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Most journalists dream of uncovering government corruption, landing a big interview or winning a Pulitzer Prize. But those are not the goals that Thomas F. Secunda, who co-founded Bloomberg L.P. in 1982 with Michael R. Bloomberg, has in mind. “The only journalism that matters is the kind that moves markets,” Secunda told the senior staff of Bloomberg News during a recent discussion in the seventh-floor auditorium of the company’s Lexington Avenue headquarters, according to one former Bloomberg journalist in attendance.

The question of how exactly some of those Bloomberg reporters may have uncovered market-moving information has become a critical one for the company. In April, Goldman Sachs complained that a reporter had monitored an executive’s activities on the Bloomberg machine, the ubiquitous financial terminal that contains a mind-boggling array of information about economies, companies, markets and people, including Bloomberg’s own customers. The revelation prompted inquiries from more than 20 customers, including Bank of America, the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department and the European Central Bank. Daniel L. Doctoroff, chief executive of Bloomberg, apologized, calling the reporting practice a “mistake.” Interviews with more than 30 current and former Bloomberg employees paint a picture of an aggressive, hyperkinetic organization that not only tolerated but encouraged an unusual symbiotic relationship between the company’s news operation and its business interests, including the use of the terminals to break news. Many of these reporters say they routinely used the terminal’s function, called the UUID command, to find background information on subscribers, including contact information, when the subscriber had last logged on, and weekly statistics on how often customers used a particular function, like equity shares or currency markets.

Broadcast Music Inc., or BMI, filed a lawsuit in federal court against Internet radio giant Pandora Media over Pandora's attempt to lower its royalty obligations by buying a tiny radio station in South Dakota to qualify for the lower rates that terrestrial radio broadcasters pay to use music online.

BMI is asking a federal "rate court"—a part of the U.S. District Court in Manhattan that sets music royalty fees when the parties involved can't agree—to determine the rates that Pandora must pay BMI members to use their work. The suit marks the first time that BMI has resorted to litigation over Internet music services. The suit comes two days after Pandora announced it had made a deal to buy KXMZ-FM, a radio station in Rapid City (SD) Pandora had said it believed that the move would allow it to pay the reduced rates that terrestrial radio broadcasters such as Clear Channel Communications pay to use music on their digital services, such as Clear Channel's iHeartRadio. In its lawsuit, BMI, which collects royalties for music publishers and songwriters when their works are played in public, called Pandora's radio-station acquisition a "stunt" and a "brazen effort to artificially drive down its license fees." BMI and its rival, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, or Ascap, say that Internet radio doesn't benefit music-rights holders in the same way that terrestrial radio does. In the suit, BMI said it is willing to accept a lower royalty rate from terrestrial radio stations' online services because they pay such significant fees for on-air broadcasts.

[Commentary] The Republican Party’s failure to invest in high-level technology and analytics in 2012 has become shorthand code for the party’s woes: this alone wasn’t the reason Mitt Romney lost, but it was emblematic of a party whose leaders had stopped innovating — in policy, messaging, or campaign tactics.

Last week, the Republican National Committee hired Andy Barkett, a senior Facebook engineer, as its new chief technology officer. The party is also pressing the reset button on its previously close relationship with Liberty Works, a Silicon Valley-led consortium that was to manage access to the GOP’s voter file. Barkett’s hiring — along with the RNC’s other reform-minded hires — shows that the party may finally be serious about stopping the brain drain of recent years and closing the innovation gap with the Democrats. Yet, while the broad outlines of the RNC’s technology initiatives have been greeted favorably, many of the details are still being defined. Ask most political operatives what those details should be, and you’ll get wildly different responses. One of the key promises made following the release of the party’s 2012 postmortem report was opening up the voter file to outside developers and allied groups to access and contribute back to in real time. This small technical change could go a long way towards solving the data sharing problems campaign staff have griped about for ages. Done right, it could seed a whole new technology ecosystem on the right.

[Ruffini is president of Engage, a digital strategy firm in Washington]

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) announced that the House Commerce Committee hearing room will be named in honor of former Committee Chairman John D. Dingell (D-MI). Rep Dingell has served in the U.S. House of Representatives since December 1955. Dingell served as Chairman from 1981 to 1994 and again from 2007 to 2008.