Editorial
Burying the Coyote
Wednesday 14 March 2012
Since many of us had a love/hate relationship with the Coyote, partly due to the constant technical tweaks which stretched our non-geeky brains to the limit, can I suggest you chuck an example out of the window at Canary Wharf to mark its demise [● Reuters prepares to bury Coyote]? As a courtesy to the City boys lurking beneath, perhaps that old beige body should be painted brilliant white so they can see it coming. If this sounds a tad extreme, you should know that the practice of throwing recalcitrant typewriters out of the window was not uncommon at the AP office in Farringdon Street back in the sixties. Admittedly, this was normally carried out in a drunken rage. I’m told you don’t get many of them on the Reuters World Desk these days.
Paul Smurthwaite
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Paul Smurthwaite
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Burying the Coyote
Wednesday 14 March 2012
Nick Carter was right to question the dates given for Reuters use of Coyotes [● Burying the Coyote]. I understand that SII’s System 77 was first rolled out in January 1998.
There were a number of systems used by editorial, I seem to remember, prior to Reuters first use of SII systems in 82/3. The first was implemented in 1968, albeit with some teething problems!
David Kaye, senior project executive on most of Reuters editorial systems
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There were a number of systems used by editorial, I seem to remember, prior to Reuters first use of SII systems in 82/3. The first was implemented in 1968, albeit with some teething problems!
David Kaye, senior project executive on most of Reuters editorial systems
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Burying the Coyote
Wednesday 14 March 2012
Stuart Karle is right that the Coyote terminal, System/55 and System/77 have done Reuters proud for far longer than any of us expected at the start, but it’s not quite since the 1970s [● Reuters prepares to bury Coyote]. After a long period of checking and testing, we did not really get into it until 1982 and it was some time after that before Reuters’ first systems were up and running. I suggest a working Coyote, a copy of the user manual and an explanatory historical sign be presented to the print museum in Bride Lane, near where the Reuter Society meets.
Nick Carter
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Nick Carter
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Playing in the Big Leagues (The newsonomics of Reuters' Americanisation)
Tuesday 21 June 2011
Whilst media clients may only represent five per cent of revenues, what people seem to forget is the importance of the news content in real time services: the news that moves markets. I would suspect even today most screen users are taking a news service as this is critical to their business. The revenue associated with these services is not counted in the five per cent (or never used to be).
John Atkinson
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John Atkinson
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Playing in the Big Leagues (The newsonomics of Reuters' Americanisation)
Sunday 19 June 2011
My name is Matt Beagle III, and I come from Akron, Ohio. I’m an expert on the media by virtue of academic and professional training but also because I’ve devoured media content since I was old enough to read. Although I’ve never worked for The New York Times or The Washington Post, I’ve read them since I was a junior in high school and preparing to apply to colleges. Plus I have some friends who work for both of those papers and others at other major newspapers, magazines and television stations.
It’s no secret that the mainstream media are in crisis. Many of my friends in the media are out of jobs. Sometimes I feel a twinge of guilt when I realize I’m making a living off of writing about a dying industry, but somebody has to do it, and in the end I may help it resurrect itself.
It’s hard not to pine for the good old days. When I was in grade school, our media leaders were healthy, journalists had steady jobs and the public was happy. We had two newspapers in my home city, one that came out in the morning and the other in the afternoon. They took different editorial slants – one was Democratic, the other Republican – but they co-existed peacefully, and many families including ours took both papers. There was something reassuring about the slap of the paper as the delivery boy would hurl it onto our front porch.
We didn’t buy The New York Times back then except on Sundays. But the best columnists, the ones who set the policy agenda, were syndicated and carried by one or the other of our local newspapers. I was too young to read Walter Lippmann, but James Reston carried the banner after him and both were cut from the same cloth. In those days a citizen could trust the best columnists to tell them the truth and how to vote.
Something very fundamental changed when our town and many others lost one of their two newspapers. I consider it a watershed moment in our media history. I know many attribute it to the loss of industries that employed workers who were the traditional buyers of afternoon papers. To that extent, they were victims of structural changes in our economy. (Brought on by the Japanese and the Koreans, but that’s another story.) I wonder if the end of two-newspaper towns did not presage the de-intellectualization of our populace, or something like that.
TV was important but could co-exist with newspapers. There were three channels and for all intents and purposes each had but one national and one local news broadcast a day (no one watched at midday). All of them were good, although there was something more venerable about CBS and Walter Cronkite. NBC’s logo – a peacock – always bugged me, and ABC was an upstart. But as I said, they co-existed, and I don’t think they greatly harmed newspapers.
