Obituary: Frank Fitter
Friday 30 September 2011
Frank Fitter, a stalwart of the economic services editorial department in London before turning to human resources and welfare duties, has died at the age of 79.
Fitter joined the commercial department as an office junior in 1948 and following his return to the company in 1952 after two years' national service with the Royal Air Force became a sub-editor, then copytaster. He was appointed evening editor in 1969, office manager in 1977, staff executive in 1979 and welfare officer in 1981.
He retired on 9 July 1987, his 55th birthday, after 38 years with Reuters. Fitter died on 14 September.
Fitter joined the commercial department as an office junior in 1948 and following his return to the company in 1952 after two years' national service with the Royal Air Force became a sub-editor, then copytaster. He was appointed evening editor in 1969, office manager in 1977, staff executive in 1979 and welfare officer in 1981.
He retired on 9 July 1987, his 55th birthday, after 38 years with Reuters. Fitter died on 14 September.
Obituary: Dennis Savage
Thursday 29 September 2011
Dennis Savage, a long-serving commodities journalist in Comtelburo and Reuters Economic Services, died on Sunday in the Journalists’ Charity home in Dorking, Surrey, where he had been resident since March. He was in his mid-80s.
Savage joined Reuters in 1950 and transferred to the company’s permanent disability scheme in 1978. He had worked in the City office in London editing the non-ferrous metals and sugar bulletins before combining the jobs of evening editor and filing editor.
The funeral will be at 2:30 pm on Tuesday 4 October at North-East Surrey Crematorium, Lower Morden Lane, Morden, Surrey.
Savage joined Reuters in 1950 and transferred to the company’s permanent disability scheme in 1978. He had worked in the City office in London editing the non-ferrous metals and sugar bulletins before combining the jobs of evening editor and filing editor.
The funeral will be at 2:30 pm on Tuesday 4 October at North-East Surrey Crematorium, Lower Morden Lane, Morden, Surrey.
Another major shake-up as Thomson Reuters disbands dual structure
Wednesday 28 September 2011
In the second major management shake-up in two months, Thomson Reuters disbanded its two-division structure on Wednesday and promoted a senior executive to the new role of chief operating officer. Tom Glocer remains chief executive. Robert Daleo, chief financial officer, will leave next year.
The company said James Smith, chief executive officer of the professional division, would become chief operating officer immediately. At the same time, the professional and markets divisions are disbanded and will “transition to a set of focused business units” reporting to head office.
Both Daleo and Smith were Thomson Corporation executives when the Toronto-based company bought Reuters in 2008.
“The changes we are announcing today will streamline our organization and enable us to work better across business units to achieve growth and capture operating efficiencies from scale,” said Glocer. “The professional markets in which we operate are marked by increasing collaboration among specialists and Thomson Reuters must operate with the speed and agility needed to serve these demanding professionals.”
Daleo, chief financial officer since 1998, will retire in July 2012 when he turns 63. Stephane Bello, chief financial officer of the professional division, will succeed him as chief financial officer of Thomson Reuters, effective 1 January 2012. Daleo will then serve as vice-chairman of the group until his retirement.
David Thomson, chairman of Thomson Reuters, said: “Bob Daleo has guided the financial operations of the company for more than a decade through three chief executives. Retirement has been anticipated for some time and we shall miss the presence of a trusted and valued colleague. Bob’s contributions to the businesses have been immense. Our evolution into a global electronic information company owes a great debt to him. Bob’s advice and leadership will be sorely missed, but those qualities remain in place over the months ahead to all our benefit.”
“Stephane Bello is the perfect choice to succeed Bob because of his strategic and analytical strengths, proven leadership abilities and deep knowledge of the company and our markets,” said Glocer. “He will work closely with Bob, Jim and me over the next several months to ensure a smooth transition and uphold the high standards of integrity and financial reporting set by Bob Daleo.”
Following the sudden departure in July of Devin Wenig, head of markets, Thomson Reuters promoted Smith, chief executive of the professional division that caters to lawyers, accountants and scientists, to the new role of chief operating officer.
The Financial Times reported that the latest moves take some burden from Glocer, who took hands-on control of markets after Wenig’s exit, which was seen as a sign of the group’s controlling shareholder, Canada’s Thomson family, exerting tighter control.
Glocer told the FT that the split into markets and professional divisions had made sense when Thomson Corporation bought Reuters and needed to concentrate on merging its financial data businesses without distracting its professional units.
“Certainly for the first two years it worked very well like that. This year, I concluded markets wasn’t coming out of the integration the way it needed to and I had to take the first step in July,” he said. “In the perfect world, markets would have been growing faster this year and I would have moved in an orderly way to this structure” in 2012, he said.
The FT said Smith’s promotion could elevate his standing as a possible internal successor to Glocer, who said: “He’s always been in the frame as far as I’m concerned, but I’m not planning to go anywhere.”
