John Micklethwait: Setting the tone at Bloomberg News
Bloomberg News is one of the biggest news organizations globally, with 2,400 reporters, and coverage that reaches every medium from wires, to broadcast, to print, and radio - and John Micklethwait is the man that sits atop of it all. On this episode of Press Profiles, we discuss John's career journey from The Economist to Bloomberg, some of his favorite interviews (which include sitting down with Putin), where Bloomberg is headed next, his foray into screenwriting, his early career as "not a particularly stellar banker", the challenges of rooting for Leicester City, and of course, a whole lot more.
Listen to the episode and subscribe to Press Profiles on Apple, Spotify, Google, or PressProfilesPodcast.com, and follow along with the transcript of my conversation with John below.
+++
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
Hello. This is John Micklethwait, the editor-in-chief at Bloomberg. And you are listening to Press Profiles. (MUSIC)
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
Hello again, everyone. And welcome back to Press Profiles, the podcast where we turn the tables on the leading journalists in business news, top anchors, and reporters, and editors. And today, we certainly have one of the top editors. John Micklethwait is the editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, the man who oversees all of the content on the news behemoth that is Bloomberg.
We will talk to John about his start in journalism, the differences between being an editor and a reporter, how he's grown Bloomberg's news operations over the years, where he's looking to take Bloomberg in the future. We'll talk about some of the big topics he expects to dominate the news cycle in 2024, including the Israel-Hamas war, artificial intelligence, maybe, a little talk about an election we have coming up in the U.S., and plenty of other events.
We'll discuss all of these things, plus his venture (MUSIC) into screenwriting with his well-known significant other. That's what we call a teaser, folks. And we'll keep you around so you can find out who we're talking about, all that a whole lot more. Here now is John Micklethwait on Press Profiles. John, good to see you.
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
Nice to see you, Russell.
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
This should be a fun conversation. I appreciate you joining us.
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
Thank you for having me.
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
So you've interviewed tons of world leaders. You have to oversee this huge news organization. I would love you to take a step back and sort of say where are we today, in the course of history. This feels like one of the most tumultuous times that any of us have experienced and sort of has us paging through the books of history to figure out what this even resembles. As someone who's a student of the news cycle and history, give us a sense of where you think we are in the world today.
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
A long time ago, when I came to Bloomberg, I outlined our challenge, was to be the chronicle of capitalism. From a capitalism point of view, I think the world has changed pretty dramatically. I think certainly, when I came to Bloomberg in 2015, you could still say the world consensus was broadly going ahead.
We were moving towards a world of ever-freer markets, freer trade, democracy, to some extent. These were all things that we sort of expected, back then, to continue. That has stopped. And the world has become a much more regional place. And what do I mean by that? Sort of two different things; first, that particular areas are growing.
Most, obviously, you've got the Global South, you've got the BRICS. You've got all those bits becoming an ever-bigger part of capitalism, at the moment. You've got the rise of connector economies because America and China. You get places like both Mexico and Vietnam have gained by the fact that those two things have come apart.
So from the point of view of journalism, you need people on the ground to be able to cover those things. But secondly, also, there is that division is that suddenly, if you're in capitalism, what governments do matters much more than it did before.
You have Donald Trump talking about a 10% trade tariff, but you've also got all the things that Joe Biden has done, like the IRA, you've got Europe fighting back with their own green subsidies, and so on. So this idea, before, that if you were in business, you could just sit there, and in general the world would come your way and you could focus on getting just-in-time production, those have changed.
Now, you have to have a kind of just-in-case strategy always sitting in the back of your brain. And on top of that, you also have to care a lot more about what governments are doing. So I think that would be the big picture, at the moment.
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
And how are you charging your news organization to try-- you talked about it being much more regional-- how are you thinking about getting your arms around all the various stories? Because news is certainly popping up everywhere.
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
The most obvious thing we would say-- and, again, I would say this, wouldn't I-- is that we think we are the most global news organization because the one thing that is happening in that world, which I just depicted, is that you can no longer blithely assume that, I don't know, Indonesia is going in one direction, that Argentina or Chile are going to do things. You need reporters there.
