October 18, 2024
New digital global section aims to increase engagement among subscribers when the markets are closed
NEW YORK (October 18, 2024) – Today Bloomberg Media launches Bloomberg Weekend Edition, a new, forward-looking digital experience intended to increase its cross-platform audience and subscriber engagement on the weekends.
The Weekend Edition’s content will focus on the intersection of finance, life and culture, and live in a dedicated section with a distinctive design on Bloomberg.com and the Bloomberg app, as well as on the Bloomberg Terminal. Tapping into Bloomberg’s newsroom of 2900 journalists and analysts in 118 countries, the new section emphasizes premier journalism from every region, and showcases essays, reviews, interviews, enterprise stories and multimedia features. The launch also includes Saturday and Sunday newsletters, as well as a narrated audio playlist.
“Our readers have told us that one of the most valuable things we can do for them on the weekend is to create more time and space for ideas, and to put what happens during the week into context,” said Katherine Bell, Executive Editor of Bloomberg Weekend Edition. “We’re going to bring a Bloomberg lens — global, analytical and forward-looking — to all kinds of questions, not just about finance and the economy but life and culture as well, to provoke our readers’ thinking and help them look further ahead.”
Bloomberg appointed Bell to oversee the weekend initiative in March 2024. Read her first editor’s letter here.
The Weekend Edition includes dedicated editorial staff in New York, London, Hong Kong, Washington D.C. and Sydney, with more additions to come on the global team.
Bloomberg Media’s subscriber base recently reached 740,000–- six years since launching the global news subscription business. As with the relaunch of Bloomberg Businessweek earlier in 2024, the new editorial, audience and product strategy for the weekend prioritizes subscriber growth and engagement–and is driven by an ongoing shift in how Bloomberg’s audience consumes content.
“The Weekend Edition is our first new major digital content product expansion since Bloomberg UK in 2022, and we expect it to be a significant driver of our ambitions to reach 2.5 million subscribers over the next few years and grow every area of our business,” added Julia Beizer, Chief Operating Officer, Bloomberg Media. “Our research shows an audience of decision makers that are hungry for weekend content. They want added context that will help them get ahead at work and in their personal financial lives. We’re also excited by the high density of C-suite and international audiences who want our coverage outside of traditional office and market hours.”
Bloomberg Weekend Edition features:
Website and mobile: The Weekend Edition will feature journalism from across Bloomberg’s global newsroom. It will have a dedicated section on Bloomberg.com and will be featured prominently on the home page across every region from Friday afternoon through Sunday. There will be a weekend version of the Big Take franchise; Weekend Essays by Bloomberg journalists, Opinion columnists and guest writers; reviews; data visualizations; and Dispatches from our bureaus around the world that bring unique insights to the news, along with bespoke photographs and illustrations. A new feature called Next Chapter spotlights an author of an influential book who updates the story or revises the thesis. On the weekend, readers will also find enterprise journalism from Bloomberg Businessweek, CityLab, Green, Wealth, Pursuits and many other areas of the newsroom.
The debut Weekend Edition includes: two Weekend Essays: one by Bloomberg Opinion columnist Shuli Ren on China’s lie-flat generation choosing leisure over luxury goods and one by paleontologist Steve Brusatte on fossilized dinosaurs emerging as a new asset class; a review by Gary Sernovitz of three recent books demonstrating that no one really knows why Elon Musk bought Twitter; a Dispatch from Paris on Telecom mogul Xavier Niel by Bloomberg’s Benoit Berthelot; a Dispatch from Tokyo on Japan’s train enthusiasts snapping up shares in the metro by Bloomberg’s Alice French and Momoka Kobayashi; and a Next Chapter by Alison Taylor, NYU Stern School of Business clinical professor and author of Higher Ground.
Audio playlist: A narrated audio version of the Weekend Edition is a companion playlist of stories designed for readers to listen throughout the weekend. Audio stories will be embedded in Weekend Edition articles and essays, and the whole playlist will be available in the Bloomberg App, which includes a major audio player refresh. It now includes a new design, a Picture in Picture view, which can follow users around the app so they can listen and browse at the same time and an updated landing page to listen as a playlist or to individual stories.
The entire playlist will be available on Apple Podcasts to Bloomberg subscribers. A limited selection of stories will also be available on Apple, Apple CarPlay, Android Auto and Spotify in Bloomberg’s “Listen to the Story” feed.
Newsletters: Two new newsletters will debut. The Saturday newsletter will serve as the most comprehensive entry point to each Weekend Edition, with the goal to encourage readers to click through to read, listen to and save stories. In November, the Sunday newsletter The Forecast will debut, which will not be a standard “week ahead” newsletter, but a look forward incorporating data, analysis and forecasting in multiple ways.
Video, TV, podcasts: The Weekend Edition will integrate Bloomberg Originals’ weekly documentaries, as well as Bloomberg Television’s newly relaunched Wall Street Week program, which airs on Fridays. The Big Take podcast will also be featured on the weekend.
Additional features of the Weekend Edition will roll out in the coming months.
Bloomberg Weekend Edition will be free to read for all users for the first two months after its launch before moving behind the paywall.
About Bloomberg Media
Bloomberg Media is the world’s leading multi-platform media company for business and finance, which draws on the editorial resources of more than 2,900 editorial professionals globally in 118 countries. Bloomberg Media is the consumer-facing media organization of Bloomberg L.P.