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Greg McCaffery, current president and CEO of Bloomberg BNA, began his career when the company still preferred the moniker The Bureau of National Affairs, Inc. To avoid being considered a government agency-and there were a number of otherwise knowledgeable people who thought the newsletter publisher was part of the U.S. federal government, even at the large multinational bank where I used to work-it adopted the acronym BNA to forestall confusion and uses the bna.com URL.
BNA can trace its roots as far back as 1929, when it was established as a division of U.S. Daily, a publication founded by David Lawrence and a precursor to the current U.S. News & World Report. In 1947, BNA was spun off by Lawrence and became an employee-owned company. It remained that way for 64 years, until Bloomberg purchased it in September 2011 for $990 million and established BNA as a stand-alone, wholly owned subsidiary.
Today Bloomberg BNA divides up its primary businesses into four areas on the Bloomberg Law platform: Legal & Business; Tax & Accounting; Human Resources; and Environment, Health & Safety. It fully integrates data that previously was labeled separately as Bloomberg Law or BNA. Its Company & Markets section pulls data from Bloomberg-the information that traders and business librarians access through a dedicated Bloomberg terminal. It also owns BNA Software, Kennedy Information, Llesiant, The McArdle Printing Co., Inc., and STF Services Corp.
McCaffery joined BNA in 1986 as a reporter covering chemical regulation. He moved on to editing and then to product development before taking on management responsibilities. He has watched-and been responsible for-changes at the company, including the creation of BNA's Americans With Disabilities Act Manual (first published in 1992) and the migration of the company's current awareness publications to digital formats. He's lived through the revolution in online information creation, distribution, and retrieval.
It may be hard to remember, but back in the late 1980s, internet searching didn't exist, and librarians relied on subscription-based online systems for...