And on the research side of what we do, you need analysts there to tell you what's gonna happen because it's no longer just all trending in the same way. It's much more kind of multi-local. And so from our point of view, having strength and depth all the way around the world, as opposed to our competitors, which are more regional, I think, strong in America, strong in Europe, but don't have as many people in Asia, that's one bit we're trying to do.
The second thing, on the economic side, we've grown a bit what we call geoeconomics, where we look quite hard at the relationship between politics and economics. And we looked at the costs, the other day, of a confrontation over Taiwan. That is an immense amount of money. And that would affect capitalism all the way around the world.
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
Are there any surprise regions that you find yourself gravitating towards, in terms of coverage, where you're finding a lot of interesting news that one might not normally think?
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
I think editors tend to be like taxi drivers. They're always talking about (LAUGH) where they've just been. (LAUGH) I've just come back from the Gulf and from Africa. The most interesting thing there, to me, was the fact that the Gulf countries, I was fully aware of their impact, in terms of money. You see all the people going out to events in the Gulf, trying to get money from the Gulf and so on.
But the sort of geopolitical aspect of it, regardless, you can make guesses about what might happen in, say, Egypt. But what is new is that the people who might have the most dramatic effect on what happens to General Sisig, perhaps in the Gulf, rather than necessarily in Washington or Beijing. So that's quite interesting. And, again, I was quite interested in Africa, where we've got used to the story about Western money giving way to Chinese money. Now, again, there's money from the Gulf having a pretty big impact on Africa.
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
John, what countries in Africa?
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
I was in South Africa. But I talked to our journalists from across the region who look up and down the continent. That's one of the places where Gulf money is beginning to replace Chinese money in different places. So, again, you are seeing a lot of interconnectedness between these different regions. You are seeing a quite a lot of what might be described as sort of South-South relationships.
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
How important is it for you to follow that flow of money to understand what's going on? (LAUGH)
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
My predecessor, Matt Winkler, always had a good phrase about, "Follow the money." If you want to look at the most interesting bits of journalism, they often have to do with the money. If you want to understand what's happening in a region, that's a very good sort of indicator about what's happening under the surface.
I think what is interesting at the moment is I think that if you are in finance or, for that matter, you run a large consumer goods company or even if you have a tech company, all of these things, I think, a few years ago, you might have assumed, "Look. Basically, the world is heading in our direction. I can make software in Redmond or in Palo Alto. I can press a button. It goes around the world."
You look, even at the big tech companies. Their biggest threat at the moment is probably less each other than regulation. So all the way around the world, companies, I think, are having to adapt to that world. At Bloomberg, we're always gonna cover markets. We're always gonna cover finance. Those are our heartlands.
We're always gonna cover business, more generally. But what's interesting at the moment is the fact that those particular forces at work, another gigantic force which is at work is the rise of private markets. If you look at capitalism, again, going back a bit, you'd just assume that it was all to do with the DOW, the FTSE. And it was all to do with quated (PH) companies.
There are countless industries now, where it's impossible, really, to look at them without bringing in private companies, either because they've been brought by private equity or just because they've decided not to go public and stay that way. And that's also changing the way we look at the world.
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
Let's dive a little bit into your career. You had early pangs to be a journalist, growing up. Apparently, you took some cracks at writing, early on. And I think, by your own account, some of them weren't very strong. What's the story? Did someone read back one of your early stories?
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
One of them got read back at my wedding, (LAUGH) yes, the various kind of laughable attempts at student journalism. I think the really interesting thing, not interesting, but the pertinent thing, which always puts me in an embarrassing position, whenever young people come to me and ask for advice is how little journalism I had done before I became a journalist.
And now, very much when people come and they want jobs here, you find yourself looking back through the student journalism, you find people who've done a lot of internships during the summer. They've done all those things, write up and down across many different parts of society. That's all true.