In a message to staff, Glocer said his strategic goals were simple: to work better across business units to meet the increasingly complex demands of customers and capture growth opportunities; to leverage Thomson Reuters’ scale and achieve efficiencies by building innovative technology platforms that can be shared across the company; and to square off against competitors as a whole company which is greater than the sum of its parts.
He said the priorities he set in July for the markets division of restarting the sales engine and resetting Eikon in the context of the company’s broader product strategy had not changed, nor had the goal of creating a strong performance culture.
“These last two months acting as both CEO of Thomson Reuters and CEO of the Markets division have convinced me of two important things. First, no matter what labels we apply to our units, we have great people who are eager to work together to better serve our customers and grow our company. Second, this must be a team effort but with clearly defined roles and accountability for performance. I am looking forward to working closely with Jim, Bob, Stephane and our other leaders to achieve success and excellence at Thomson Reuters.”
● SOURCE Reuters | Financial Times
The company said James Smith, chief executive officer of the professional division, would become chief operating officer immediately. At the same time, the professional and markets divisions are disbanded and will “transition to a set of focused business units” reporting to head office.
Both Daleo and Smith were Thomson Corporation executives when the Toronto-based company bought Reuters in 2008.
“The changes we are announcing today will streamline our organization and enable us to work better across business units to achieve growth and capture operating efficiencies from scale,” said Glocer. “The professional markets in which we operate are marked by increasing collaboration among specialists and Thomson Reuters must operate with the speed and agility needed to serve these demanding professionals.”
Daleo, chief financial officer since 1998, will retire in July 2012 when he turns 63. Stephane Bello, chief financial officer of the professional division, will succeed him as chief financial officer of Thomson Reuters, effective 1 January 2012. Daleo will then serve as vice-chairman of the group until his retirement.
David Thomson, chairman of Thomson Reuters, said: “Bob Daleo has guided the financial operations of the company for more than a decade through three chief executives. Retirement has been anticipated for some time and we shall miss the presence of a trusted and valued colleague. Bob’s contributions to the businesses have been immense. Our evolution into a global electronic information company owes a great debt to him. Bob’s advice and leadership will be sorely missed, but those qualities remain in place over the months ahead to all our benefit.”
“Stephane Bello is the perfect choice to succeed Bob because of his strategic and analytical strengths, proven leadership abilities and deep knowledge of the company and our markets,” said Glocer. “He will work closely with Bob, Jim and me over the next several months to ensure a smooth transition and uphold the high standards of integrity and financial reporting set by Bob Daleo.”
Following the sudden departure in July of Devin Wenig, head of markets, Thomson Reuters promoted Smith, chief executive of the professional division that caters to lawyers, accountants and scientists, to the new role of chief operating officer.
The Financial Times reported that the latest moves take some burden from Glocer, who took hands-on control of markets after Wenig’s exit, which was seen as a sign of the group’s controlling shareholder, Canada’s Thomson family, exerting tighter control.
Glocer told the FT that the split into markets and professional divisions had made sense when Thomson Corporation bought Reuters and needed to concentrate on merging its financial data businesses without distracting its professional units.
“Certainly for the first two years it worked very well like that. This year, I concluded markets wasn’t coming out of the integration the way it needed to and I had to take the first step in July,” he said. “In the perfect world, markets would have been growing faster this year and I would have moved in an orderly way to this structure” in 2012, he said.
The FT said Smith’s promotion could elevate his standing as a possible internal successor to Glocer, who said: “He’s always been in the frame as far as I’m concerned, but I’m not planning to go anywhere.”
In a message to staff, Glocer said his strategic goals were simple: to work better across business units to meet the increasingly complex demands of customers and capture growth opportunities; to leverage Thomson Reuters’ scale and achieve efficiencies by building innovative technology platforms that can be shared across the company; and to square off against competitors as a whole company which is greater than the sum of its parts.
He said the priorities he set in July for the markets division of restarting the sales engine and resetting Eikon in the context of the company’s broader product strategy had not changed, nor had the goal of creating a strong performance culture.
“These last two months acting as both CEO of Thomson Reuters and CEO of the Markets division have convinced me of two important things. First, no matter what labels we apply to our units, we have great people who are eager to work together to better serve our customers and grow our company. Second, this must be a team effort but with clearly defined roles and accountability for performance. I am looking forward to working closely with Jim, Bob, Stephane and our other leaders to achieve success and excellence at Thomson Reuters.”
● SOURCE Reuters | Financial Times
Obituary: Robert Eksuzyan
Saturday 24 September 2011
But for several generations of correspondents, this irascible, short-fused but utterly endearing ethnic Armenian was much more than just a fixer: his honesty and integrity – despite the ideological pressures he worked under until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 – made him a loyal and reliable friend. He had a clear devotion to Reuters, and a deep respect for the correspondents who worked for it and their families. He was a hilarious raconteur – and he loved to provoke an argument too. Rows were always conducted with gusto, made all the more entertaining by his erratic English, a language he adored but which, to his great frustration, he had never mastered. This was a source of much amusement, though, to his colleagues. As John Morrison, a former Moscow bureau chief in the 1980s, said: “I would love to have had a chance to explain to him the sense of ‘You had a good innings’.” Most of us ascribed his hot-headedness to his Armenian blood and his upbringing in Abkhazia, the now breakaway region of Georgia. And how he loved to provoke us all – even when he was nearing the end of his long service! I recall him arriving for work one morning when he was well into his 70s, and announcing to the editorial floor with a raised, clenched fist: “One day, Abkhazia will bring the United States to its knees!”
