NEW YORK -- On the sixth-floor lobby of Bloomberg's headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, 22 colorful Japanese koi swim in a narrow pond built into the floor. They represent the first 22 Bloomberg terminals that founder Michael Bloomberg sold to Merrill Lynch in the early 1980s.
Bloomberg has grown into a media empire in the decades since, with an army of 2,700 journalists gathering news and data. While financial professionals pay $20,000 a year for the proprietary Bloomberg terminal, the news that Bloomberg distributes through its website and television channel has always been free -- until now.
