5:53 p.m. | Updated In a world of shrinking newsrooms, real expansion is an increasingly rare story. But next Monday, Bloomberg West, Bloomberg Television’s show on technology, will double its daily programming to two hours. Along with the existing afternoon program, Bloomberg West will present another hour of tech news at 10 a.m. Pacific time.
“We see a real opportunity,†said Andrew Morse, head of Bloomberg Television in the United States.
“The television world is flooded with mediocre content â€" this extra hour is more of a place for big names in the Valley to come on and talk, and to dig deeper into what the news means,†he said, speaking of Silicon Valley.
Officials from Bloomberg would not provide specifics about the profitability of the show, which is mostly filmed at its news offices in San Francisco. For several months, Bloomberg has been the leadin source of online business videos, considered valuable content.
Bloomberg has also been seeking ways to make video news that works across a number of outlets, including television, tablets and smartphones. It will need more production people, and will concentrate on creating an editorial process that can efficiently produce content from the same interviews and stories for different outlets.
The show runs ads. It may also get revenue from Bloomberg’s very profitable trading terminals, which will carry the video content. Even so, the expanded coverage indicates a growing appetite for technology reporting, at least among Bloomberg’s generally educated and affluent audience, and a shift in business news reporting on television away from covering daily stock movements.
“It’s not enough to say that the new Samsung phone is out,†Mr. Morse said. “You have to say what it really means.†Coming on at 10 a.m., which is 1 p.m. in New York, “lets us get in on the agenda†of th! e day’s developments, he said.
Bloomberg aspires to have a lot of well-known technology executives on the air. It doesn’t hurt Bloomberg’s costs that on-air guests are working free.
The greater costs may come in terms of graphics, editing and reshooting material in the field to work on different devices. “You can run something in a long form on the Web, and then cut it into smaller segments for the phone,†said Wendy Brundige, bureau chief at Bloomberg West. “At South by Southwest, we shot things for Web, mobile and TV, and then some just for mobile.â€
The mobile work, she said, was “quick hit, freer†than standard business news content. Mobile viewers, who are increasingly important to every news outlet, also appear to like interstitial graphics that illustrate well a few facts tied to a story.
