• Forbes, Thursday, April 2, 2009 9:15 AM

With the implosion on Wall Street, Bloomberg -- one of the world's top purveyors of financial data -- may face the biggest loss of customers in its history. Bloomberg's 2,300 news staff in 145 bureaus deliver 6 million stories a year. But its money-making business is financial data. Michael Bloomberg bet the house on growing his data terminal business among bond traders, hedge funds and outfits selling mortgage bonds and collateralized debt obligations.

The failure of Lehman Brothers alone pulled the plug on some 4,000 Bloomberg terminals, or about 1% of its entire base. Thousands more Bloombergs were disconnected in the fourth quarter of last year, says an analyst. To cope, Bloomberg broke with tradition and turned to outside sources, getting advice from McKinsey last year and hiring former NBC News chief Andy Lack to beef up Bloomberg Television.
,br> In the meantime, media competitors are itching for a fight. The Wall Street Journal is pushing all its reporters to provide tiny bits of breaking news of interest to stockbrokers and bond traders, similar to what Bloomberg offers. A bigger concern: newly merged Thomson Reuters, also a financial news and data company, whose balance sheet does not depend on its 500,000 terminals for overall sales nearly as much as Bloomberg.

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