What the 1% Will Be Reading

Image via WikipediaBloomberg News may dutifully cover the so-called "class warfare" playing out nowadays in the nation's cultural and political arenas, but when it comes to boosting its own products, Bloomberg LP knows the "1 percent" demographic group is the way to go.

Women's Wear Daily's online edition reports today that the financial news corporation next month is launching a posh periodical, called Bloomberg Pursuits ("BP"), that is an offshoot of the monthly business magazine, Bloomberg Markets. Both journals will be distributed gratis to the roughly 310,000 subscribers to the Bloomberg Professional service. Those subscribers pay $20,000, on average, for access to Bloomberg Terminal, a computer system that enables financial industry types to access Bloomberg Professional service and thereby, track financial market data in real-time and trade on the electronic trading platform, as well as peruse price quotes and news and send messages.

Circulation for the two magazines will be 375,000 copies apiece, with non-Bloomberg Terminal issues being available on newsstands and by subscription. The Women's Wear Daily article quotes Bloomberg Pursuit's advertising director, who claims 60 percent of the periodical's market is outside the U.S. in financial hot spots such as Hong Kong, Japan and Germany. Ninety percent of BP's readers are male whose household income, on average, is $452,000, BP boasts.

The debut issue will be 76 pages, 30 of them devoted to advertisers, including Rolls-Royce and Hermes. Articles in the inaugural issue will include profiles of Bloomberg subscribers doing things such as observing a solar eclipse aboard an icebreaker in Antarctica, building a racing yacht and collecting Ferraris, which the subscriber deconstructs and then spruces up.

BP, which is designed to compete with other magazines for the affluent such as the Robb Report and ForbesLife, will garner attention in an hour-long prime time program on Bloomberg Television in February.

The always media-hungry devoted staff of "TUOL" can't conceive of how Bloomberg Pursuits in any way will be seen as a symbol of the expanding schism between the haves and have-nots in America. Still, "TUOL" is not likely to thumb through Bloomberg Pursuits anytime soon, mostly out of fear that the journal may contain a computer chip that automatically dispenses painful paper cuts to perusers who don't have a suitable financial portfolio.