Unspun

Unspun, colleagues and clients, as well as many other PR hacks in town and their clients, Embassy and NGO-types were on hand at the Grand Hyatt last monday to listen to a senior staffer from Bloomberg tell us how to “Get the Inside story on how the media works and how your company can benefit.”

The topic sounded interesting, and it wasn’t often that PR hacks got to eat free food put out by news organizations, so we all trooped there with great anticipation. We were then treated to a 2 hour excruciating talk centered around how great Bloomberg is because of their terminals, which provided the user with information about almost anything about anything of the business world.

The talk also underscored how organized Bloomberg was as a worldwide news gatherer, with teams spread across the globe and timezones and their expertise and knowledge keyed into the system. A user can find all about a business player, where they went to school, their track record etc. Sort of consulting Big Brother of the business world. You even get badly written food and restaurant reviews by frustrate creative writers – stock analysts – for every ton you may visit as a Road Warrior.

The audience was impressed half an hour into the presentation with all this information that can be at one’s disposal. Another hour into the talk and we were beginning to feel numb from the ceaseless information download on how great the Bloomberg terminal was. “We get the big picture,” one felt like telling the speaker. “Now let me and my people go.” Our thoughts turned to the excellent spread – the sandwiches were delicious – at the rception area.

When two hours were up and we were let out of class we all felt like college kids who emerged from a lectur, resenting the fact thatwhat could have been said in half an hour was stretched to take away to hours of our lives.

We were also wondering how people who could invent such a sophisticated system of information gathering could be so backward in the information retrival system. To operate a Bloomberg terminal you virtually have to go through boot camp to learn how to drive one of those suckers.

“I keep wondering what they have that I can’t get from Google,” said one disgruntled member of the audience, perhaps exaggerating a little. Another as more prescient and so cutting, “The Bloomberg terminal system is so cutting edge, if today was still 1984,” he said. True, search engines have moved far, far ahead since then, but Bloomberg seems so in love with their system that they forgot that time has ticked on. Obviously tagging is a foreign concept there.