Bob Evans, his bureau chief for much of the Brezhnev period, says he was hired in 1964 by then bureau chief Sidney Weiland not so much for his English, which was clearly dodgy, but for his potential as a fixer. It was an inspired decision. Seated in the old Reuters office in a lugubrious Soviet building known by its acronym of Sad Sam (Sadovo-Samtyochnaya), he would argue for hours on the phone with Soviet bureaucrats to get access to sporting events and even political information. Trawling through the columns of the intimidating Soviet broadsheets of the day, he would pounce on scraps of buried information – or more often notice what was not said – and draw conclusions that would put correspondents on the trail of a news story. His leads often led to page one stories round the world.
Robert was intensely proud of his father, an Abkhaz-Armenian Red Army officer who survived Stalin’s pre-war military purges and went on to beat a war-time death sentence and service in a ‘punishment battalion’ from which he was not expected to come back alive. It was memories of his father, rehabilitated in the 1950s, that made Robert a patriot – and though he loved the company of Western correspondents and deeply respected Western values he was no push-over for empty anti-Soviet propaganda. Having worked all his life for British bureau chiefs, though, he had an extraordinary admiration for the British. After the defeat or Argentina in the 1982 Falklands war, he observed: “I have been telling people for ages round here that Britain would win. Nobody believed me.” A high point of his life was a trip to England, his first ever outside the Soviet Union, to spend a week in Editorial when Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika had made travel possible for ordinary Soviet citizens. To his astonishment he found “there was food in the shops even outside London as well!” Bob Evans had taken him on a Saturday stroll down the high street in Sutton, Surrey.
A universal character and himself a boy at heart, he loved the company of young people whom he always encouraged. With women, he was chivalry itself. He once chewed out a Western colleague for divulging the age of a female colleague whose birthday we were celebrating, and told off more than one bureau chief when he thought they were not paying enough attention to their wives.
The extraordinary tributes from his colleagues, drawing on vivid memories, speak of a remarkable life lived to the full.
Having spent most of his life combing through the Soviet or Russian press, clipping out articles for potential news stories and filing them, he never made the adjustment to the full-blooded computer age when it dawned at Reuters. He retreated more into himself in the office and took out a lot of his frustration on the hi-tech of the day which stubbornly remained beyond his reach. But he soldiered on through three office moves – and at least one stroke – ending his working days in the present premises of Berlin House, giving us always the warmth of his company and benefit of his historical recall which was so useful.
“He considered Reuters his home,” his grandson, also called Robert, said.
He retired in 2008, after a 40-year-career in Reuters interrupted only by a period in the mid-1970s when he was ordered by the KGB to move to another news organisation because he had become – as they told him – “too friendly” with our “bourgeois correspondents”. He was allowed to return three years later after our well-connected office driver Zhora Nikitin who, like all our Soviet staff, loved him too, intervened with the authorities. For a while, after retirement, he stayed on in Moscow with his wife Anya, but then they moved back to Gagra for his last years in the family house he inherited when his mother died. He continued to care for its surrounding mandarine orchard which he had looked after throughout his adult life.
RICHARD BALMFORTH
Reuters v Bloomberg battle 'may change news'
Thursday 22 September 2011
The battle for dominance between Reuters and Bloomberg may change the way news is gathered and distributed, a leading US media commentator says.
Peter Osnos, a former Washington Post correspondent, said the recent hiring of Alix Freedman, a Pulitzer prize-winning 27-year veteran of The Wall Street Journal, as global editor for ethics and standards was another signal that Thomson Reuters is in a major contest for dominance with its principal rival, Bloomberg.
Osnos is founder and editor at large of PublicAffairs books and vice-chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review. Writing in The Atlantic, he noted that Reuters editor-in-chief Stephen Adler said that in Freedman’s new job she will work “closely with reporters and editors on major stories, final-reading many signature pieces and holding us all to the high standards set out in Thomson Reuters Trust Principles and the Reuters Handbook of Journalism”.
Osnos also noted recent high-profile arrivals at Thomson Reuters and said Bloomberg had amassed a similarly impressive roster as it launches its opinion section and invests in its multiple news teams in Washington and around the world.
“The growth of Thomson Reuters since their merger in 2008 and the rise of Bloomberg … are major developments in journalism that aren’t fully recognized by the public at large because so much of their activity and income comes from financial data on terminals and in specialized packages,” he said. “Unlike the leading newspapers in this arena that also have formidable ranks of reporters, commentators and editors – the New York Times, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal – the lack of a daily anchor in print seems to reduce the visibility of their output in the traditional competition for attention in mainstream news circles.”
