A mole forwarded us the excerpt below. It all but bans personal Web posts and status updates of all sorts. First it outlaws discussion of any topic covered by Bloomberg News. The financial wire covers a huge swath of events — "companies, markets, industries, economies and governments," per its own marketing materials, plus "Arts and culture" and food — leaving little else to talk about.

And even if a Bloomberg journalist does find an allowed topic, he would be hard-pressed to link to or even describe any relevant content, since company policy says staff may not "direct Internet traffic to media competitors or discuss them" (emphasis added).

Not that these rules will necessarily matter; we expect managers will be about as adept at enforcing this policy as they are at stopping other technical blunders (which is to day, not very adept at all).

UPDATE: Bloomberg wrote in to defend its policy, saying links on personal websites might be construed as endorsements of unvetted stories (like, say, that erroneous death report some clumsy financial wire recently published). The company would rather all links be posted to something called "BLOOMBERG PROFESSIONAL(R)". That sounds pretty bloggy and fun!

Since Wired links to Bloomberg News as the source of its information, one possibility is that Bloomberg published a story about the new channel before they were supposed to. That kind of thing seems to happen a lot at Bloomberg these days. Seeing the article, YouTube PR panicked and pushed out a blog post that triggered a Twitter message. Then Bloomberg pulled its story and YouTube PR followed suit. Update: In an updated post, Wired now calls the link to Bloomberg their own "big goof."

Another possibility: Bank of America, named as a channel partner, pulled its support from the project because it either doesn't have cash to throw at experimental sponsorships or would prefer to keep a low brand profile while weathering the current financial crises.

Google TV Ads Platform Adds Bloomberg TV to U.S. Inventory

Google to Bring New Advertising Clients to the BLOOMBERG TELEVISION® Network

NEW YORK & MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA (September 25th, 2008) – Continuing efforts to make television advertising more relevant, accountable and measurable, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) announced today that the BLOOMBERG TELEVISION® network will make national cable advertising time in the U.S. available through the Google TV Ads™ platform. By offering self-service buying opportunities through Google TV Ads, the BLOOMBERG TELEVISION network will expand its reach to a wider range of advertisers, including those that are new to the medium.

With the addition of BLOOMBERG TELEVISION inventory, advertisers using the Google TV Ads platform can not only reach the high-net-worth BLOOMBERG TELEVISION U.S. audience but can also gain access to viewership data at an unprecedented scale. Google’s TV Ads platform can report second-by-second data from millions of anonymized set-top-boxes, allowing advertisers to measure viewership of their ads more precisely than ever before. With this data, advertisers can better understand what consumers are responding to and make real-time adjustments to their campaigns to maximize the return on their TV ad investments. Google's digital platform also makes it easier for advertisers to find relevant programming through its keyword search functionality.

“We’re pleased to be partnering with BLOOMBERG TELEVISION to continue to make TV advertising more relevant and measurable,” said Mike Steib, director of Google TV Ads. “We will now be able to give advertisers, many of whom have never tried TV advertising before, access to the desirable BLOOMBERG TELEVISION demographic.”

"The BLOOMBERG TELEVISION audience is the wealthiest and most powerful in cable television,” said Trevor Fellows, head of advertising sales at Bloomberg. “As high net worth viewers are extremely difficult to quantify using traditional methods, we believe that involvement with Google TV Ads from an early stage will help us and our advertisers learn more about our audience.”

Google TV Ads offers greater accountability in advertising. With Google’s auction-based pricing system, advertisers only pay for impressions delivered to their ads, and they can receive integrated digital reporting within 24 hours. The BLOOMBERG TELEVISION network joins Google TV Ads’ growing list of inventory, which also includes NBC Universal and DISH Network.

"We're very happy with the progress of Google TV Ads," said Michael Kelly, executive vice president for DISH Network, Google TV Ads' current inventory partner. "Google TV Ads has brought more accurate, accessible, and up-to-date viewer measurement to the industry, enhancing value to our advertisers."

The BLOOMBERG TELEVISION service is the only 24/7 business and financial news television network. BLOOMBERG TELEVISION content is created exclusively by the global BLOOMBERG NEWS® service, with 143 bureaus in 69 countries. BLOOMBERG TELEVISION programming offers viewers a snapshot of the markets with fast, accurate reporting of world indexes, currencies, U.S. Treasuries, commodities futures, agricultural futures, and exchange traded funds, as well as special features, insight and analysis, and proprietary coverage of leading stocks and industry sectors. The worldwide service broadcasts in seven languages.

