This is the very first paragraph, okay:

Facing a banking collapse that was unlike anything it had seen since the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve created $2 trillion of assets and debts during the past year to rescue the nation's financial institutions. But it did not make clear to taxpayers just where all of this money went.

And that's when journalism died.

A Bloomberg employee tells us:

Bloomberg recently introduced "metrics,'' an arbitrary, computerized numbers game for judging employees' performance. One yardstick is the number of newspaper pickups a reporter has. When one Bloomberg journalist recently pointed out his good showing in the IHT, a senior editor replied with a North Korean-style straight face, "the Herald Tribune doesn't count for pickups.''

And why wouldn't the IHT be counted? Our tipster says it's because Winkler "declared it off-limits" because he's still angry about the paper signing a contract with rival Reuters two years ago. Is that The Bloomberg Way? We've emailed Bloomberg for comment and we'll update if we hear from them.

UPDATE: A Bloomberg spokesperson's comment: "It's not true. Newspaper pickup is not a metric."

A Bloomberg press release called Andy Lack a "news legend" upon his arrival in October to head TV, radio and Web operations at the financial news wire. Pearlstine promptly fêted the former Sony Music CEO at a high-profile meal at Le Cirque

Perhaps all the attention went to his head. Lack, one tipster writes, regressed to what we're told is a 10+ year old habit from his NBC News days: complaining about tiny limousines.

That whine would be in terribly bad taste for a man who just laid off 100 of his own people — the first mass firing in company history.

The story, per a tipster:

Upon arriving at Tokyo this weekend, Bloomberg TV honcho Andy Lack threw a shitfit worthy in comparison to his fellow co-news potentate Matt Winkler.

The limousine Lack had his Manhattan-based minions order from the aptly namedImperial Hotel to pick him up at the airport was too small for his liking. Theformer Sony music hatchet man, who fired hundreds of Bloomberg TV staffers thisyear, including a whole division and then some in Tokyo, screamed at the driverwho didn't understand his engrish. Ever cost conscious and environmentallyaware, the Ugry Amelican poo-bah then demanded that another larger, lessfuel-efficient tank be dispatched to the airport to pick him up.

Alas, that big boat didn't satisfy the Get Shorty lookalike. So after thehour-long plus ride into the city, "Limo" Lack stormed into the hoteland demanded that the very aporogetic general manager come out to the foyerentrance with a measuring tape to compare vehicle sizes.

The measuring tape trick apparently dates to Lack's NBC days. Back then, though, he had his own aide he'd send fetch the device, the tipster recalled. The bad economy, it would seem, affects everyone.

UPDATE: A Bloomberg spokesperson calls the story "completely false," adding:

The alleged "incident" you refer to never happened. The only true statement in your report is that Andy Lack visited Tokyo for a few days this week. He arrived from the airport in a standard hotel car and had a very pleasant ride to the hotel. Andy walked to the office every day from the hotel, which is a few blocks away from the Tokyo office. No arguments, disagreements or fuss at all. What you describe may have happened to someone else, but it wasn't a Bloomberg employee or manager.

There's a whole coterie of career Bloomberg editors — known colloquially as pod people — who have got to be shitting their pants. Pearlstine is in charge if this is true (and official confirmation is still coming).

If anyone can shed some light on this pants-shitting — or just the rule changes — we'd be thrilled! tips@gawker.com

UPDATE: Bloomberg PR tells us the following:

• There is no change in the guideline warning of the perils of "but, despite and however."
• There have been "many" stories over 850 words for years.
• "'The Bloomberg Way' is a style guide for news reporters. It is still our style guide.
• "Greet the Week" were "special enterprise stories that were generally done on Mondays. Bloomberg News is now doing more features and enterprise stories every day."

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]

Bloomberg spokesman Judith Czelusniak, in an e-mail, said, “There was an executive editors’ meeting yesterday, and Matt did a video for news staff based on it. He’s following up on some new workflow procedures that he said he’d be implementing in the news department back in July…when the Company did its reorganization. No new hires or promotions, but more global coverage hubs and more responsibility for exec editors. Some editors being moved around the globe.”

The executive editors, including Amanda Bennett, Al Hunt and John McCorry, will now apparently decide daily coverage.

No more Winkler determining coverage? Sounds good, right? But:

“If we are going to get to the next level for the sake of everyone, I can’t continue in the same role,” Winkler said on the video conference, according to a Bloomberg reporter. “As the senior managers assume more responsibility, I will spend more time with the reporters and editors I rarely see, on strategic planning in the bureaus, on recruitment, and on determining the most important business and economic and political issues worth reporting."

Uh oh. One reporter sums up: "Fairly unclear."