Because Bloomberg is privately owned, it is hard to know just how profitable it is, Osnos said, but every indication is that it has come through the prolonged financial crisis since 2008 without any meaningful loss of momentum.
“Thomson Reuters is a more complicated situation. According to a recent takeout in the Wall Street Journal, the Thomson family and its investment arm, Woodbridge, which controls the majority of shares in the enterprise, is ‘impatient with the company’s performance.’
Like Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters’ revenue is significantly tied to its sales of sophisticated and extensive material to Wall Street and to the international banking community through its markets division. Over the summer, Thomson Reuters restructured the markets division, leading to the departure of six top executives. The division now reports to CEO Tom Glocer. The stock price of Thomson Reuters has been lagging, and posted a 52-week low recently, a drop of almost 20 per cent this year, Osnos said.
“But assuming the shake-up on the financial side and the strengthening of its already formidable news operation gain the necessary traction, its competition with Bloomberg will be a vitally important aspect of how journalism is adapting to the continuing turbulence in the industry …
“With so much uncertainty elsewhere in the news business, the robust competition between Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg looms especially large in the overall future of news gathering. With thousands of reporters and strong leadership teams, both companies are bound to be factors in the news business in the digital age, even if their overwhelming profitability is tied to financial data.” Osnos said The Wall Street Journal's loss of Freedman was much more than a job shift. “It is a measure of bigger changes in how news and data are being collected, paid for, and distributed.”
● SOURCE The Atlantic
Peter Osnos, a former Washington Post correspondent, said the recent hiring of Alix Freedman, a Pulitzer prize-winning 27-year veteran of The Wall Street Journal, as global editor for ethics and standards was another signal that Thomson Reuters is in a major contest for dominance with its principal rival, Bloomberg.
Osnos is founder and editor at large of PublicAffairs books and vice-chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review. Writing in The Atlantic, he noted that Reuters editor-in-chief Stephen Adler said that in Freedman’s new job she will work “closely with reporters and editors on major stories, final-reading many signature pieces and holding us all to the high standards set out in Thomson Reuters Trust Principles and the Reuters Handbook of Journalism”.
Osnos also noted recent high-profile arrivals at Thomson Reuters and said Bloomberg had amassed a similarly impressive roster as it launches its opinion section and invests in its multiple news teams in Washington and around the world.
“The growth of Thomson Reuters since their merger in 2008 and the rise of Bloomberg … are major developments in journalism that aren’t fully recognized by the public at large because so much of their activity and income comes from financial data on terminals and in specialized packages,” he said. “Unlike the leading newspapers in this arena that also have formidable ranks of reporters, commentators and editors – the New York Times, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal – the lack of a daily anchor in print seems to reduce the visibility of their output in the traditional competition for attention in mainstream news circles.”
Because Bloomberg is privately owned, it is hard to know just how profitable it is, Osnos said, but every indication is that it has come through the prolonged financial crisis since 2008 without any meaningful loss of momentum.
“Thomson Reuters is a more complicated situation. According to a recent takeout in the Wall Street Journal, the Thomson family and its investment arm, Woodbridge, which controls the majority of shares in the enterprise, is ‘impatient with the company’s performance.’
Like Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters’ revenue is significantly tied to its sales of sophisticated and extensive material to Wall Street and to the international banking community through its markets division. Over the summer, Thomson Reuters restructured the markets division, leading to the departure of six top executives. The division now reports to CEO Tom Glocer. The stock price of Thomson Reuters has been lagging, and posted a 52-week low recently, a drop of almost 20 per cent this year, Osnos said.
“But assuming the shake-up on the financial side and the strengthening of its already formidable news operation gain the necessary traction, its competition with Bloomberg will be a vitally important aspect of how journalism is adapting to the continuing turbulence in the industry …
“With so much uncertainty elsewhere in the news business, the robust competition between Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg looms especially large in the overall future of news gathering. With thousands of reporters and strong leadership teams, both companies are bound to be factors in the news business in the digital age, even if their overwhelming profitability is tied to financial data.” Osnos said The Wall Street Journal's loss of Freedman was much more than a job shift. “It is a measure of bigger changes in how news and data are being collected, paid for, and distributed.”
● SOURCE The Atlantic
Police drop sources order
Tuesday 20 September 2011
London's Metropolitan police wanted a court order to force the newspaper's reporters to reveal confidential sources for articles disclosing that murdered teenager Milly Dowler's phone was hacked on behalf of the News of the World. They claimed a reporter could have incited a source to break the Official Secrets Act.
Tuesday’s Scotland Yard announcement came not long after hundreds of media people discussed the police initiative and other press freedom issues. The event, chaired by Reuters editor-at-large Sir Harold Evans, was attended by a top-level contingent from Thomson Reuters including chairman David Thomson, CEO Tom Glocer, pictured, editor-in-chief Stephen Adler, and other editors and executives.