The New York Times reports that between shots of hard liquor at the office yesterday, one Lehman employee shouted: “Are they going to take my BlackBerry? Come on, come get it.” Oh, they will. Research in Motion's BlackBerry sales were already disappointing in August. With Lehman expected to lay off most of its 29,000 Lehman employees, Merill Lynch and Bank of America expected to cut some 20,000, and plenty of Bear Stearns bankers still unemployed, September could be worse. Their ex-employers may not repossess the hardware, but RIM makes its steadiest profits from the recurring monthly service fees paid by businesses to push corporate email to the devices.

New York's most successful tech company is financial information provider Bloomberg, which somehow manages to charge companies thousands of dollars a year per subscription for access to the terminals that every Wall Street trader has on his or her desk. But with Lehman cutting 29,000 and Bank of America cutting another 20,000, Bloomberg's already low-volume business just got smaller at a time when it is facing redoubled competition from Thomson Reuters.

The benefit of a merger between the likes of Bank of America and Merrill Lynch is that the new company can combine their infrastructures and cut redundant costs. Unfortunately for IP telephony provider Cisco, it's one of those redundant costs. After flirting with Avaya for a couple of years, Merrill Lynch returned as a Cisco client in 2005. Last May, Cisco announced it would deploy 100,000 phones to Bank of America. When clients combine, vendors lose.

On February 27, 2007, Salesforce.com announced its largest deal ever, signing Merrill Lynch as a client and adding 25,000 new subscribers. How will Salesforce.com fare now Merrill and those 25,000 accounts are moving to Bank of America? At worst, Bank of America will insist Merill's brokers and their assistants use the Soffront CRM software the bank signed up for in March. At best, Salesforce.com will lose several thousand accounts as the new company seeks to reduce reduncancies and lays off as many as 20,000.

Investment bank Marlin and Associates helped Rupert Murdoch and News Corp's subsidiary Fox Interactive find MySpace, but otherwise it's been Lehman Brothers advisers bringing their favorite startup clients to the Murdoch empire. IGN Entertainment hired Lehman in the summer of 2005 and sold to Fox Interactive in the fall. Then in April 2007, photo-sharing site Photobucket hired the investment bank only to sell to Fox in May of the same year. Without Lehman Brothers, how will News Corp. grow on the Web?

On Monday, travelers Googling for information on airline delays amid bad East Coast weather may have flocked to an old Chicago Tribune article about United Airlines' 2002 bankruptcy, hosted on the website of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Noticing all the incoming traffic, robots running the Sun-Sentinel site added the article to a list of most popular stories.

The aggressive journo-cyclons at Google News were watching that list, and inferred that the United Airlines article must be brand new if it was posted there. It didn't help that the human "editors" of the Sun-Sentinel website hadn't bothered to put a date stamp on the article to indicate how old it was.

Some different robots at Google then spammed this story out to anyone with a "UAL" news alert.

An unwitting human at Income Securities Advisors Inc. then stumbled upon the old article but thought it was new, because the timestamp attached to it in a Google News search indicated as much. The human posted a link to the article on an Income Securities section of Bloomberg.

Noticing the link, a human at Bloomberg News then published an incorrect headline to Bloomberg's own wire, the newswire confirmed today. (Yesterday it wasn't clear if this was the case — the Times correctly implied it was, the Wall Street Journal incorrectly said Bloomberg had merely hosted the Income Security report.)

The robots then seized back control of events! Automatic stock-trading systems helped push down the price of UAL amid panicked selling triggered by the Bloomberg report. The stock plummeted to $3 from $12.50 before some good robots finally halted trading.

The bottom line: Bloomberg news chief Matthew Winkler should be ashamed not only of the recent screwups by his journalists, but also because he was so wrong in his famous tirade line, "the enemy... is not the computer... it's the human!"

The enemy very much appears to be The Computer, Matt!

[WSJ, Bloomberg]

It really boiled down to a bunch of people believing something they read on the Internet. In other words, Google and Bloomberg are seen as trusted sources. Google sells itself as more trustworthy because there are no editorial decisions made by humans on the news site — when of course, like Bloomberg's syndication practices, it's just that much cheaper to maintain. What neither of them have solved is the entire problem with the mechanization of information distribution: Garbage in, garbage out.

The obituary contains nothing to indicate Bloomberg has new information on Jobs's health, at least in our quick skim.

But the reporting notes do reveal that near the top of Bloomberg's list of people to call in event of his death is Jobs's ex girlfriend Heidi Roizen (quite the Valley switchboard, apparently) and California attorney general and (like Jobs) cranky aging hippie Jerry Brown. Also, Bloomberg doesn't seem to have many people's cell phone numbers.