[Talking Biz News; more at Reuters Mediafile]

Winkler wrote a three-page letter to the Deadline Club alleging that the club didn't give the story an award because they were cowed by the insurance industry. What other reason could there possibly be? Keep in mind: the story ran. The industry gave a list of objections, which were investigated by the Deadline Club in conjunction with Bloomberg. The story was a finalist, but not a winner. From Winkler's complaining letter:

During the conference call, Deadline Club officials said they accepted that Bloomberg had not made factual errors. However, that was not the end of the conversation. Two Club officials said they would have edited parts of “Insurance Hoax” differently. The conference call was not supposed to have been a referendum on Bloomberg’s editing.

Over the years, this year included, Bloomberg News has been honored to receive awards from the Deadline Club, which we have had every reason to view as an organization run by professionals. We don’t know why “Insurance Hoax” failed to win any of the four awards for which it was a finalist. We do know the process by which the stories were judged was irregular, opaque and unethical. We especially question the Club’s preemptive guilty verdict rendered in an unsigned memo that parroted the insurance industry’s positions.

Or maybe it just lost.

[CJR]

{Fon Lex fen} …I’d love to smack the heroine needle out of your arm and shove it up your purple suited arsse you loud mouth tasteless family size bag o’ douche…no wonder you’re always screaming at everyone, you probably need a fix you amy winehouse hermaphradite bbc walking fashion fopa….quiet the fuk down, join narcotics anonymous, and stop wearing suits that match the neon colored rooms of the building….peter g. Runs the show, everyone knows that, fukin court jesture…and soomee, rock on…done.
[Jerel Smith Quits Bloomberg via Joel X]

So all I’m saying is for people who understand what we’re trying to do here—and again my son who you just met who walked out the door when you showed up and who’s a student at Columbia University—okay?—and got eight fives on eight APs—okay?—he took the Bloomberg Way in high school, and if you ask him he’ll tell you the Bloomberg Way was the single best thing that he used to teach him how to write, and when he got to Columbia University, he said he could write an essay a lot better than other people, and “I gotta tell you, dad, it’s because of what the Bloomberg Way did for me,” and his older brother went to Swarthmore, who is even more distinguished as an academic, did the same thing, so I did try this out on a bunch of kids, okay? And they didn’t find it confining, and they didn’t find it you know restricting.
[CJR: The Winkler Way—Okay?]

Mr. Doctoroff, denying that any deal was in the works, told the gathering, “We do have greater aspirations, and in what form those aspirations will be fulfilled, we’re going to all have to sit and figure that out,” according to another employee who also agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity because the meeting was meant to be confidential.

Yet Mr. Winkler and Mr. Pearlstine seemed to distance themselves from the long-held company mantra that they are “builders not buyers” — meaning the company would seek growth organically rather than through acquisitions. Mr. Pearlstine noted Mr. Doctoroff’s résumé — he worked at Lehman Brothers and Oak Hill Capital, a private equity firm — and suggested that his expertise in deal making might be put to use.

Michael Bloomberg and Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. have both thrown cold water on speculation that Bloomberg might acquire the New York Times Company, and it's hard to make a strong business case that Bloomberg LP needs exposure to the struggling print news sector (reports of Michael Bloomberg's interest in the Times couched the potential deal as something of a charitable civic gesture).

So what else might Bloomberg LP be interested in buying? Its news operations may soon be unshackled from its slowing bread-and-butter terminal business, according to the Times, which means Bloomberg's various other news outlets could soon be free to break news without worrying whether it has first reached terminal subscribers. Any media acquisitions would likely be designed to accelerate advertising growth (already under way) and offset any further slowdown in the terminal business. With an eye toward those concerns, might Bloomberg might be interested in...

• Dow Jones Newswires? - Rupert Murdoch bought Dow Jones for the Wall Street Journal and its hard to imagine he'd have a tough time parting with the newswire operation, which faces big challenges in the wake of the Reuters-Thompson merger. On the other hand, it's hard to see how such a deal would appeal to Bloomberg.
• TheStreet.com? - The financial news site started by Jim Cramer could be bought for a tiny fraction of Michael Bloomberg's fortune and would bring two things that have been missing, by design, from Bloomberg News: A website that breaks news and quickly and brings attention to it efficiently, and opinionated analysis. As a bonus, the site is far ahead of Bloomberg.com in bringing video to the Web.
• CNET? - Another affordable acquisition that would bring Web smarts and video savvy, but CNET may be too consumer- and tech-focused for Bloomberg.
• GigaOM or TechCrunch? - Neither would add much ad revenue, and both are heavily tied to their founding bloggers. But either could at as a sort of flagship for Bloomberg's growth on the Web

Your own brainstorms are welcome, either in the comments or to tips@gawker.com.