Of course all of that changed with cable television. Ever since cable, I have the feeling that we have lost control of our media. The breakup of AT&T meant the same for telecommunications. It was easier and things seemed a lot more stable when you had a heavy black phone with a rotary dial, a TV set with three channels (and maybe a Canadian station for hockey games) and newspapers with want ad sections, good sports sections and owners who cared about editorial quality and the bottom line.
So I actually saw our media industry heading downhill before the Internet, which has only hastened its demise. I call it the fragmentation of the media industry. Basically there are not enough people to support all of these media entities, and only the strong will survive. But of course people no longer demand the same quality, so there is no guarantee that the best journalism will win out.
On the other hand, I’m well aware that Facebook and Twitter cannot be ignored. They are very much on the playing field now. Politicians and corporations have understood that to reach the voter and consumer, you’ve got to use social media. I’m not a big user myself, but I recognize they can’t be ignored.
One of the ironies of the Rep. Weiner saga is that he fell on his own sword, so to speak. He had made good use of social media in his campaigning, and it was social media that brought him down. Life is full of ironies.
Now the other day I was reading The Wall Street Journal and I came across an interesting article. (I don’t read all of the Journal, but I know it’s something you have to pay attention to. I like the “What’s News” column, for example.) It talked about how the media company Thomson Reuters was making a major effort to crack the U.S. media market. Everyone knows that Reuters has been around for a long time but it’s not quite a household name in the U.S. In fact, finding someone who can pronounce Reuters properly (“Roy-ters”) is not easy, even on the East Coast, where I live.
I started looking into Thomson Reuters. I came across a couple of amazing facts which took me quite by surprise. First, it has 2,900 journalists. By my calculation, that’s more journalists than any other news organization in the world. I have no idea how there could be so many Reuters journalists and I’ve never met one of them.
Actually, that’s not true. I know quite a few of the new editorial managers in Reuters (you can drop “Thomson” when talking about the news side of the group) because many of them have worked in the past for such venerable media groups as The Wall Street Journal and Business Week. Reuters wants to succeed in the U.S. market, and so like the owners of a professional sports team, they are buying up existing talent who know how to play the game on U.S. soil.
The other amazing thing I discovered is that Thomson Reuters makes a great deal of money and that most of it comes from the financial sector. Media clients account for less than 5% of its revenues. So this is a news juggernaut that does not depend on fickle consumers and is not at the mercy of abrupt changes in the media market. It’s basically like Bloomberg, only older and it’s owner is not a mayor.
Still, it’s got to irk Thomson Reuters managers to be so big and yet so unknown in the most powerful country in the world. It’s understandable that they want to be part of the media elite in the United States and to be mentioned in the same breath as The New York Times and CNN. There’s nothing worse than having second-rate guests at the White House dinner.
But Reuters is going to have to get in the trenches with the rest of the media, and that’s not going to be easy. Where were they on the Anthony Weiner story – what I’ve dubbed the Battle of the Bulge? Were they first with the pictures? First with news that he would not step down? And first with news that he would? How many people re-Tweeted the Reuters Tweet?
Reuters might be big and strong, but if it’s not cited by Fox and CNN at the same time on the big breaking story of the day, it will never be a household name and its journalists will always labor in the shadows. There was only one Michael Jackson, for sure, but stories like his death are the meat and potatoes of the media market. Reuters better get ready for the next one. While it’s at it, it might want to look into talk that he never did die.
Nelson Graves
vbnbnbn
It’s no secret that the mainstream media are in crisis. Many of my friends in the media are out of jobs. Sometimes I feel a twinge of guilt when I realize I’m making a living off of writing about a dying industry, but somebody has to do it, and in the end I may help it resurrect itself.
It’s hard not to pine for the good old days. When I was in grade school, our media leaders were healthy, journalists had steady jobs and the public was happy. We had two newspapers in my home city, one that came out in the morning and the other in the afternoon. They took different editorial slants – one was Democratic, the other Republican – but they co-existed peacefully, and many families including ours took both papers. There was something reassuring about the slap of the paper as the delivery boy would hurl it onto our front porch.
We didn’t buy The New York Times back then except on Sundays. But the best columnists, the ones who set the policy agenda, were syndicated and carried by one or the other of our local newspapers. I was too young to read Walter Lippmann, but James Reston carried the banner after him and both were cut from the same cloth. In those days a citizen could trust the best columnists to tell them the truth and how to vote.
Something very fundamental changed when our town and many others lost one of their two newspapers. I consider it a watershed moment in our media history. I know many attribute it to the loss of industries that employed workers who were the traditional buyers of afternoon papers. To that extent, they were victims of structural changes in our economy. (Brought on by the Japanese and the Koreans, but that’s another story.) I wonder if the end of two-newspaper towns did not presage the de-intellectualization of our populace, or something like that.
