Best of Panic With Friends: Ted Merz – Journalist Turned Product Manager, Former Global Head of News at Bloomberg on Financial Journalism and Information Dissemination in the Age of Social Media

Long time listeners know I’ve taken a few weeks off to go climb some mountains on my bike. I’ve just departed Lake Como, wrapping up this leg of my crazy cycling ‘adventurecation’. You can follow my rides on the Strava app. In the meantime, I’ve been doing reruns of some of my favorite Panic with Friends episodes. This episode from January of 2021 is with my good friend Ted Merz. He’s moved on from Bloomberg, but his insights on social media and data are spot on.

Best of Panic: (January, 2021) My friend Ted Merz at Bloomberg has one of the most interesting jobs in the world. Ted has been at Bloomberg since 1991 and today heads Bloomberg’s Global News Product. That is a complicated job and this is a complicated era of news considering the 24/7/365 flow of information, misinformation and of course news. Ted makes it all look easy. I miss visiting with him at the Bloomberg HQ, but see and talk to him more often now that he’s advising others.

I love talking to Ted about Twitter and the rest of social media and the deals he has had to cut and the way he thinks about data.

One of the best compliments I have gotten is having Ted tell me he enjoys my writing style and reading my daily blog. That is not why I invited him on as a guest, but it is definitely one reason I am so happy I started to write in the first place and a motivating factor for me to keep writing!

You can listen to the podcast here on Spotify or Apple podcast and now all the episodes are on my YouTube channel as well. You can click subscribe on any of these channels and get the podcast alert each week.

You can also listen right here on the blog:

For more details on today’s conversation read on below…

Guest: Ted Merz

Profile: Former Bloomberg / Founder Wabu Capital

Where to Find Him: LinkedIn, Twitter 

Show Notes:

• Introduction (00:31)
• Welcome Ted (03:18)
• Starting in journalism (04:07)
• Moving to Bloomberg (06:21)
• The biggest story of Ted’s lifetime (09:33)
• Covering 9/11 (11:33)
• Bloomberg customer service (15:47)
• Talking Twitter (16:23)
• Partnering with Twitter (24:02)
• Monetizing data (27:21)
• Enormous opportunity with Twitter and Reddit (34:28)
• First inkling of COVID breaks December 31. 2019 (36:40)
• Data as alpha (39:35)
• A ‘Netflix’ Model of news and information (42:02)
• Wrapping up (47:20)
• Closing thoughts (52:05)

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