Police left open the possibility the so-called production order could be applied for again, but a senior police source said: “It’s off the agenda. There will be some hard reflection. This was a decision made in good faith, but with no appreciation for the wider consequences. Obviously the last thing we want to do is to get into a big fight with the media. We do not want to interfere with journalists.”
Editors speaking at the Thomson Reuters event recognised Fleet Street had to mend its ways but appealed to the government not to crush Britain's cherished free speech with draconian laws. Top lawyers, editors and politicians agreed during the debate on “The Press We Deserve” that Britain’s existing Press Complaints Commission, a voluntary self-regulatory body, had failed in its duty to keep the press honest but differed sharply over the solution.
Evans said the British press was in its greatest danger since two journalists were jailed for not revealing their sources in 1963.
Editor’s note: The original version of this report headed “Police drop sources order after Thomson Reuters debate” erroneously implied that the police announcement was a consequence of the Thomson Reuters debate. It was not. It was a coincidence. Mea culpa.
Photo: Julie Mollins
● CLICK to view Reuters video
● SOURCE The Guardian | Reuters
Exciting times ahead for Reuters, says Stephen Adler
Tuesday 20 September 2011
It is in the Trust Principles that Reuters is supposed to be the world’s best news organisation, and in the present environment, with other businesses weakening and with Reuters’ journalistic organisation strengthening, it is uniquely placed to be really powerful and really strong, Adler said.
Visiting London before returning to New York after a trip to Tokyo, Singapore and Beijing, he said Reuters was the best news organisation in the world in terms of being fast, accurate and fair. But for deep, “inciseful” storytelling, “we’re not nearly the best in the world”.
He cited the Financial Times and The Economist in Britain and The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal in the United States as news organisations people would typically say were the best.
“People, when they say that, are thinking about memorability, about the big stories, about the things that really change people’s thinking. So there’s enormous praise for fast, accurate and fair but I think we’re living in a world that needs both.”
Adler, a former Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek editor appointed Reuters editor-in-chief in February, said Reuters’ editorial has a good, strong budget, though funding was not unlimited. “But our budget is so substantially bigger than anything any other news organisation I’ve ever seen that, when I came in and I saw the budget I said, you know, this is something I can work with…
“The signal I get from the top of the company is they want to own the best news organisation in the world and they want to invest in it. They think it’s important to business generally and they think it’s important to the company’s place in the world.”
The aim is to reach a high-end audience in terms of people interested in ideas, decision makers thinking about what’s going on in the world in a serious way. “That’s the tier we want to reach.”
Adler said Reuters was heading towards having a very strong digital placement across pretty much any device whether it be an iPhone, iPad or none-Apple device, the web or mobile. “We don’t want anybody else to be better. Where we are is we’re in an interim period. We’ve done a little bit to refresh the website, it’s a little better than it was before, but some time next year I think you’re going to see a dramatic improvement in delivery of Reuters news pretty much across every platform ... whether you end up having to pay for it or not is kind of a business model question but we’re going to dramatically improve it.”
Adler acknowledged concern that Reuters was being seen as a New York-based organisation that looks out on the world from the United States. He said: “We need to be strong in the United States because it’s the world’s largest economy and because the political system is really important and because it’s a regulatory environment affecting the entire world and the fact we’re truly committed to being global we have to be a whole lot better in the US than we are. I think that’s the first principle.”
Several questions put to Adler reflected a perception that his recent senior appointments were either overwhelmingly American or did not seem to value international or wire service experience. In response he mentioned hires from Dow Jones news wires, from Asia, and from Europe. “So I think the premise is wrong. The fact is I have hired a lot of senior people who I’ve worked with in the past, I think they’re some of the best journalists in the world, I think it’s the best leadership team in any news organisation in the world, but it is significantly more diverse than it was characterised.”
He dismissed talk about Reuters being “The Wall Street Journal in exile”. Hiring two successive page-one editors from that newspaper should be viewed as a good thing and not a bad thing.
Adler said he found Reuters had got a little lax on training, which had been an enormous virtue of the company. At some point there came to be no general training budget and training, which was basically given to the bureaus.
“So what we’ve done is we’ve re-created a centralised training budget and requiring the ethics course to be taken every two years to stay fresh while re-introducing a boot camp that everybody has to go to … basically, when you join the organisation you have to have mandatory training.”
Does this also apply to the new hires or columnists?
Adler said anybody who comes in on staff has to go through the mandatory training and a lot of the new columnists were on staff. He could not say whether such training would also apply to columnists who were not on staff and would look into it.
“What I really don’t like is the merging of opinion and news in a news story and we do watch out for that,” he said.
“We want to be relevant in a contemporary media world and we want to do it in a way that’s respectful of and consistent with the Reuters tradition but not one that makes us irrelevant going forward.”
