Ed Greenspon tapped as Bloomberg’s Canada editor-at-large

As Michael Bloomberg himself steps away from the limelight, his empire is ramping up, at least in Canada. On Monday, Bloomberg News announced the hiring of Edward Greenspon as editor-at-large in Canada. Greenspon has previously held roles as managing editor of the Globe and Mail’s Report on Business and Ottawa bureau chief, before becoming the Globe’s editor-in-chief. Most recently he was a vice-president at Torstar Corp before ending his tenure in December.

Greenspon will be calling upon all of that considerable experience, for while Bloomberg is a global force in finance circles, especially among investors, it ranks a distant 8^th in Canada among online business sites, according to the latest comScore results, well behind Yahoo, MSN, Forbes, AOL, Dow Jones and the Globe's Report on Business. Indeed, for most in the business world, the name Bloomberg means terminals, the roughly $20,000-a-year computers many professional traders use to track the market. It’s on the backs of those terminals that founder Michael Bloomberg built the company, and made his billions; a platform that ultimately propelled him to the mayor’s chair in New York City, where he served for three terms before stepping down last month.

For Bloomberg, the company, the journalism serves largely as a companion piece to the market data, providing investors with some context and analysis to accompany their trades. Greenspon says the company has far greater ambitions; chief among them to be most influential news organization in the world, he told Yahoo Canada Finance in an email exchange.

In Canada, he plans to pursue that through a greater emphasis on explanatory and investigative journalism, the latter being the sort of thing that every serious media outfits aspires to do, providing they have the deep wells of patience and budget required, to say nothing of talent. It demands oodles of each while publications build their brand, and ultimately their readership, through big headline grabbing scoops. In the short term, such work does little to boost advertising, the predominant source of revenue for most media companies (unless they have a pay wall, which Bloomberg does not.)

What Bloomberg does have, here at least, is an online offering with a relatively thin veneer of Canadian content surrounded by articles linking back to the U.S. site. And once you’ve stepped beyond the CanCon, there are no evident paths back to the Canadian page.

(Speaking of transparency, this might be a good spot to note that Greenspon was once my boss, and played a major role in lifting me from the obscurity of regional business journalism to the, um, glamour that is Toronto's media industry. However, I should be equally clear that Bloomberg is a competitor of ours. So there’s a mixed bag of prejudices here.)

For his part, Greenspon says he intends to make Bloomberg more satisfying to Canadians, as well as harness interest outside our borders, explaining that there is a sweet spot where business, economics, policy and politics converge, and that’s where he plans to steer the brand's coverage.

It will take a significant effort to challenge the incumbents at the top, but any investment in Canadian business journalism is a welcome one. We look forward to the challenge.