[Times]

Norman Pearlstine, a veteran of Time magazine, is to take on the role of chief content officer at Bloomberg News. He will "partner" with the wire's editor-in-chief "to seek growth opportunities" and "make the most of the existing operations"—a nauseatingly mealy-mouthed a job description even by the despicable standards of modern corporation communications. Both Winkler and Pearlstine will report to Dan Doctoroff, the New York city official whom Bloomberg recently installed to run the business which made the mayor's multi-billion fortune. So, how to read the reorganization?

Winkler is the most widely hated media executive I have ever come across. We ran a tape of the bad-tempered newsroom boss yelling at subordinates who dared question a firing decision, which prompted more than 100 stories of the culture of terror and mind-numbing conformity that he had instilled at the Bloomberg wire service. (You must listen to the clip: "The enemy is the human!") His employees will be hoping that Pearlstine's arrival is part of a plan to reduce Winkler's absolute power, and gradually ease him out of the position he has held for nearly two decades. Winkler is a long-standing sycophant of Bloomberg, who still retains ultimate control of the company he founded, so Doctoroff probably can't remove the newsroom chief in one clean cut.

One sign that it's a humiliation for Winkler: the press release went overboard in touting Winkler's role as founder of Bloomberg News, their reunion of two former colleagues and their "mutual regard." The only departure from implausible corporate boilerplate was Winkler's video message to staff, which accompanied the text of the release. In a widely ridiculed effort to show how with it he is, Winkler has been putting his messages to music. The latest went out with a background of that Beatles song, You say you want a revolution. An unwise question; Winkler would not like the answer. (Please, some brave soul over at Bloomberg HQ, send us the clip!)

According to the source, the proponents of the merger are appealing to the mayor's sense of "civic-mindedness," arguing that he is best suited to take the publishing company private to "help protect the brand" in the wake of relentless shareholder assaults. "It is clearly a brand that Bloomberg could help preserve and that he cares about immensely … and could pay a competitive price" for, says this person.

It's not like Bloomberg would run the Times like some sort of non-profit. If that were the case, Rupert Murdoch probably wouldn't have even made the pretense, in the same Newsweek story, of claiming to be intimidated by Bloomberg: "I wouldn't look forward to going up against him," said the News Corp. chief and Wall Street Journal owner.

[Newsweek via PaidContent]

No one is questioning Bloomberg's entrepreneurial chutzpah: he built the financial information service which bears his name into New York's most valuable private company. But Bloomberg's judgment in people is about as questionable as that of his predecessor, Rudy Giuliani. One cannot claim that any of Bloomberg's associates have mob ties that match Giuliani's aide, Bernie Kerik. But Bloomberg has left Lex Fenwick and Matthew Winkler, as nominal CEO and editor-in-chief, respectively, despite their evident failings as managers.

You've heard the audio tape of the irascible Winkler yelling at dissenting reporters; here's a former employee who can't believe that Bloomberg's corporate record has gone so long without proper examination.

Something that strikes me as odd in all of the will-he-won’t-he stuff about a Mike stab at the White House is that no one seems to be looking at the company he founded, with its peculiar management culture, surely one of the most spiteful and lowgrade, given the generally high standard of the workforce, that there is. Would his running of the United States be as nasty, with all the effing and blinding and ass-pinching that he brought to corporate culture ?

There is not only the vile Winkler, truly an unstable and unsavoury piece of work, but `humans’ like Lex Fenwick, the purple-suited ****-sniffing bald coot all the way from Britain, who strangely masquerades as the CEO when even the cleaners know the real boss is Grauer. Educated (more like interned) at Downside School, the disgusting specimen affects a Cockney accent to cosy up to the underdog. One person who hates our Lex with a vengeance is Emma Gilbey (of the Gilbey’s Gin family), the wife of the NYT executive editor Bill Keller. Her brother was at school with Lex …

A singularity is how Bloomberg News encourages the mediocre. Anyone with any spirit, any inclination to say `yes, but’ rather than snap straight into action no matter how ludicrous the order, and, my God, the orders can be so stupid, is crushed and sidelined. Thus, the horrid Winkler prevails with his no buts, no despites, no announceds and the rest.

From a Bloomberg News employee overseas on January 9, 2005: We are told that, on Dec. 27, John McCorry, who was chairing one of the news conference calls, interrupted various proposals on covering the tsunami to ask: "Why do we care?" This latest example of his finesse was greeted by silence. We knew McCorry was crass, but isn't this going a little far even for him? He's adding bad taste, maybe worse, to an already incompetent and unprofessional track record. It's truly astonishing that a company with employees of different creeds and origins living and working all over the world can keep such trash in positions of responsibility.