In my case, I rather lazily took a job in the city with what was then Chase Manhattan. And then, I was immensely lucky that somebody at The Economist told me they were looking for people to write about finance. And it was a time in 1987 when the The Economist was losing people to the city because you could make more money if you wrote about cars for BZW or Goldman Sachs than if you wrote about cars for The Economist or, for that matter, The Financial Times. And so I looked something of a rarity because I wanted to lead the finance and come into journalism for a pay cut, instantly.
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
It's funny. You talk about changing times. And obviously in journalism, but of every other industry, many of us were fortunate. When we were growing up, you could just jump into a new career and give it a shot. And unfortunately, it seems the next generation has to, as you said, have all these internships, all this background. They're competing against folks who are very focused on an industry at a very early level, and good thing, bad thing? Because if it was the same, you might not be where you are.
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
No. I think, in a sense, getting rid of people, it's not a bad thing, (LAUGH) but because I think that having the slight professionalization, I think, is a good idea. People taking it more seriously than I did is definitely a good idea. And, certainly, the kind of opening up, in terms of diversity of opportunity and all those things, that's good, although it has to be said, things in some other places, things like internships, are also somewhat allocated in that way. We are forbidden anything nepotistic at Bloomberg.
But the bit I do worry about, a bit, is that sometimes I think it means that there are people who would be very good at this, if you just gave them a chance at doing it. And that, I think, there are so many people who appear in front of you who've already, I don't know, edited Harvard Crimson, and done an internship at The Guardian, and worked for Reuters or whatever.
They appear in front of you. And they are the easy hire, in some respect. And if I look at all the people I've hired at different points during my career, many of the best people have been people who had very little writing experience, but they had ideas and they had the ability to do things.
And so I think that is the bit which I think is sad, a bit, about the professionalization of journalists. There is still a transatlantic gap. I think, in America, it is much, much more accepted that you should have been to journalism school, that you should (LAUGH) know the basics of shorthand.
I can still remember working at the LA Times and being a kind of minor tourist destination because when I say, "Working at the LA Times," The Economist, they very generously gave us an office there, but the people who worked at the LA Times coming around to watch me because I had no idea how to type or use any of the other things that they regarded as the tools of their trade.
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
What did the banking background do for you? I know you weren't in banking long, as you said, Chase Manhattan Bank. What did that banking background do for you?
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
I think it had two quite useful things. Number one, very obviously, it did teach you about finance. So that gave me a skill. And I think that's still important for kind of young people coming into journalism. I often say to people, "Look, if you know about art, write about art."
Sometimes, the niche is often a useful way (LAUGH) to get things published. Obviously, finance is quite a big niche and art is quite a big niche. But there are things that particularly are focused on those areas. So, yes, knowing about finance has been useful. And as you said, follow the money, that's been the most useful.
I would say there has also been a general thing, which, again, this is not (LAUGH) false modesty, the fact that I was not a particularly stellar banking has meant that I have been, sometimes, more tolerant of the inadequacies (LAUGH) of other people in finance than my peers because it's very easy, if you're a journalist who writes about these industries, to sometimes think, "Look. I could do that so much better than they could. And isn't it bleeding obvious that Standard Chartered should do this or JPMorgan, why haven't they done that?" If you worked at there and you weren't particularly stellar at it, then sometimes a little bit of modesty is useful.
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
So you join The Economist in 1987. You are in a number of different roles. You join, first, as a finance correspondent. You served at the business editor. You were the U.S. editor. You mentioned some time in LA. And then, you were named editor-in-chief in 2006. As you look at that ten year there, what are you most proud of?
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
I suppose the underlying achievement, (LAUGH) which is the same for all editors, is just purely to keep the show on the road. That sounds, again, a bit small.
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
Not in the media landscape. That's no small achievement.
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
Exactly. I think one of our earliest covers was the death of the newspaper. I remembered that Twitter, I'm pretty sure, and I would have to (LAUGH) fact-check this, I think, came into being, the week after I was appointed. There were all these different things that upset the media landscape.
