Wolff: Bloomberg, the last media mogul

• Bloomberg has cobbled together a big media business
• But his real business remains those data terminals%2C not the media properties
• Media business lacks a grand player%2C a vacuum Bloomberg could fill

In a few weeks, Michael Bloomberg will be back in business.

He won't be the mayor of New York anymore. He'll be the controlling shareholder in a major data and media company. For the past 12 years, he's had a careful relationship with his own company, Bloomberg LP. In a way, it was a pretty great relationship: He got the benefits from it but, staying hands off—having to keep his hands off (well, at last looking like he was) — he avoided the blame.

But now that changes. The responsibility for the company is back in his lap. If things go wrong, which they have recently, it'll be on him.

For instance, there's the fact that Bloomberg reporters were spying on corporate clients. That's something, as mayor, he could profess to having no knowledge about, and no real responsibility for. The same for the company's recent decision to suck up to the Chinese government and kill a piece by Bloomberg reporters about high-level Chinese shenanigans. Ditto for firing one of the reporters.

All of the questions that might be raised, about privacy, about client confidentiality, about basic free press issues, about standing by your reporters, Bloomberg could easily and blissfully avoid as mayor. But they'll come straight at him now. If you think he was ornery at a press conference as mayor, wait to you seem him in a few weeks.

And then there are the business issues. Bloomberg LP, is doing fine, a few less terminals in China maybe, but overall still a Niagara of cash. But Bloomberg media is, relatively, an embarrassing money pit. Nothing really works, except its ability to call attention to the company's presence and potential. It's a brand without a business.

There are a lot of people who are responsible for this in both positive and negative ways, building one of the most prominent media companies in the country, but not exactly making it work: Matt Winkler, Dan Doctoroff, Andy Lack, Norman Pearlstine. As other media companies have fallen, Bloomberg has used its cash to scoop up much of the available prestige.

Even absent a real business plan, Bloomberg media became one of the big boys, albeit without big-boy revenue.

In an ideal world, Michael Bloomberg would probably have stepped from the mayor's office into an ultimate not-quite-­yet elder statesman and business-leader capacity from which he might use his $30 billion both for good works and not­-so-behind-­the­-scenes manipulations.

But Bloomberg has a media business — not his real business, data, but a media business— around his neck. Whether he likes it or not.

Bloomberg media was always supposed to be just a kind of cream on the top of the data terminal business — a little color. And then it was supposed to be a business that helped burnish Michael Bloomberg's reputation. It was certainly never supposed to be the main show. One of Bloomberg's partners, Thomas Secunda, still a major power in the company, continues to believe the media business should just be a helpful adjunct to the terminals, that it should be lesser, not greater. (A view that helps explain why Secunda is Secunda, and Bloomberg is Bloomberg.)

But media businesses have a life of their own. They call attention to themselves. That's their job.

There's a nervousness around the Bloomberg offices at the prospect of the return of the man himself, a kind of clearing out, and making way for the big man. Pearlstine, who ran BusinessWeek, recently left the company for Time, Inc. Lack, who ran the television business, is moving out soon. In their place, are two younger men—Andrew Morse, from CNN, on the television side, and Justin Smith, from Atlantic Media, on the print and digital side—crying out for adult supervision.

In a way, running a media company, with its suggestion of creative hubbub, seems as unlikely an outcome for the process­-oriented, data­-minded Wall Street hustler, which is Bloomberg's real identity, as…being mayor.

On the other hand, one reason he ended up as mayor was that he was clearly bored with his data day job. Bloomberg, to understate the obvious, needs the attention. He needs to be more than just a billionaire.

There are indications on Bloomberg's part that he's tempted by a certain old-media clout and cachet. He's made no secret in media circles that he wants to buy the Financial Times. And then there's The New York Times, which he's flirted with. He is such a logical buyer and savior of the Times that the inevitable will probably happen.

Of course, clout and cachet—even power, prestige, and influence— don't make a business.

Still, it doesn't sound that far from being mayor, a job he used his data-terminal billions to support.

And right now, the media business is in something of the shape that the city was in when he took it over in 2002—contemplating more disruption, and, too, ruin and oblivion.

What the media business lacks, along with advertising revenue, is a suitable figure to represent it. It is an obvious hole at the center of this ever-­more-depressed and scaled-down business. No grand presence. No real proprietor. No awe-­inspiring son­ of ­a­ bitch.

Power needs the powerful to personify it—even to actualize it. Nobody believes in the future of the media business. But they believe in Michael Bloomberg. And he's got a media business whether he likes it or not.

It's really not a bad match.

He is the last mogul.