April 27, 2009

Inside Market Data

Research Compares Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters News

A comparative study of news services from Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters shows that Bloomberg generally produces a higher volume of news items, while Thomson Reuters generally focuses more on analysis, according to research released this week by Burton-Taylor International Consulting LLC.

Burton-Taylor gathered data for both newswires on multiple dates each month between December and March. On average, Bloomberg carried just under 32,000 news items per day, compared to just under 14,000 per day by Thomson Reuters, including news from third-party vendors that are part of each service, but not including news items "scraped" from the Internet by Bloomberg and items such as corrections or service alerts.

According to Douglas B Taylor, managing partner at Burton-Taylor, Bloomberg delivers more third-party content than its rival, including items from other news sources, company announcements from sources like PR Newswires, and research announcements from sources such as Moody's for ratings actions.  Without the third-party news sources, Bloomberg distributes roughly 11,000 items per day, while Thomson Reuters carries around 7,600 items.

In the 11,000 items per day that Bloomberg averaged, more than 6,200 tended to be alerts, or single-line headlines, rather than full stories, whereas about 3,300 of Thomson Reuters' 7,600 daily items were alerts. "This may show a difference in philosophy," Taylor says.  "Although both services offer excellent speed, a higher percentage of the Bloomberg file is devoted to alerts than that of Thomson Reuters, indicating that Bloomberg may place a stronger emphasis on delivering key facts quickly and moving on, while Thomson Reuters may emphasize pulling together a complete story more quickly."

Bloomberg also appears to take a broader approach to tagging the relevance of stories, generally returning a wider scope of information in response to search terms on the Bloomberg terminal than similar searches done on 3000 Xtra, Taylor says.

The report also directly compares how the two vendors covered the same story over the same 24-hour period-examining between 15 and 20 stories that were either about a major company or were a hot topic on a sampled day-using Burton-Taylor's proprietary NewsMeter^TM analysis, which provides an hour-by-hour breakdown of news coverage and whether items are press releases, alerts, full stories, updates, comments or analysis.  Among the stories selected for the comparison were Honda's announcement regarding its earnings forecast being cut, Morgan Stanley's results and the Norway rate cut.

While the firm gathered the data and conducted the research independently of Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg, it verified the numbers with both, Taylor says.

by Vicki Chan