Script that goes with Financial Data & Journalism - How Bloomberg Makes Data Work presentation

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Financial Data and Journalism - How Bloomberg Makes Data Work
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Hello everyone,
My name is Marianne Bouchart and I’m the Web Producer EMEA at
Bloomberg News. I’m also in charge of initiating data journalism projects
and visualisations around Europe, Middle East and Africa.
And I’m here today to talk about How Bloomberg News Makes Data
Work…
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We have the chance today to have in this audience a vast range of
people from various backgrounds, some of you may work in very
different industries but there’s one thing that brings us all together today
is that we believe in data and we believe not just in data itself but in all
the ways we can Make It Work.
And at Bloomberg, making data work is what we love doing.
You don’t need to be an investor or a stock broker to know that the
world’s markets have a massive impact on our everyday lives.
Whether it is the euro zone crisis or the Libor probe or even Facebook’s
historic Initial Public Offering, financial data and what media
organisations make out of them have become crucial.
The question we will raise during this session is how a financial news
organisation like Bloomberg handles data on a daily basis
and to give you a grasp of how financial data is used and how
Bloomberg News is making the most out of it by developing exciting
projects in data journalism and interactive visualizations on all its
multimedia platforms.
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What’s Bloomberg?
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So when you think of Bloomberg, the 1st thing that comes to mind is
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this, right? Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York. And that’s a very
fair 1st impression since he is the founder of Bloomberg L.P. he created
it in 1982, and it kept on evolving since then!
All quite reassuring so far..
What’s maybe a bit less reassuring is that the second thing that comes
to mind when thinking about Bloomberg is:
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a bunch of words: Data, Finance, Markets, Complicated, Niche
Maybe a bit scary...
Right, and that’s also quite a fair comment. But although it’s true that the
core product of Bloomberg is mainly targetted towards a niche audience
of investors and people working in the financial industry,
I’ll try and prove you during this session that we actually produce
content for a far broader audience, not just in finance, but in subjects
such as sports or politics. And in ways that you may not even expect..
and I hope I’ll achieve that today…
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People ask us all the time whether we are a technology company, a
media company, a data company, or are we an information company?
And in many ways, Bloomberg is actually all of the above.
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With headquarters in New York, the company employs more than
15,000 people in 192 locations worldwide.
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Bloomberg LP is the world’s most trusted source of market-moving
news, data and analytics targeted to help professionals make more
informed business and investment decisions.
And that’s the core of the Bloomberg Professional® service, which
provides real time financial information to more than 310,000
subscribers globally.
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The Bloomberg terminal used to be a cumbersome, physical piece of
hardware but today
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the means of delivery has now shifted.
Subscribers can access the mix of market information, business news
and financial analysis over a range of devices including
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iPad,
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BlackBerry, and Android smartphones.
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In numbers (because it’s always sexy to just pile up some stats and
figures during a data conference)
Bloomberg News is an award-winning news service, created and
distributed from 146 bureaus in 72 countries.
It has over 2,300 news and multimedia professionals that produce more
than 5,000 stories daily, which are distributed via the Bloomberg
Professional service, on Bloomberg.com and syndicated to 430
publications in 67 countries.
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Financial Data at Bloomberg
We get data from over 11200 different sources which go from brokers to
banks or research and analytics companies, but we also compile data of
our own.
Our clients include investment firms, corporations, commercial and
central banks, government agencies and high net-worth individuals.
As many companies decide to cut down on services and staff,
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Bloomberg is actually expending and announced in May this year that it
acquired software provider PolarLake and is launching a new Enterprise
Data Management (EDM) service to help companies acquire, share,
cleanse, manage, own and distribute data across their organisations.
EDM, for those who may not be familiar with the term, is the process by
which a firm manages reference data through its entire supply chain:
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3.All this mix of market information, business news and financial
analysis can be used by investors to help them make decisions, but
it’s also used by over 2,400 news professionals and journalists.
All journalism at Bloomberg is somehow data journalism.
It is in our culture. We are the only media organisation in the world with
such resources in terms of financial datasets. Each reporter is given
access to a Bloomberg terminal and therefore to thousands if not
millions of datasets on different subjects ranging from finance, business
to sports or politics…
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And reporters have thousands of ways to look through the data and give
depth, context to their stories.
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And one of the first functions that we use on the terminal,
Equity + GP <GO>
is the Price history Graph
that gives us the history of Apple US Equity over the years,
To give you a grasp of how much data we are dealing with here, we can
for example
use the News function and see why is the price so high on Sep 14…
and it’ll bring up all the news item from that day that can explain the data
from the graph
SPLC <GO>
Journalists can also use a function called SPLC, which is quite sexy and
stands for Supply Chain. It gives us all of the company’s Suppliers and
Customers. That’s where you realise that over 40% of Apple’s cost go to
Hon Hai Precisio, which is quite interesting.
BI <GO> Bloomberg Industries
Bloomberg Industries offers interactive and continuously updated
industry
research and data for business and financial professionals.
the team is made of over 100 analysts who cover over 100 industries
across Europe, North America and Asia.
They create and manage in-depth data and analysis for each
industry's drivers, metrics, competitors and earnings.
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The BI portal is also very useful for data journalism as it aggregates
information from more than 200 third-party providers, creating one of the
largest central repositories for analysing an industry's past and present
performance, as well as future forecasts.