I think The Economist had massive advantages, as does Bloomberg, is that at the core of it, it has content that people want to pay for to consume. And if you look back over the era of modern era, then you could argue that ChatGPT is the next particular threat to this, is that people who've given away their content for free have generally not done so well.
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
The fact that you kept it on a path and, still, it is considered one of the most venerable publications, it is no small feat in a changing landscape.
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
I think its reputation has probably risen since I left, so. (LAUGH)
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
You held roles as a reporter and an editor. And you move back and forth between the two. Can you talk about the differences?
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
Yes. Because, actually, I think that is the strength of The Economist, which I've tried to make a strength of Bloomberg. I think that if you look at my career, it went, and I'm gonna get this wrong, something like reporter, reporter, editor, reporter, editor, reporter, reporter, editor, so on, like that.
And going backwards and forwards between it, I think, was very useful. And I think, certainly, when I first came to Bloomberg, there was an assumption that to rise, you had to go into management, so to speak. And I have two sort of (LAUGH) ideas on that.
One, I think many journalists just want to remain reporters, all their lives. And I think most journalists, I think I've only ever found one person who ever contradicted this, I've never met anyone who wanted to go into journalism to be an editor.
People go into journalism in order to report things, to write things, to be a columnist, to appear on television, to broadcast, whatever it is. That sort of person who is attracted to it, certainly that was true of me. There was one lady I met at Bloomberg, about three, four years ago, who said, no, she did want to be an editor.
But I really don't think that is true with the vast majority. So we are a strange group of people because if you look, by contrast, at the people who, I don't know, join General Electric or do whatever, at least, somewhere, I think, in their brains, they want to go right to the very top. And I think that's (LAUGH) also true of politicians, as well.
So journalists, what they want to do is to write. And I think it's good that more people know who Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward are than Bill Bradley, who is the editor of Washington Post, and that the heroes of journalism should be the reporters.
So, in general, allowing people a career where they can report and report is great. I think you also need a career where you can report a bit, edit and manage a bit, and then go back again. I think that's also a good thing. And that's what The Economist was very good at.
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
And that perspective helps specifically how?
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
Because I think it reminds you what it's like to write. I wrote a piece, the other day, (LAUGH) for Bloomberg. And it's a reminder that it does take a bit of time. Otherwise, you end up, as I sometimes complain, that you spend more time writing memos than writing journalism, which is an inevitable part of management.
And, to be fair, once you have an organization with 3,000 people, then your main duty is to manage it, rather than to go off and write things yourself. But I still think it's a useful discipline, for those people who are doing content, to try and produce bits of content themselves.
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
In 2015, you joined Bloomberg. You get recruited away to work for Mike Bloomberg. I'm curious, what was his recruiting pitch to you to get you to leave The Economist and join Bloomberg?
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
The Economist has a tradition that the editors last for decades. So it wasn't a kind of stealing operation, if I could put it that way. But, no, I think the attractions of Bloomberg, to me, were then and still are there are some similarities with The Economist.
I think, firstly, it's quite a data-driven operation. It's fiercely independent and it believes, very strongly, that sort of facts should lead the way. Those are very similar to The Economist. I think, also, there is a little bit of them being both somewhat insurgent brands, is that, and this may seem very strange to younger listeners to this who may think, "Bloomberg and The Economist are doing well," but certainly when you go back to when I started in journalism, I think Bloomberg as a journalistic force hadn't even been created.
And The Economist, at the time, it seemed a very small fish compared with the likes of Time, and Newsweek, and all these other things. So I think that there is a little bit of cultural similarity on that. That said, I think, for me, one of the attractions to coming to Bloomberg was exactly that it was not The Economist, it was very different. It was a much bigger, more complex organization. And when you have a job you love, and I loved working for The Economist, then it's much better to go and do something, I think, different.
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
Go back, for me, ten years or so, 2015. How different is the news organization today than it was then and some of the changes that have been made over that period of time?
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
I think, in terms of the fundamental values, I don't think it is that different. I think there's still that determination to produce kind of independent global content-led journalism. I think that's the absolute core of it. I do think that we have changed a lot, in terms of integration.