Referring to talk about current Reuters journalists being up in arms about the agency’s direction, Adler said he did not see that at all. “I see an enormous amount of excitement and receptivity to a desire to do frankly stronger and more ambitious journalism. I think the staff is on fire; they’re really excited, and everywhere I go there is a sense that we’re going to a world of extraordinarily ambitious journalism and we’re going to raise the level of journalism and there’s tremendous energy and excitement around that.”
Photo: Corrie Parsonson
● CLICK to view edited video highlights of the meeting
Harold Evans on Rupert Murdoch 'the stiletto'
Monday 19 September 2011
Describing media ownership rivalry between Murdoch and Robert Maxwell, one-time owner of Mirror Group Newspapers, Evans writes: “Maxwell was the meat axe, a muddler, a volatile sentimentalist, a bully and a crook. Murdoch is the stiletto, a man of method, a cold-eyed manipulator.” Both media barons were directors of Reuters in the 1980s through their British newspaper interests.
Evans is a former editor of The Sunday Times and The Times, then owned by Murdoch who took over Times Newspapers in 1981 from the Thomson Organisation. Thomson was formed in 1978 as a holding company for the publishing, travel and natural resources empire founded by Canadian entrepreneur Roy Thomson, who became a British citizen in order to be ennobled in 1964 as first Baron Thomson of Fleet. The organisation joined Thomson Newspapers to become the Thomson Corporation in 1989.
Evans writes that he has come to regard the judgments he made in 1981, when Murdoch sought to acquire control of The Times and The Sunday Times, as the worst in his professional career.
He was appointed Reuters editor-at-large in June. “Editor-at-large means you're free to create as much havoc as they will tolerate,” he said at the time.
● CLICK to read Harold Evans’ new preface in full as published by The Guardian
● Harold Evans’ books
Thais call for new probe into Reuters TV cameraman's death
Saturday 17 September 2011
A statement by the Department of Special Investigation on Friday marked a dramatic reversal from February when the agency's chief concluded the Japanese journalist and others could not have been shot by soldiers.
Muramoto, 43, was killed by a high-velocity bullet wound to the chest while covering clashes between “red shirt” protesters and troops in Bangkok’s old quarter on 10 April 2010. He was among 25 people, including soldiers, who died that night. Mysterious gunmen clad in black were seen among the red-shirted protesters, firing at troops.
Witness accounts in a preliminary DSI investigation seen by Reuters in December said the fatal shot came from the direction of troops. A witness was quoted as saying he saw “a flash from a gun barrel of a soldier”, then watched Muramoto fall after he was shot in the chest while filming the security forces.
But on 27 February, DSI Director-General Tharit Pengdit issued a new statement that contradicted the preliminary report, saying the bullet came from an AK-47 assault rifle, which did not match weapons used by soldiers in the area that day.
The Bangkok Post reported that, before Tharit made the claim soldiers were not involved, the army chief of staff had paid him a visit “to complain about an initial department finding”. The DSI denied the report.
It was unclear what caused the DSI chief to change position again and assert soldiers may have played a role in civilian deaths – an extraordinarily sensitive issue in Thailand where the military is extremely powerful and deeply politicised.
“We want the court to be the one who investigates this so that the result can be accepted by all,” Tharit told Reuters. “The DSI has insisted from the beginning that we found soldiers may have been involved in the deaths.”
Tharit said his agency would send the cases of the 13 civilians killed to police on Monday. Police would then submit the findings to prosecutors, who would bring the cases to Thailand’s Criminal Court for a final investigation.
“We welcome this development and have always wanted to see this case fully investigated in a transparent manner. Muramoto-san’s family and Reuters colleagues deserve to know how this tragedy occurred and who was behind it,” Stephen Adler, editor-in-chief, said in a statement.
Muramoto was based in Tokyo and had gone to Bangkok to help cover the anti-government red shirt protests from March to mid-May last year. The DSI has identified the cases of Muramoto and 12 other civilians, killed over the course of the unrest, for its initial investigation.
● SOURCE Reuters
Reuters aims to become best in the world – Stephen Adler
Friday 16 September 2011
“Indeed, to be fully effective as a global organisation, we have to be as influential and as well known in the US – the world’s largest economy – as we are elsewhere in the world,” editor-in-chief Stephen Adler, pictured, said in an interview published on Friday. “Our mandate at Reuters is to become the best journalism organisation in the world,” he said.
Reuters’ recent hiring spree, including a handful of Pulitzer Prize-winners, has quickly attracted the media world’s attention, the US news website and blog Huffington Post reported. At the same time, it said, Reuters has relaunched its ● website to better showcase its vast reporting in a more consumer-friendly way, stepped up social media efforts and increased analysis, opinion and enterprise reporting.
Reuters is not giving up on breaking financial news that paying subscribers want or reporting international wire stories that cash-strapped newspapers, lacking foreign budgets, increasingly need, The Huffington Post said. However, deputy editor-in-chief Paul Ingrassia says the company wants to go beyond breaking news. “I think what we’re making a bigger effort to do is not only be first with events,” Ingrassia said, “but very quickly and analytically ... report the meaning and impact of those events.”
