Bloomberg Anchor Margaret Brennan sat down with TVNewser recently to discuss her new job and the transition from CNBC where she’d been working for seven years. Her first day on air was July 13th and now that she’s settled in a bit (and can spend less of her day commuting to New Jersey), we caught up with her.
With such a long tenure at CNBC, we asked Brennan about the decision-making process that led to her move to Bloomberg TV. “It was a long process, it was something I thought a lot about,” she said. “But it was the right decision for me at the right time. I really wanted to continue to grow. And my interest area and really my passion is more international news and having the platform and the opportunity to tell more of the global business stories with a global news organization is really what hooked me in. And I’m loving it.”
“It’s not just corporate America in the snapshot of earnings,” she added of the editorial vision at her new home. “It’s also really connecting more of the narratives there.”
Part of Brennan’s transition from CNBC to Bloomberg involved changing roles from correspondent to anchor, something we were curious to know how she’s handled. “I don’t view being an anchor as just holding the set down. It’s also bringing news into the mix,” she told us. “It’s great for me in that I can get a lot of my ideas in during a program, what we’re seeing and what’s moving the markets. And not just focusing so narrowly.”
With an academic background in foreign affairs and Middle East studies, she told us that CNN’s Christiane Amanpour has been one of her chief inspirations, career-wise, thanks to international reporting she’s done. Early in her career, Brennan worked with business news legend Louis Rukeyser, another mentor. She described his skill at relating information to viewers: “He was great in connecting with people and not just getting caught up in the jargon of wall street that you so often can, particularly when you’re reporting during market hours. He was great at translating things. That was a huge lesson I learned from him.”
TVNewser had heard that Brennan was once a — wait for it — Irish step dancing champion. We asked her if it was true, and she told us, “Yes. (laughing) It is. I Irish step-danced from the time i was five until the time I was 18. It sounds really hokey i know, but it was really important to me because I was out there competing from the time I was five years old.” You can see her Irish step dance anchor Bloomberg News every weekday from 10am-12pmET.