I think when I arrived, there was Bloomberg Media and Bloomberg News. Those are now merged, at least, in terms of the fact that we run it as one editor and research department. We do have access, if you come and work at Bloomberg, which obviously you and many people should immediately come and do. (LAUGH)
The fact that we can say, "You are joining a newsroom which does have television, it has radio, has podcasts, it has all these things, all the way around the world, as well as an events business and all that sort of thing," that is a massive advantage.
And those are things that we've continued to change. Obviously, the core of what we do and the reason why we exist in the shape we do is the Terminal. As you also know, we said recently we now have 500,000 consumer subscribers. That's the number which I think we can multiply aggressively. So those are all things that have changed.
But a lot of the things that have changed, I mentioned podcasts and things, these were all things that people talked a bit about in 2015. But now, there are much more dramatic parts of journalism. Data graphics have always been a part of journalism. Now, they're right to the fore.
And I think what has changed, fundamentally, is those consumers. The consumers who I have tried to serve, most of my time as a journalist, are ones for whom time is the most important thing. They just don't want you to waste your time. And so therefore, if you have a piece of information, give it to them as quickly as possible, especially with kind of breaking news and things.
But on the other hand, if you want to explain something, you have to justify why you're doing that, at length. In many cases, you can. If I wanted to explain to you exactly what was happening in the Ukraine at the moment, that would require some length; or exactly what is happening in terms of the kind of private companies we just talked about earlier, yes, you're probably better doing that at length. And I could say that's gonna save you time.
If you sit and listen to one thing, or indeed watch a weekly doc about it, or listen to a podcast, that, on the whole, the set of people we want, time is the most important thing. So thinking of different ways of trying to answer that conundrum is the heart of what we do.
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
So you looked back. Now, look ahead ten years, if you can. And how different do you think the news-gathering operation is, at that point? What role is AI playing, if you had to guess?
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
So step back, a bit. I think technology has played an enormous role in what we have done, I think, especially at Bloomberg because we are a technology company. We have done a lot of automation. We use a huge amount of computing power to scour the world, to find things, in terms of breaking news.
The lesson, so far, has been that you can massively expand the coverage of, say, companies' earnings all the way around the world by using technology. But actually quite interestingly, you don't actually lose journalists in the process. Journalists' jobs change.
When I first arrived, there were a lot of people scribbling out headlines really quickly on events like earnings. Now, the same people sit up, the (LAUGH) previous night, telling the computer what to look for, which is usually much deeper than just what the earnings are.
It's the number of, I think I've used this example before, the number of iPhones sold in China, what's happening in particular parts of the company that might drive the share price. So from that perspective, technology's been at the core of lots of things we've done over the past nine years.
What is happening now is that, I think, AI has arrived. We would hope that we have advantages here, not just because of all that technology. And now, I think it's very good at AI. And we have the huge treasure trove of data that is the Terminal.
In terms of exactly how it plays out, I'm not sure, in the same way I think anyone who (LAUGH) claims they know exactly which way would be in the same status as me saying, at The Economist, the I knew exactly what was gonna happen when I probably was not aware of the fact that a company called Twitter had just been set up.
But if I had to guess, I think some of the areas, which I can see the sort of technologies can make a difference on, one is summarization, being able to tell somebody what an article is about. I think anything to do with personalization is likely to be somewhat at the front, trying to target things so that you get stories that are particularly useful for you.
I think a particular area which I think will grow quite a lot is local language. Most of the elements where you look at AI, it is much, much better at translating things than previous technologies. And that sounds great. You simply press a button and everything is translated into Mandarin or Spanish. But actually, it's gonna be more complicated than that. It's less about having the ability to push the button than thinking about how you can devise things for people who want to read in that language.
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
AI will certainly be a key storyline, I think, for the coming year.
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
Yes. And it's going to affect the media industry in a big way because if you look at what ChatGPT might already be doing to search traffic, that is, again, I think another reason why what I said is that the more you can rely on consumers paying directly for your business, the better it is.
