by banks.
The review found that Bloomberg had already blocked its journalists from access to all of this information.
The company’s chief executive, Daniel L. Doctoroff, said in a statement: “We know we needed to evolve, and we have learned from our mistakes. We are already implementing many of the recommendations we received.â€
The complaints that emerged in April threatened Bloomberg’s relationships with its terminal users, each of whom pays about $25,000 for an annual subscription to Bloomberg’s data service. Bloomberg’s journalism was initially viewed as another service for the terminal’s users, but it became a source of tension with the banks that use the terminals and who are often the subject of Bloomberg reports.
A related but separate review of the company’s journalistic practices recommended that Bloomberg no longer allow its journalists to accompany the company’s sales force in their efforts to sell Bloomberg terminals.
The review of the company’s journalism, completed by Clark Hoyt, an editor-at-large at Bloomberg News and the former public editor of The New York Times, found that Bloomberg had inconsistently applied its policy of not covering its parent company.
In one recent case, Mr. Hoyt’s report said that Bloomberg’s journalists gave “extensive coverage (far more than
competitive news services)†to a regulatory dispute about new trading facilities for derivatives at the same time that the Bloomberg parent company was trying to set up one of those trading facilities. The coverage, Mr. Hoyt wrote, did not provide “significant coverage of counter-arguments, or of the full scope of the company’s economic
interest in the dispute.â€
The company said it had immediately accepted almost all of Mr. Hoyt’s recommendations and was creating new permanent positions to oversee newsroom standards.
