Bloomberg’s Andy Lack: ‘Today I don’t think people even talk about traditional television anymore’

By Alex Weprin 

Bloomberg Media Group CEO Andy Lack gets profiled by The Bostonian. The magazine digs into Lack’s vision for Bloomberg, as well as his past at NBC News. Lack is bullish on the future of journalism, particularly at his company, noting that it has more worldwide bureaus than all the TV news networks combined, and more reporters than the Wall Street Journal and New York Times combined:

“The essential values and principles that inform the craft of journalism are harder and harder to protect,” Lack says. “The world is more competitive. The digital age places new challenges on old media and the network news organizations that I grew up in. There used to be news organizations that made a few programs a day, and they were predictable. One was at 6:30 in the evening, one at 7 o’clock in the morning, and one famous one on CBS on Sunday evenings. Today we have not only a 24-hour news business, but a global 24-hour news business that is broken down into minutes, not days and hours. Today I don’t think people even talk about traditional television anymore. It’s about video circulating around the planet in many different media and formats. It goes online and it goes to your iPad or smartphone. At Bloomberg, it’s everywhere.”

The magazine speaks to some of Lack’s former colleagues, including ex-NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker and Neal Shapiro, the former head of NBC News and now CEO of WNET.org:

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Neal Shapiro, who replaced the quickly departed executive producer of Dateline, recalls Lack’s arrival. “NBC was completely adrift,” says Shapiro, now president of WNET. “Andy is a big personality. You get the sense that you can do anything if you aim high. He came in and gave everyone the sense that he was going to be bold, set high goals, and it was a new day and we were going to pick ourselves up. He immediately righted the ship.”

You can read the entire profile here.

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