View from the Office.

Brooks McFeely has quietly built MT Newswires into one of the fastest growing and most trusted financial news organizations in the world.

And he bootstrapped it from a newsletter started as a side hustle towards the end of his time in the Navy 25 years ago.

MT provides the news on the websites of most of the largest financial firms in North America including Fidelity, Vanguard, Schwab, JPMorgan and Bank of America.

The company’s 200 reporters publish 2,000 articles a day. It is currently growing faster than 20 percent a year, fueled by an expansion in Europe and Asia.

How MT is accomplishing this at a time when so many news organizations are wailing and rending their garments about losses is worth a closer look.

The Philadelphia Inquirer last week published the first major profile of Brooks since he launched the company. The article by Joseph DiStefano highlighted some key points.

–A focus on actionable news. Articles tend to be short, factual summaries of corporate press releases, SEC filings, Wall Street analyst reports and global coverage of major asset classes, including crypto.

–-Selling bulk subscription licenses. The company has a B2b strategy of selling to businesses that need content. Those deals are hard to land, but more consistent than relying on advertising.

–Keeping costs low. The company started out with reporters working remotely, avoiding the large expenses of offices in major cities. Brooks said turnover has been low.

–Maintaining a Scrappy Culture. MT has worked to maintain an independent, scrappy culture from the days when the company started with the name Midnight Trader.

I met Brooks perhaps a decade ago when I was Global Head of News Product at Bloomberg. We did a deal to include MT Newswires on the professional terminal.

The fact that the big-league investors who buy Bloomberg systems found the content valuable should tell you that the company was on to something.

MT Newswires has a lower profile than Dow Jones, Reuters, and Bloomberg in part because it’s newer but also because the articles mostly don’t appear on the Internet.

The insight Brooks had was that a growing number of companies wanted content for their websites. And they wanted to “host” that content, not encourage people to click away.

Fidelity is a good example. Clients logging in to the website to see news on companies their portfolios rely on MT content that is integrated into the platform.

Keith Lanigan, MT’s executive editor, told the Philly Inquirer: “Licensing our news across most of the major retail and institutional trading houses” has served the company well.

It’s turned out to be a big market not just in the U.S., but overseas.

MT sticks to breaking news about companies and markets. It doesn’t do CEO profiles or the type of enterprise reporting produced by other media companies.

Nevertheless, given the dire state of much of the media, MT offers some important lessons about how to provide information clients need while keeping costs low.

Check out the link to the full article.

It has more details and even some quotes from me!