NEW YORK: Journalists in 2025 find themselves in a peculiar bind. As students use AI to polish thousand-word statements of purpose and algorithms churn out content by the terabyte, reporters increasingly are at the mercy of the same chatbots—inheriting their flat vocabulary, their hedging phrases, their vagueness. The irony is sharp: the tools meant to help us write better are making us sound more alike.  

Which makes Paul Addison’s recent gem find all the more startling.  

Last week, Paul Addison, a veteran Bloomberg journalist, posted something on LinkedIn that hit the business journalism world like a forgotten time capsule: Bloomberg’s original A–Z style guide for business journalism from the late 1990s, complete with its infamous banned list. This triggered an avalanche of comments from current and former Bloomberg reporters, editors, and journalism professors. What followed was less nostalgia and something close to longing from reporters who’d survived what one called “the Bloomberg crucible.”

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At the centre of the conversation was a relic from late 1990, a mimeographed A–Z style guide written by editor-in-chief Matt Winkler, just months after Bloomberg Business News was born. The document reads today like a mix of grammar manual, satire and editorial manifesto. The guide reads like it was written by someone who loved language enough to torture it into submission.

The entry for “Bias” alone set the tone. Reporters, Winkler wrote, may “hate some of the people and companies” they cover, but their writing must be divorced from those feelings. Even Charles Keating — the American financier involved in the 1980s savings-and-loan scandal of the 1980s — could not be labelled a “commie hunting, porno bashing, thrift robbing, old lady cheating sleazebag” in the copy. Facts, not fury, were the house style.

“Starting with no pedigree or lineage in journalism other than my own experience, I was determined to define our work in the most rigorous way,” Wrinkler once said in an email.
Beneath the jokes and provocation, the first edition also laid down timeless rules of good writing: “Writing well matters. Let nouns and verbs dominate your sentences. Use adjectives and adverbs like a fine perfume, sparingly. Accuracy above everything else.”

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That blend of severity and irreverence ran through the entire guide. Commas were a bigger menace than incest, if only by volume. The word “deal” was banned because it sounded like something done by greasy-haired used-car salesmen in polyester shirts. Instead, use ‘the loan,’ ‘the refinancing’ etc.

“Upcoming” was forbidden because, as the guide warned, if it appeared in a Bloomberg story, “Matt will be downcoming and the offending reporter will be outgoing.” (This was a rewrite from the WSJ’s Bernie Kilgore.)

On hyphens, the compound modifiers after “to be” must keep their dash; the guide also offered examples that doubled as trash talk: “Matt is well-known. Dow Jones wire services are second-rate.”

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The was/were entry is where Winkler stops being just funny and becomes editorially aggressive. It shows Bloomberg’s style guide was also a competitive manifesto disguised as grammar.  

For journalists raised on the Bloomberg Way — the more polished, institutional rulebook that followed — this was the raw origin story. But Addison’s post also revived memories of the notorious Bloomberg banned list that arrived in 1995, when hundreds of common journalistic words were suddenly outlawed.

Gone: “uptick,” “downturn,” “soar,” “slump,” “surge.” Forbidden: “however,” “despite,” “amid.” Banned: “deal,” “launch” (except for ships), “feel,” “dampen,” “slide.” Adverbs became suspect. Clichés were treated as contagious. Hundreds of perfectly serviceable words were simply outlawed.

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As former Bloomberg journalists explained in Addison’s comment thread, the bans forced reporters to think harder, be clearer, and write what actually happened rather than what it felt like. You could not say markets “soared”; you had to say how much they rose. You could not say a company “launched” a product; you had to say it began selling one.

To mark the moment, Addison also shared a tongue-in-cheek rhyming version of the banned list, a playful poem that skewered the newsroom’s obsession with precision:

“Say no to ‘uptick,’ ‘downturn,’ ‘dips’
And no to ‘launch’ except for ships…”

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The poem ended, as Bloomberg stories always did: with KISS — Keep It Simple, Stupid.  

What struck many commenters was how radical Bloomberg’s approach was for its time. In a media world thick with flourish, metaphor and opinion, Winkler’s Bloomberg tried to strip business journalism down to nouns, verbs and numbers. Winkler’s approach—”writing well matters,” “accuracy above everything else”—was almost puritanical in its severity.

Three decades on, as Addison’s post made clear, that culture still lives in the muscle memory of those who passed through Bloomberg’s newsroom. The rules were sometimes absurd, often infuriating, but they produced something rare: copy that was clean, fast, and brutally exact.

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The banned list is gone now, dissolved into the more reasonable Bloomberg Style Guide that governs the newsroom today.  

In an age when journalism now fights algorithms, influencers and opinion masquerading as news, Bloomberg’s old banned list feels oddly modern. It was not about sounding clever. It was about sounding true.

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