How Bloomberg journalists use data science to move financial markets

Bloomberg journalists have been breaking business news since 1990, but these days their reporting relies increasingly on data science. This change has thrust the head of data science, Gideon Mann, into a key role in the newsroom. The computer science graduate spent seven years as a staff research scientist at Google before he joined Bloomberg in 2014, but had little prior experience of finance and was initially surprised to see the influence that journalists have on markets. "Before I started at Bloomberg, I didn't understand the nature of how news moves markets," Mann told Computerworld UK from Bloomberg's new £1 billion European headquarters in the heart of the City of London. "Things happen in the real world and usually there's a journalist that's writing and talking about them and spreading the word, and that's how that information gets disseminated."