TV was important but could co-exist with newspapers. There were three channels and for all intents and purposes each had but one national and one local news broadcast a day (no one watched at midday). All of them were good, although there was something more venerable about CBS and Walter Cronkite. NBC’s logo – a peacock – always bugged me, and ABC was an upstart. But as I said, they co-existed, and I don’t think they greatly harmed newspapers.
Of course all of that changed with cable television. Ever since cable, I have the feeling that we have lost control of our media. The breakup of AT&T meant the same for telecommunications. It was easier and things seemed a lot more stable when you had a heavy black phone with a rotary dial, a TV set with three channels (and maybe a Canadian station for hockey games) and newspapers with want ad sections, good sports sections and owners who cared about editorial quality and the bottom line.
So I actually saw our media industry heading downhill before the Internet, which has only hastened its demise. I call it the fragmentation of the media industry. Basically there are not enough people to support all of these media entities, and only the strong will survive. But of course people no longer demand the same quality, so there is no guarantee that the best journalism will win out.
On the other hand, I’m well aware that Facebook and Twitter cannot be ignored. They are very much on the playing field now. Politicians and corporations have understood that to reach the voter and consumer, you’ve got to use social media. I’m not a big user myself, but I recognize they can’t be ignored.
One of the ironies of the Rep. Weiner saga is that he fell on his own sword, so to speak. He had made good use of social media in his campaigning, and it was social media that brought him down. Life is full of ironies.
Now the other day I was reading The Wall Street Journal and I came across an interesting article. (I don’t read all of the Journal, but I know it’s something you have to pay attention to. I like the “What’s News” column, for example.) It talked about how the media company Thomson Reuters was making a major effort to crack the U.S. media market. Everyone knows that Reuters has been around for a long time but it’s not quite a household name in the U.S. In fact, finding someone who can pronounce Reuters properly (“Roy-ters”) is not easy, even on the East Coast, where I live.
I started looking into Thomson Reuters. I came across a couple of amazing facts which took me quite by surprise. First, it has 2,900 journalists. By my calculation, that’s more journalists than any other news organization in the world. I have no idea how there could be so many Reuters journalists and I’ve never met one of them.
Actually, that’s not true. I know quite a few of the new editorial managers in Reuters (you can drop “Thomson” when talking about the news side of the group) because many of them have worked in the past for such venerable media groups as The Wall Street Journal and Business Week. Reuters wants to succeed in the U.S. market, and so like the owners of a professional sports team, they are buying up existing talent who know how to play the game on U.S. soil.
The other amazing thing I discovered is that Thomson Reuters makes a great deal of money and that most of it comes from the financial sector. Media clients account for less than 5% of its revenues. So this is a news juggernaut that does not depend on fickle consumers and is not at the mercy of abrupt changes in the media market. It’s basically like Bloomberg, only older and it’s owner is not a mayor.
Still, it’s got to irk Thomson Reuters managers to be so big and yet so unknown in the most powerful country in the world. It’s understandable that they want to be part of the media elite in the United States and to be mentioned in the same breath as The New York Times and CNN. There’s nothing worse than having second-rate guests at the White House dinner.
But Reuters is going to have to get in the trenches with the rest of the media, and that’s not going to be easy. Where were they on the Anthony Weiner story – what I’ve dubbed the Battle of the Bulge? Were they first with the pictures? First with news that he would not step down? And first with news that he would? How many people re-Tweeted the Reuters Tweet?
Reuters might be big and strong, but if it’s not cited by Fox and CNN at the same time on the big breaking story of the day, it will never be a household name and its journalists will always labor in the shadows. There was only one Michael Jackson, for sure, but stories like his death are the meat and potatoes of the media market. Reuters better get ready for the next one. While it’s at it, it might want to look into talk that he never did die.
Nelson Graves
vbnbnbn
The Reuter Christmas Anthem
Wednesday 08 June 2011
I wonder whether anyone remembers the Reuter Christmas Anthem and if they can identify the long-forgotten sub-editor who wrote it in 1943. It was reprinted in Reuters World No 33 in December 1985, contributed by Alfred Geiringer, then 74, former head of Reuters Commercial Services. He couldn’t remember the sub-editor’s name but did recall that she often handled stories from the Russian front during World War II and that “she died young and there was a child for whom Reuters staff made themselves responsible in some way for a time”. He said the reference to “editors who shout” was aimed at Muriel Penn, who joined Reuters in 1931 as a sub-editor and retired at the end of 1969.