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
So AI being a big storyline, there will be a few others that we can, at least, anticipate now; Israel, Hamas, obviously the upcoming election, U.S.-China interaction, potentially Taiwan being an issue. Those are the main ones you have in your mind? What other ones are, sort of, as you look out onto the horizon?
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
Yes. The other day, in the rare foray into journalism, I did write an article with my colleague, Adrian Wooldridge, arguing that we live in a 10% world. And the background of this, to briefly sort of blow my own trumpet, was in 2016, I wrote an article called "The 20% World", which pointed out, at the time, if you walked into a bookmaker, the odds of Donald Trump becoming president was 20%. The odds of Brexit were 20%, so were the odds of Marine Le Pen winning in France and Jeremy Corbyn winning in London.
And my point then was that, "Look, these things are now possible. These unthinkables are now possible. And, perhaps, one of them will happen." So by the end of that year, for better or worse, most people say worse, (LAUGH) I've been proved correct.
What strikes me at the beginning of this year is that all the things that we used to regard as unthinkable are now much closer to being the hot favorites. So Donald Trump has built up a big position. There is still, the bookmakers would say, "By far, the most likely person to be the next president."
You have, virtually, I think it's a one-in-seven chance of (LAUGH) Britain going back into the European Union. Marine Le Pen looks the most likely, admittedly, out of a lot of people, to be the next French president, and so on. And the world, we pointed out, is that actually this time, maybe, the unthinkables are the ones where better things happen, so you can get roughly a 10% chance of somebody other than Trump or Biden becoming the U.S. president.
I would say there's, maybe, a 10% chance of Starmer winning the election and doing a deal with Europe, maybe, a bit higher on that, and so on. So there are some possibilities of good news out there. But at the moment, the probability's sort of the reverse of what it was in 2016. The probabilities look the other way, but I still think there are some intriguing possibilities.
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
That's a great way to look at it. Now, we're rooting for the long shots. (LAUGH)
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
Yes.
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
You in the UK are fortunate 'cause you can go into the betting parlors and you could see what the odds are on certain things. We haven't made that leap, yet. But I guess, give it time, right? It will happen. But that's not such a long shot. You have done a number of amazing interviews over the course of your career.
We talked about jumping back between being an editor, and being a reporter, and you still do a lot of reporting. You had the opportunity to interview plenty of world leaders, over time. You spent some time with Putin. I would love just hear your thoughts and what you gleaned from spending some time with a person like that who, for most of us, is just a headline in a news story and we'll never have that interaction.
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
I suppose a kind of perk of this job is that you do that sort of thing. The answer is, I think, on the whole, most interviews, in that nature, are ones where there is an element that you know what they're gonna say and they know what you're gonna say.
I would say that with Putin, I think the main thing is slightly, firstly, the degree of fear around him. I did one interview in Vladivostok, where I think because people were worried about him being upset by any possibility of surrounding noise, several (LAUGH) thousand people were ejected from a building into the cold and the snow, just by having traveled halfway around the world to come to a conference.
It's sort of that type of thing. He's a very combative person, Putin. He's very tough-minded. And, to some extent, I think he was somebody who'd react more to being challenged. There is a strong element to kind of machismo around him in a way that is not true of other leaders and even people from his side, which suggest that you challenged him as a way of getting him going.
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
Yeah. Interesting. One of the more challenging situations or interviews as you sort of prepare for and think about how to approach it?
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
I think all of these things are difficult. Some people, Donald Trump, you tend to know that he's gonna generate headlines very quickly. Putin is a get, like many of these things. And, again, it's much easier for people like me, who have a lot of people, who sometimes know far more about the individual subjects briefing us beforehand.
But, yes, it's part of our job. It's a part of my job, and the same for the editors, and most of the other publications to go off and meet these people and, where possible, to try and help them help us get interviews with them. That's part of what we do. But it tends to be the tip of a very large iceberg, if I could put it that way.