COUN <GO>
ex: United Arab Emirates
An other function that reporters like to use at Bloomberg is called COUN
which brings up a sort of fact sheet on a specific country. You obviously
have the financial snapshot, but also (Economics tab) information on
GDP, Unemployment, (Profile) and some more general information...
and a map
Talking about maps…
BMAP <GO>
For people who fancy graphics,
we also have a tool called BMAP that compiles various data such as
Energy Assets, global wind farms, earthquakes, etc...
- Financial (data) journalism at Bloomberg News
All these functions, these millions of datasets we have compiled in this
terminal really gives an edge to Bloomberg News in terms of data
journalism.
It’s quite unique, in a way, and sometimes mind blowing. I mean you can
spend hours trying different combinations and cross referencing
companies results and analyse a countries’ debt.
And most of the time, for the past three decades, we’ve been doing
most of this on the terminal
for Bloomberg professional users
It’s only recently that we have been developping data journalism and
visualisations projects for the web, that appeal to a broader audience
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As many data journalists would tell you, a data journalism project starts
with an idea, whether it comes from a journalist, an editor, or a graphic
designer… Once someone comes up with an idea, different people from
different department (News, graphics team, analytics, rankings) get
together to try and make it happen.
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--> The Fed’s Secret Liquidity Lifelines: how we make ground-breaking
data journalism
One of the best examples so far is an interactive data visualisation
called the Fed’s Secret Liquidity Lifeline.
http://www.bloomberg.com/data-visualization/federal-reserve-
emergency-lending/#/overview/?
sort=nomPeakValue&group=none&view=peak&position=0&comparelist=
&search=
Between Aug. 2007 and April 2010, the U.S. federal reserve provided as
much as $1.2 trillion in pnublic money to companies and banks to help
them cope with the crisis.
We got hold of some 480 CSV files, 29,000 pages of documents and
Fed spreadsheets showing which companies or banks got the
emergency liquidity, how much and when. In total
The data revealed for example how the Fed helped finance Barclays’
purchase of Lehman Brothers’ assets by supplying both firms with
liquidity until the deal closed. That allowed Barclays to keep more than
$40 billion well into 2009.
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data made available here :) http://www.bloomberg.com/news/
2011-12-23/fed-s-once-secret-data-compiled-by-bloomberg-released-to-
public.html
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It took about 4 months to put this together, mainly because we had to
wait for Freedom Of Information requests to get through… And it was
built from scratch by David Yanofsky, using javascript.
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An other example, which shows how Bloomberg News tackles all sorts
of data, and not just financial one, is this data visualisation called
Measuring the U.S. Melting Pot.
http://go.bloomberg.com/multimedia/measuring-the-u-s-melting-pot/
It all started with the idea that many people in the U.S. describe
themselves not just as Americans but as Irish-Americans or German-
Americans. This graphic illustrates a Bloomberg compilation of data from
the Census Bureau’s 2010 American Community Survey.
You can explore the results of the survey and see the distribution of
other heritages across the country. Select an ancestry from the menu on
the left to see its concentration, county by county, then choose one from
the right to compare their relative prominence in a region.
That’s for the more longer term projects we have…
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On a day-to-day basis, we try and bring data to life in some simple but
effective ways…
Like with this story we did last week about Bill Clinton’s popularity
compared to Obama’s..
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-28/democrat-leaners-prefer-
clinton-to-obama-in-poll.html
It shows the results of a Bloomberg National Poll conducted between
Sept. 21-24 which asked 1007 people how they felt about these different
people. It shows that People LIke Bill Clinton better than Obama, but
also they prefer George W Bush to Mitt Romney, I let you make you’re
own opinion on that piece of information...
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As I said earlier, the terminal is one of the most comprehensive, up-to-
date databases in the world. When we use data from the terminal for the
web, the graphics are usually interactive, contain a lot of data and are
updated regularly.
One of the things that Bloomberg is famous for is also our Billionaires
Index.
http://go.bloomberg.com/multimedia/billionaires/
The Billionaires’ team and our graphics team work together on this
interactive index that gives a daily ranking of the world’s 100 richest
people.
As it says above, the graphic tracks the list’s top 20 billionaires over the
past 70 business days.
They have a combined wealth of over $500 billion.. that’s a lot…
Viewers can scroll over the squares below to see how their fortunes
have changed day-to-day.
And if you Click a square, you can read the Bloomberg stories
explaining the events that drove those changes.
To view the full list click here.
It all started with an idea from on of our interactive graphic designer
Seth Myers, who just happens to sit next to the Billionaires team in the
New York office. He heard them talking about the ranking and thought it
could make a good graphic.
And we are doing more and more of these collaborations between
departments...
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CCL
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In fact, we’ve put together a new data visualisation team who will be
creating interactive visual products for the web and make the most of
Bloomberg data.
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Bloomberg recently hired Lisa Stausfeld, who used to do information
visualisations for the New York Times, as the global head of data
visualisations.
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Many people will tell you that NOW is the time for data visualisation and
Bloomberg agrees with that and is committed to taking a position in the
world of data visualisation.
So look out for exciting projects we’ll be launching soon on
Bloomberg.com.
I hope this talk was useful to you,
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I’d like to thank Seth Myers for helping me out putting this information
together
and I’ll be in the Sponsor Pavillion (Table B)
between 2:30pm and 3:20pm
with 2 colleagues from Bloomberg’s Global Data team to answer all your
questions…
Joakim Nilsson and Agustina de Marotte
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Thank you!
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