Bloomberg is a financial news and data company founded in 1981 and primarily owned by billionaire and New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The vast majority of Bloomberg’s $8.3 billion in 2013 revenue — 82 percent, as of 2012 — are tied to its $20,000-per-year financial data terminals used by 318,000 subscribers as of 2014, but the company’s news division also has 2,400 editorial employees, more than The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal. The company laid off just under 40 employees, especially in its culture and sports departments, in late 2013. It also consolidated its employees more heavily in its New York offices in 2014, after a decade-long emphasis on political coverage based in Washington.

Bloomberg News provides business and financial news through a wire service and Bloomberg Markets magazine, and as of 2014, that division had 2,400 newsroom employees. In January 2010, Bloomberg began a partnership with the Washington Post News Service.

Bloomberg released a free iPad app modeled after its terminals. The company has considered charging as much as $1,000 per year to some of the content on its website.

After complaints by clients, Bloomberg News acknowledged in 2013 its journalists had long used its terminals to gather information on its users for reporting. The terminal use was part of a company-wide focus on data-gathering and internal “transparency” along with external secrecy.

Bloomberg’s social media guidelines, leaked in April 2011, encourage journalists to use Twitter but restrict the ways in which they can do so.

In 2013, Bloomberg Media Group hired as its CEO Justin B. Smith, who had engineered The Atlantic’s digital resurgence. The next year, Smith hired high-profile political journalists John Heilemann and Mark Halperin to head up a new politically focused site called Bloomberg Politics.

In January 2011, Bloomberg launched Bloomberg Government, or BGov, a website that covers business and politics for subscription fees of thousands of dollars a year. Four months later, it launched an online opinion section called Bloomberg View. In 2012, View had a staff of about 20 and 1.6 million monthly unique visitors. Bloomberg also re-launched its free politics page in 2012.

Bloomberg launched a venture capital fund called Bloomberg Beta in 2013 to invest in startups, including some that Bloomberg News covers.

In 2009 Bloomberg bought the weekly magazine BusinessWeek for $5 million from McGraw-Hill.