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
Sure. Anyone else on the wish list for the future?
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
I think everyone would always love to interview Xi Jinping, but I haven't done that.
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
I want to talk about another project you worked on. You have co-wrote a screenplay, a movie with your significant other, who is the one and only Kristin Scott Thomas, the wonderful actress who starred in Four Weddings and a Funeral and The English Patient, a movie soon to be released that's called North Star.
It's a British drama film about three sisters returning to their family home to attend the wedding of their twice-widowed mother. Talk to me a little bit about that collaboration and that process of what it is like to write a screenplay, probably a little bit different than a news article.
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
We wrote most of it during lockdown. It was a nice diversion, actually, (LAUGH) to the trials of running a newsroom, I think, during that particular time. But it is very much Kristin's film and I will leave it to her. I think in a recent interview with another publication, she was asked about me and said, "This interview is about me, not him." And I will revert (LAUGH) to that answer, as well.
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
We will honor that. We will honor that. I am curious, though, as a writing collaboration, what a journalist brings to the table and what an actor brings to the table, and how does that mesh?
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
I think there are very obvious things, like the actor tends to be a lot better at dialogue. I should say that I have actually written six books with Adrian Wooldridge and that I actually find collaborating with people relatively easy. And I think there are rules that you follow, where ideas can go backwards and forwards. And they work.
And, again, I should say very much that whatever achievements I had (LAUGH) at The Economist were very much because of somebody called Emma Duncan, who was my deputy there and at Bloomberg, though very much with Reto Gregori, who is the deputy here. And we work very much as a team. So I've always thought that the way to not just to write things but also to manage things is to do it in a collaborative way.
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
You've mentioned you've written a half a dozen books. What is the difference between writing a screenplay and writing a book?
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
Immense because one is an element of show, don't tell. And the other is where you're, effectively, trying to put things across. I do think that there is an element of a way to talk more about the screenplay when it comes out. But on the book side, I do think on of the lessons, which I think Adrian and I would both say is over time, is that narrative is very important.
I think when we began, there was a lot of analysis, which we used to pepper with anecdotes and stories. I think where you have a narrative that follows, I think that is an important attribute. To give you an example, when we wrote a book about Conservative America, called The Right Nation, we spent some time, and when I say, "We spent some time," it was largely Adrian, not me, writing three chapters at the beginning about where the Conservative movement in America came from.
I think what was interesting, in terms of the reception of the book, is that a large amount of the more positive reviews focused on those three chapters. And we had spent a lot of our time arguing about whether George W. Bush would really win the election or whatever it was.
People didn't care about that. What they read and consumed avidly was the narrative of where did Conservatives in America come from. We also wrote a book called The History of the Company, which worked that way. And a couple of our more recent ones have been the same. So I do think, from the point of view of people, there's a reason why biographies sell, I think, because there is a kind of logical narrative to them.
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
Let's finish off with some quick hits, give everyone an opportunity to learn a little bit more about John Micklethwait. John, tell us how are you spending your free time, these days? Any notable hobbies or activities?
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
The simple answer is I wish I took more exercise, which I tried to do. (LAUGH) When my partner, who you just referred to, when she said, "Oh. He just watches football," so last night, I merrily watched Ipswich play Leicester, which is the tragic team I follow.
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
Yeah. Leads us to our next question: Favorite sport or sports team?
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
I've always supported Leicester City, who, for what it's worth, have had possibly the most unusual history of any significant (LAUGH) soccer team in the past ten years.
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
Right? They won a surprise championship?
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
They won a surprise championship at odds of 5,000:1, which I don't think there is any American team sport that becomes remotely applicable to that. I think if you look at the NFL or baseball, the main odds you can get on the outside are 100:1, 200:1 because effectively, you have much more even teams.
The idea that a complete outsider who nearly got relegated the previous year could win the whole thing over the course of 42 matches was unheard of and will, sadly, I think, never be repeated again. To give you some idea of the (LAUGH) roller coaster, they did however get relegated. So the reason why they're playing Ipswich is because (LAUGH) they're now down in the second division. A very useful thing for all American sports would be to introduce relegation, a subject at some point, which I will write about.
