Financial news provider Bloomberg has announced it is cutting about 100 jobs in the US and reviewing its staffing levels in Europe and Japan in a restructuring of its TV operation.
The company is closing its foreign-language TV services – broadcasting in French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish – to focus on running one single English-language global business news channel.
The channel will draw on Bloomberg’s 1,600 reporters in bureaux around the world, who will provide analysis on breaking news stories from cameras at their desks.
The restructuring was announced to staff on Wednesday by Bloomberg’s multimedia chief executive Andy Lack, who joined the company last October after working at NBC and CBS News.
A Bloomberg spokeswoman confirmed that about 100 job cuts in the US faced the axe, and other cuts in Europe, the UK and Japan were possible but not yet finalised.
“We’re positioning the television network for growth but the broadcast operations need to restructure in order to grow and make programming changes,” she told Press Gazette.
“We will leverage our tremendous global television production assets and the 145 bureaux Bloomberg has around the world.
“That combination doesn’t exist at any other television network, and we are planning to take full advantage of it.”
She added that the company was hiring about 1,000 extra staff this year in other areas of the business, including the print news division, which supplies stories to more than 350 newspapers and magazines including the New York Times and Le Monde.
Bloomberg was founded by current New York mayor Michael Bloomberg in 1981.
This week’s announcement of job cuts is understood to be Bloomberg’s first major redundancy trawl in its 28-year history.
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