The Reuter Christmas Anthem
O Lord Grant us our daily news,
And give us time to pick and choose,
And feature what we find.
Grant us the gift of prophecy
And let the opposition be
A day or two behind.
Deliver us from Foreign names,
From censorship and libel-claims
And editors who shout.
Grant us the gift of prophecy
And make your great events agree
With what we’ve just put out.
Persuade the ‘Mail’ and the ‘Express’
To quote themselves a little less
And us a little more –
And when we end, remember well:
We have already dealt with ‘hell’
And quite enough – before.
Grant us the gift of prophecy
And get us rights to cable free
Until our day is done.
And grant us when our time is due
A quite exclusive interview
Slugged Snapfull
Doomsday 1.
David Betts
In the penultimate stanza ‘hell’ refers to the Hellschreiber, forerunner of the radio teleprinter, which produced the bulk of German, Russian and Italian copy at that time – Editor.
vbnbnbn
The Reuter Christmas Anthem
O Lord Grant us our daily news,
And give us time to pick and choose,
And feature what we find.
Grant us the gift of prophecy
And let the opposition be
A day or two behind.
Deliver us from Foreign names,
From censorship and libel-claims
And editors who shout.
Grant us the gift of prophecy
And make your great events agree
With what we’ve just put out.
Persuade the ‘Mail’ and the ‘Express’
To quote themselves a little less
And us a little more –
And when we end, remember well:
We have already dealt with ‘hell’
And quite enough – before.
Grant us the gift of prophecy
And get us rights to cable free
Until our day is done.
And grant us when our time is due
A quite exclusive interview
Slugged Snapfull
Doomsday 1.
David Betts
In the penultimate stanza ‘hell’ refers to the Hellschreiber, forerunner of the radio teleprinter, which produced the bulk of German, Russian and Italian copy at that time – Editor.
vbnbnbn
Back to the future
Tuesday 24 May 2011
To John Baggaley’s comment about the Nicosia desk, I would just add: If not now, when?
Graham Colville
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Graham Colville
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Back to the future
Monday 23 May 2011
For those of us who have been around long enough the headline on the latest (newest) reshuffle, BACK TO THE FUTURE, was perfect. Perhaps when they move the Middle East Africa desk back to Nicosia you can use PLUS CA CHANGE.
John Baggaley
John Baggaley
Future news network
Tuesday 16 March 2010
I see Zaid Rashdan’s point, but I'm not convinced. Here's why. Organisations should focus on what they're good at, and get good at other stuff they need to do to stay healthy and get even better at what they are good at. But there is a fine line. If organisations stray too far from their core they spread themselves thin, and often wither. Since the 1970s Reuters has built its non-news business on the back of its stellar journalistic reputation. But as a company, Reuters (or better its executives since the era of its stock market introduction) failed to realise that news gathering was the real strength – and that the new gizmos and transaction technologies and the deal-oriented info that flowed on these systems were a corollary, and not the strategic core – or unique selling proposition (USP), as management theory calls it. And after Reuters became a listed company, it has seemingly consistently failed to develop a strong strategy. A near-monopoly in the trading rooms, it was like a turtle on its back when Bloomberg showed up as competition in the non-news arena. Now follow the social networks. I can't see it helping much. I could see Thomson Reuters as a strong independent player, and thus indispensable partner to the companies building the social media world – but only if it doesn't dilute its offering: news content which is reported, edited and produced to the highest standards. Because that is becoming a real rarity.
Bjorn Edlund
Bjorn Edlund
Future news network
Monday 15 March 2010
I think this step [● Reuters media chief outlines vision for future news network] is inevitable; it’s a natural reaction to any traditional media, I am only surprised that it took so long. The emergence of virtual environments, like a second life, or a new awakening, in an extraordinary on-line world is around us, exploding in number of users, volume of content, and topics. The sheer amount of content available on the web in terms of news reports, pictures, videos and blogs has exploded. As Chris Ahearn said “Media is not a one-way street anymore” It has become a news source itself that cannot be ignored. No one company can do it alone.
Zaid Rashdan
Zaid Rashdan
Future news network
Sunday 14 March 2010
Project Apollo [● Reuters media chief outlines vision for future news network] sounds desperate, like so much talk about media these days. Content is just something to talk about in the new world, but unless content is generated, there is nothing to talk about. And the world's formerly greatest news agency needs, in my view, to find better ways to fight for the value of the news/content it produces. How content is tagged and clouded and shared many-to-many on social media platforms hardly seems like something Reuters should focus on. The agency went astray a long time ago, when it thought technology was its core rather than content.
Bjorn Edlund
Bjorn Edlund
