Today news broke that Bloomberg has designs to acquire BNA, a D.C. area-based legal information services company, for $990 million.
(Keeping up with the Jones’s is expensive when the Jones’s are the Thomson Reuters’s.)
As such, the terminal manufacturers will welcome BNA’s 350ish publications and 600-odd reporters into their fold. BNA specialize in tax and regulatory law, which makes it useful for Bloomberg’s burgeoning BGov and for competing with Reuters’s News & Insight: Legal division, launched in March.
A sad footnote to this is that BNA sounds like it was a really great company:
According to its website, its been wholly employee owned–employees and retirees still own 100% of the company’s stock–since 1947, and has racked up a number of best companies to work for awards from FORTUNE, Working Mother, Washingtonian.
But then, Bloomberg has free trail mix and one of a handful of the escalators the world that turn a curve.