By giving Adler a mandate to make big moves, Reuters may hope to avoid being lapped by the Bloomberg behemoth, the website said. When asked whether Bloomberg is Reuters’ main competitor, Adler rattled off the many subscription platforms that Reuters offers its users, including traders, investment bankers, lawyers, tax specialists and pharmaceutical researchers. Reuters, he said, also reaches one billion people a day through the agency business used by newspapers, magazines and websites.
“Our audience base is thus quite different from anyone else’s, as is our revenue model,” Adler said. “The better we are, the more our journalism is worth to all of our customers. And we aim to be the best. And, yes, Bloomberg is certainly a leading competitor.”
As part of Reuters’ hiring spree, The Huffington Post noted that last week alone the agency hired former Slate media critic Jack Shafer, Pulitzer-winning Wall Street Journal veteran editor Alix Freedman, and Bay Citizen editor-in-chief and Industry Standard founding editor Jonathan Weber.
The website said that a year ago, media watchers wouldn’t have imagined such a slew of hires coming back-to-back. But Adler – a former deputy managing editor at the Wall Street Journal and Businessweek editor-in-chief just before Bloomberg’s acquisition of the magazine – started making big moves shortly after becoming Reuters editor-in-chief earlier this year.
Adler’s new editorial leadership team was looking like the Wall Street Journal in exile, it said. Ingrassia spent over three decades at the Journal and Dow Jones, where he won a Pulitzer for his coverage of the auto industry and later ran Dow Jones Newswires. Three other former Journal staffers are on board, too: former chief operating officer Stuart Karle, data editor Reginald Chua, and enterprise editor Michael Williams.
“Adler’s leadership team isn’t all Journal ex-pats,” The Huffington Post said. Adler hired Jim Gaines, a former Time Inc. executive most recently at News International’s iPad application The Daily and Harold Evans joined as an editor-at-large. “And some members of the team are old Reuters hands. Chrystia Freeland, who joined Reuters last year, became editor of Thomson Reuters Digital. In May, James Ledbetter moved from ● Reuters.com to become Reuters inaugural op-ed editor…
“When my position was created, there became a much stronger mandate from above to go out and get big names and put the full weight of Reuters behind it,” Ledbetter said. Since he took over, Reuters has hired not only Shafer but two former New York Times reporters with Pulitzers on their resumés: David Rohde and David Cay Johnston. “It’s getting to be quite a stable,” Ledbetter said.
While recent buzz may help raise Reuters’ profile outside, The Huffington Post said there has been some grumbling inside the company. Staffers say there are concerns that too much emphasis is being placed on big-name outside hires at the expense of cultivating talent within. Managers also worry about holding onto their positions in the newsroom amid editorial reshuffling and executives' shifting priorities.”
Staffers say other management changes have gone over well, including an emphasis on getting out of the office more to build deeper source relationships and the dismantling of the long-running beat system that only rewarded stories impacting stock prices. One staffer said it seems clear management wants to build a news organisation that creates a lot more buzz and prestige.
Some staffers believe that management expects to win Pulitzers in the coming years, following Reuters’ greater investment in enterprise and investigative reporting.
Both Adler and Ingrassia, however, balk at any suggestion that there’s a Pulitzer mandate. “Prize-hunting, per se, is not the objective here,” Ingrassia said.
“As I’ve said to the staff, we want to do work that is so memorable and so distinguished that it is recognised by our peers,” Adler said. “Winning awards is one measure of excellence but not an end in itself. We also want people talking about our journalism, sharing it with each other, and using it to make smart decisions and achieve fresh insights.”
● SOURCE The Huffington Post
Reuters to expand opinion offering
Thursday 15 September 2011
Reuters is substantially increasing the volume of its opinion articles and wants to offer commentary on all sorts of issues and news stories as part of an effort to make it more than just a wire service, one of its new editors said in an interview.
There is a role within the traditional Reuters marketplace for opinion and commentary, said James Ledbetter, who joined a year ago as website editor from US online magazine Slate.
Now Reuters op-ed editor, he told media magazine Adweek: “We are in the process of substantially increasing the volume of opinion material that we produce and the range of the issues that we want to offer an opinion about. We want to get ourselves in the midst of all sorts of issues and news stories that we know Reuters’ readers, existing and potential, care about … We really want to be a leader in the space of opinion and commentary, which has never really been an explicit goal for Reuters in the past.”
Ledbetter was asked about Reuters’ “reliable model in being a straightforward wire service, without worrying about unique content or opinion pieces”. He replied: “I don’t see the two as in any way mutually exclusive. You don’t have to look very hard at the staffing levels of American newspapers to realize that places where you might have had local columnists or a local opinion staff commissioning pieces — in many places those jobs no longer exist. We think that there is a role within the traditional Reuters marketplace for opinion and commentary.