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
Yeah. That must have been the most thrilling thing in the world, to have a long shot like that win it all.
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
Relegation was not thrilling, but (LAUGH) winning the premiership was very interesting.
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
Next championship. (LAUGH) Let's focus on the (UNINTEL). Favorite movie? I guess you gotta be careful with this question. (LAUGH)
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
I've always had a soft spot for Casablanca and the Godfather movies.
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
Wonderful. You were twice a trustee of the British Museum, one of the most famous museums in the world. You were appointed by the prime minister. Tell me your favorite thing about the museum.
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
I think the most interesting about the British Museum is that it is a museum of the world for the world. And when you're a trustee, you hold the collection on behalf of all the peoples of the world, something which is quite relevant against the current controversies about what objects people have. But that's a reason why it'll always be free to go to.
Although it's called the British Museum, its aimed there to be a global part of the enlightenment. And I think what's really interesting, at the moment, is George Osborne is chairman at the moment. And it's got a very good acting director, but it's also looking for a permanent one.
There is an immense challenge about how to display things there. There's an immense challenge about how to make it possible for people, all the way around the world, to see the immense treasures they have there. But it's a very remarkable institution.
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
We've talked about a lot of things, but give us a dream job. If you weren't a journalist, what would you be?
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
I think, all my life, I've enjoyed writing. So at the moment, yes, I would end up doing something in writing again, which is what I've done most of the time. And I think, at the moment, like many people at the top of news organizations, I spend a lot of time on management. But I do enjoy the actual content production.
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
We always ask potential employees during the interview process, we say, "Did you ever have a dirty job, a type of job where you showed a little bit of grit, had to roll up your sleeves?" Did you ever have one of those?
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
I think I've done stuff as a dishwasher (LAUGH) and things like that in my youth. So, yes, I've had to do all those things. But I have to be honest and say that, in general, and I've certainly had times as an editor and a journalist where you've had to work all night and all those sort of things, but I think, on the whole, it would be wrong to depict my career as anything other than very lucky.
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
Beautiful. It's funny, dishwasher does come up quite a bit. (LAUGH) Do you have a favorite British saying?
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
There's a very good saying from my predecessor, Matt Winkler, which is, "The best is yet to come." So stay with that.
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
That's good. We like that. How should PR people interact with you?
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
I think, in most cases at Bloomberg, given the size, it makes much more sense to get in contact with the editors or people who are dealing with a particular story 'cause you have to imagine that I get enormous numbers of emails, (LAUGH) every day. And so when one's come to me, I then have to try and distribute them. It's much more sensible to go straight to the people who should be getting those, which I'm sorry to sound so standoffish, but it's just a (LAUGH) practical answer.
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
No, but to your credit, you are very responsive, which is not easy, given the amount of things that you have coming at you. Okay. Final question, it's our headline question. We always like our guests to come up with a headline about their career, about them. What would be the headline for John Micklethwait?
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
A man who is very fortunate (LAUGH) to have had so many people to have helped him and to have also been a journalist in such interesting times, not a very snappy headline.
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
No. We'll work on it. The meat is there. It's good. Perfect. John, I want to thank you. I appreciate you taking the time. It's been a great conversation. Congratulations on an amazing career and all the good work you continue to do at Bloomberg.
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT:
Thank you very much. Thank you, Russell.
RUSSELL SHERMAN:
That is John Micklethwait, everybody. Great conversation. And to everyone out there, thank you so much for listening and thanks for all the great feedback. (MUSIC) So glad to hear that so many people enjoy listening to these conversations as much as I enjoy doing them.
Remember, you can find the full list of episodes on our website at pressprofilespodcast.com, or on Apple, or Spotify, or wherever it is you listen to podcasts. We also post the transcripts on LinkedIn, so make sure to sign up for the Press Profiles podcast newsletter. Thanks, again. And we will see you next time.
END OF TRANSCRIPT