Bloomberg has agreed to buy BusinessWeek magazine, a move which allows the US news agency to expand beyond its core business of supplying financial data to professionals.
Bloomberg, founded by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, did not disclose terms of the purchase of the business magazine from US publisher McGraw-Hill, which also owns the Standard and Poor's credit rating agency.
But BusinessWeek, in a blog post, quoted 'knowledgeable sources' as saying Bloomberg had made a cash offer 'in the £2m to $5m range' and had agreed to take on unspecified liabilities.
BusinessWeek has a US circulation of nearly a million but has been suffering from the industry-wide plunge in print advertising revenue and loss of readers to the web. McGraw-Hill announced its plan to sell the publication in July.
Bloomberg president Daniel Doctoroff said the acquisition of BusinessWeek 'will yield huge benefits for users of the Bloomberg terminal, and for our television, online and mobile properties'.
According to the BusinessWeek blog post, the magazine's losses this year are projected to be more than $40m on revenue of about $130m. BusinessWeek has 155 editorial employees at its New York headquarters, 19 correspondents in nine US news offices and 14 international correspondents in 10 offices.
Bloomberg's purchase of BusinessWeek comes less that two weeks after the news agency announced plans with The Washington Post to launch a global news service offering stories to newspapers, websites and other subscribers.
