Michael Wolff : Bloomberg's perfect post-mayor job

• Michael Bloomberg's term as New York's mayor ends in 2013
• He has been rumored to be interested in buying the 'Financial Times'
• Why not 'The New York Times' and the 'Economist', too?

Editor's Note: Pearson does not have a mandatory retirement age for executives and directors. A previous version said otherwise.

Michael Bloomberg's future is about to become a new chapter in the relationship of rich men to the media business.

The New York Times reported last week — lending an air of inevitability to rumors that many others (including me) have previously noted — that Bloomberg is out to buy the Financial Times.

This was portrayed as a synergistic acquisition. But, in fact, it may be more about one man's restless and opportunistic effort to stay in the game and build a new base of prominence and leadership.

The Times refrained from reporting on another acquisition target that is of interest to the New York mayor and his close advisers: The New York Times itself.

Call it planning for a fourth term — a permanent one. At 70, the mayor of New York, who had to change the law to get a third and final term, which ends in 2013, needs a new role to replace the public stature, the wide influence and the unique independence he's had running the city.

It's a brutal fact of American public life that, leaving political or high corporate office without another big job on the short-term horizon, you become flotsam and jetsam awfully fast. For someone as preternaturally successful as Michael Bloomberg, it's an almost existential question: What's the point of it all if you can so easily find yourself functionally unemployed?

Of course, Bloomberg could court high government appointment, but it's hard to imagine him as an adviser or employee in someone else's government. He could return to running Bloomberg L.P., his vastly successful financial data and news business, but that seems hopelessly been there, done that.

He has a philanthropic foundation that's substantially larger, for instance, than the one that continues to give Bill Clinton relevance. But Clinton in that role is an evangelist and promoter, which would not temperamentally suit the more imperial Bloomberg.

Bloomberg, though, is in an obviously different class from virtually everybody else in America who has ever developed a taste for public life: He has $25 billion.

In a sense, his next act is less limited by convention, practicalities or opportunities than by imagination.

He, and the smart and ambitious people around him (who also don't want to find themselves in coddled obscurity) seem to be imagining something unique: creating the most significant private voice on earth.

Rich men have often bought newspapers to satisfy their desires to be heard and respected -- or feared. But rich men seldom get the best newspapers. Media, at least media that's not in last-ditch straits, has a built-in snobbishness.

Michael Bloomberg, however, with rare bona fides, an unmatched fortune and the resources of a huge information business, is not just an eager buyer, but, arguably, the ideal buyer for the world's best titles.

Marjorie Scardino, CEO of Pearson, which owns the FT, and who recently announced her retirement, had long sworn never to sell the newspaper, even as Pearson moved its focus from media to education. Curiously, part of the reason Scardino could not find the support to continue as CEO was an eagerness within the company to entertain an offer for the FT from such a gold-standard buyer as Bloomberg.

It isn't every day you get a prestige buyer for prestige assets.

On Bloomberg's part, what he would get with the FT, as the Wall Street Journal has tilted away from business coverage, is the premier financial newspaper in the world. The FT, arguably Britain's leading broadsheet, would give him, an inveterate anglophile, heightened entry into British society. Too, owning the FT, would give him a 50% interest in the Economist. Bloomberg is said to covet for himself the estimable role of chairman of the Economist.

As it happens, Bloomberg's interest in the FT was sparked by his interest in the New York Times. Rupert Murdoch, a great purveyor of media gossip, ever-eager to cause trouble for his nemesis, the Times, started to spread the rumor in 2008 that Bloomberg might be after the paper. Bloomberg, thinking his second term as mayor would be his last, suddenly found his interest piqued by the rumor. After concluding that the voting-structure of the Times would make an acquisition improbable, Bloomberg asked the follow-up question: "What about the FT?"

Four years of conscientious pursuit later, the FT appears to be available. The Times seems ever-more available, too — and on a fortuitous timetable. While the Times has sold enough assets to keep it afloat in the short term, its likely decline in advertising revenue will put it in inevitable peril again, probably right around the time Bloomberg leaves office.

Michael Bloomberg is practically a central-casting savior for the Times. There may not be a man so rich, so middle-of-the-road, so of New York, so of the newspaper generation (wealthy enough to support a few more generations of quality newspapers) as him. He's a plausible protector, perhaps the only plausible one.

The FT, The New York Times, the Economist — and there is also a bit of talk about adding The Times in London, Murdoch's money-losing prestige paper there — could become a new Anglo-New York, business-centric, ever-moderate, quasi public-interest entity underwritten by Bloomberg.

There are certainly worse fates for each of these publications, and it's doubtful that Bloomberg could build himself a greater monument or more fitting office to go to every day.

Michael Wolff can be reached at michael@burnrate.com, and on Twitter @MichaelWolffNYC.