Retraction:

Story Referencing Apple Was Sent in Error by Bloomberg News

Aug. 27 (Bloomberg) — An incomplete story referencing Apple

Inc. was inadvertently published by Bloomberg News at 4:27 p.m.

New York time today. The item was never meant for publication and

has been retracted.

—Editor: Joe Winski, Cesca Antonelli

Steve Jobs obituary:

JOB, STEVE. APPLE FOUNDER, TECH VISIONARY. UPDATED AUGUST 2008



HOLD FOR RELEASE - DO NOT USE - HOLD FOR RELEASE - DO NOT USE



Steve Jobs's birthday: Feb. 24, 1955

BIO UPDATED AS OF 2008, by Connie Guglielmo



APPLE PR CONTACTS: Katie Cotton — -redacted- and Steve Dowling: -redacted- or -redacted-

People to contact for comment:

- Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak: -redacted-

- Jon Rubinstein, former head of Apple's iPod division. He's now

chairman at Palm. Contact Lynn Fox in PR.

- Heidi Roizen: venture capitalist who once dated Jobs: -redacted- or -redacted-. Heidi knows a lot of Silicon



Valley insiders and may put us in touch with others, including

A.C. Mike Markkula, the first VC to back Apple.

- Larry Ellison of Oracle (one of his best friends); contact

Deborah Hellinger in Oracle PR. -redacted-, -redacted-



- Jerry Brown (personal friend) and California AG. Try GARETH

LACY at -redacted- IN OAKLAND; -redacted- CELL, -redacted- or press office: -redacted-



- Al Gore: member of Apple's board of directors

- Bill Gates: Microsoft was among the first developers of Mac

software

- Bob Iger at Disney: who bought Pixar from Jobs

- Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google and member of Apple's board. Send

note to -redacted- or try David Krane: -redacted- or -redacted-



- Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel Corp. (Apple began using Intel

chips in its Macs in 2006). Contact Tom Beermann: -redacted- or

Bill Calder on -redacted-. Both in Intel PR

- Scott McNealy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. Contact Shawn

Dainas in PR: -redacted-

- John Lassiter and Ed Catmull: Pixar-nee-Disney executives. Try

Zenia Mucha, -redacted- or Jonathan Friedland, -redacted-, in

corporate PR at Disney.

- Guy Kawasaki, one of the first Apple evangelists. -redacted- or -redacted-



- Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, who bought an early circuit

board for the game Breakout from Jobs and Wozniak. (pr is being

handled by his daughter, Alisa Bushnell. her cell is: -redacted-; work is -redacted- work/message;-redacted-)

To contact the reporter on this story:

Connie Guglielmo in San Francisco at-redacted- or -redacted-



To contact the editor responsible for this story:

Cesca Antonelli at -redacted- or -redacted-



AAPL US <Equity> CN

MSFT US <Equity> CN

DIS US <Equity> CN



NI TEC

NI CPR

NI COS

NI US

NI CA

NI LEI

NI OBIT

NI WNEWS

NI RET

NI MUSIC

NI CONS

NI ENT

Not all attempts to make wordcraft measurable are sensible. Under Sam Zell, Tribune newspapers are counting words, coming up with the laughable result that Hartford Courant reporters are worth more than their counterparts at the Los Angeles Times. The last thing publishers should be doing is setting up systems that reward the mindless gushing of words. (Gawker Media, the publisher of Valleywag, pays writers a set monthly fee, with a bonus that varies with the number of pageviews their items generate.)

The Bloomberg way — "first word, future word, factual word, fastest word, final word" — emphasizes speed and accuracy in evaluating its reporters. (Some aspects of the news operation's culture may be shifting under new editorial leader Norm Pearlstine, but it's hard to see those basics changing.) News has value when it is actually new, and helps Bloomberg's customers make money.

And for all that, Bloomberg News is a relatively small part of Bloomberg's value proposition. Far more important are the prices that Bloomberg's terminals flash across traders' screens. News stories, in this scenario, are just one more commodity.

Not all journalism lends itself to such coldhearted analysis. Political reportage is a vital public service and, in the absence of local newspapers, it is hard to imagine how it will get funded. (Ironic that Michael Bloomberg, the company's founder, is now New York's mayor.) But it's hard to understand why business reporters, of all people, complain when their chosen career is treated like, well, a business. Merrill Lynch's pending sale of its stake in Bloomberg points to a future when the news is worth more, and those who write it, only as much as their last story. Depressing? Only to journalism careerists.