News

Our team recently sat down with Timothy O’Brien to discuss his role and responsibilities as Executive Editor at Bloomberg View and Bloomberg Gadfly.

As the executive editor of Bloomberg Gadfly and Bloomberg View, what does a typical workweek involve?
We are always watching the news to make sure we can match columnists to topics that are of primary interest to our terminal and web readers. Our columnists make that easy, for the most part, because they’re bright, engaged and thoughtful people who are self-starters. We also spend a lot of time editing, packaging the work, promoting it on the terminal and on the web, and thinking ahead to the following week.

What is the primary goal of Bloomberg Gadfly, and Bloomberg View as a whole?
We’re the commentary arm of Bloomberg News and our goal is to offer our readers a lens on the news that helps them craft their own opinion about a subject – to help them think more smartly about the flood of information cascading across their screens. View tends to focus on macroeconomics, public policy, business and geopolitics. Gadfly is much more tightly focused on markets, corporate news and financial services. Both properties have writers and editors around the globe and we have a global mission.

How do you decide what content to publish?
We want the copy to sing, we want the themes to be vibrant, we want the work to be empirical and data-driven as often as possible, and we want the columns to be unique. If a column doesn’t check most of those boxes, we won’t publish it.

Prior to joining Bloomberg, you worked as editor and writer for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, HuffPost and Talk magazine. How have these experiences served you in your current role?
I learned classic, fact-driven financial and business journalism at the WSJ and NYT. It built upon my graduate training in journalism, history, and business. Marrying that academic training with reporting felt very organic, and my time at the WSJ and NYT was very important in terms of sharpening foundational, core reporting skills. At Talk I learned how to fine tune the craft of feature writing. At the HuffPost I really learned about digital journalism and what was happening to newsrooms and reporting in the Internet era — which involved non-traditional, innovative things that I couldn’t have learned at legacy newsrooms like the NYT and WSJ.

You authored TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald. What inspired you to write the biography of one of the world’s most litigious businessmen in the U.S.? What was the greatest challenge you faced in telling Trump’s story?
TrumpNation is one of three books I’ve written and I wrote it as a study of the American cultural, business and political landscape as told through the rise, fall, and rebirth of Trump and the Trump phenomenon. I had been a research assistant on the first major Trump biography, “Trump: The Deals and the Downfall,” and that was a much more densely written, investigative book. Since I had already worked intimately on a book like that, I wanted “TrumpNation” to be more socio-cultural – and to use Trump as a vehicle for explaining how different parts of American life and business functioned. The greatest challenge in writing the book was dealing with the unrelenting smokescreens that Trump spread around the truth and his own history. He was very fun to be with and we spent a lot of time together, but he required constant attention as a subject. That can be tiring. But it was a privilege to do, on the whole.

What is the most important lesson you learned in your career to date?
To listen (it still amazes me how many people in workplaces and in life are poor listeners); to work hard; to believe in and support your colleagues; to remain optimistic; to be ready for and be open to sometimes radical change; to really value unique intellectual capital and to seek it out in collaborators and recruits; to be humble and not take myself too seriously; to not forget that, even in its worst moments, I have one of the best jobs on the planet.

What are you looking forward to covering in 2017?
Well, I will be spending a lot of time writing as a columnist about President Trump. So that somehow feels like the Ghost of Christmas Past, come back to clank around in my attic and in my work-life. I’ll also continue to work closely with our Gadfly and View teams as one of their managers, and forge strong partnerships with our newsroom colleagues.

– Gabriela Tama