Adweek said some people had expressed concern that big-name writers were going to go to Reuters and then disappearing. Ledbetter said: “Well, there’s a genuine issue there that’s not in any way exclusive to us, which is, ‘How do you make sure that the fantastic voices that you’ve gone to all this trouble and expense to hire get heard?’ Certainly, there are opinion aggregation websites where there are so many contributors that it’s hard to even name a single one. It is a genuine issue, but we have had some design changes in recent months that should help us prevent that kind of obscurity.”
● SOURCE Adweek
There is a role within the traditional Reuters marketplace for opinion and commentary, said James Ledbetter, who joined a year ago as website editor from US online magazine Slate.
Now Reuters op-ed editor, he told media magazine Adweek: “We are in the process of substantially increasing the volume of opinion material that we produce and the range of the issues that we want to offer an opinion about. We want to get ourselves in the midst of all sorts of issues and news stories that we know Reuters’ readers, existing and potential, care about … We really want to be a leader in the space of opinion and commentary, which has never really been an explicit goal for Reuters in the past.”
Ledbetter was asked about Reuters’ “reliable model in being a straightforward wire service, without worrying about unique content or opinion pieces”. He replied: “I don’t see the two as in any way mutually exclusive. You don’t have to look very hard at the staffing levels of American newspapers to realize that places where you might have had local columnists or a local opinion staff commissioning pieces — in many places those jobs no longer exist. We think that there is a role within the traditional Reuters marketplace for opinion and commentary.
Adweek said some people had expressed concern that big-name writers were going to go to Reuters and then disappearing. Ledbetter said: “Well, there’s a genuine issue there that’s not in any way exclusive to us, which is, ‘How do you make sure that the fantastic voices that you’ve gone to all this trouble and expense to hire get heard?’ Certainly, there are opinion aggregation websites where there are so many contributors that it’s hard to even name a single one. It is a genuine issue, but we have had some design changes in recent months that should help us prevent that kind of obscurity.”
● SOURCE Adweek
Thomson Reuters close to selling healthcare business
Thursday 15 September 2011
Thomson Reuters is close to selling its healthcare business to an Indian company for up to $750 million, an Indian newspaper reported on Thursday.
Business Standard newspaper said Infosys Technologies, India’s second largest software company, was the front-runner for the business and an announcement was expected shortly. Both Thomson Reuters and Infosys declined to comment.
Thomson Reuters said in June it planned to sell the business, which supplies healthcare data and analysis to companies, government agencies and health professionals. It had revenue of about $450 million in 2010.
“It's public knowledge that we are selling the healthcare division but we’re not making any comment on the process,” a Thomson Reuters spokesman said.
● SOURCE Reuters
Business Standard newspaper said Infosys Technologies, India’s second largest software company, was the front-runner for the business and an announcement was expected shortly. Both Thomson Reuters and Infosys declined to comment.
Thomson Reuters said in June it planned to sell the business, which supplies healthcare data and analysis to companies, government agencies and health professionals. It had revenue of about $450 million in 2010.
“It's public knowledge that we are selling the healthcare division but we’re not making any comment on the process,” a Thomson Reuters spokesman said.
● SOURCE Reuters
Pensioners press for automatic inflation increases
Monday 12 September 2011
The Pension Review Group is once again focusing attention on its campaign to win automatic inflation rises for all Reuters pensioners.
It has contacted the chairman of the Reuters Pension Fund trustees, Greg Meekings, and requested that members should be consulted before he signs a new deal with Thomson Reuters, which he expects to do some time in the next six months.
“Our concern is that pensioners will be presented with a solution … which may not be acceptable to us," the group’s chair Angela Dean said in a letter to Meekings.
Pensioners have had increases in only three of the last nine years, and the value of their pensions has been eroded by almost 20 per cent because of inflation.
A growing number of the 8,000 members of the RPF are becoming extremely elderly and frail, living on small pensions and facing real hardship as inflation bites into what little they get, the group said.
Thomson Reuters is one of the few major companies in Britain to have suspended inflation rises for its final salary pensioners. Most have inflation-proofing written into their pension fund rules.
CEO Tom Glocer has expressed sympathy for the plight of Reuters pensioners. “We … look forward to reaching a solution that meets our common desire to secure pensioners’ retirements,” he wrote to the PRG last year.
The rules of the current pensions agreement, established in 2006, allow for discretionary increases only when the Fund is in surplus. That agreement should have ended in 2010 but will remain in force until a new deal is negotiated with the company, which should be by next March.
● SOURCE Pension Review Group
It has contacted the chairman of the Reuters Pension Fund trustees, Greg Meekings, and requested that members should be consulted before he signs a new deal with Thomson Reuters, which he expects to do some time in the next six months.
“Our concern is that pensioners will be presented with a solution … which may not be acceptable to us," the group’s chair Angela Dean said in a letter to Meekings.
Pensioners have had increases in only three of the last nine years, and the value of their pensions has been eroded by almost 20 per cent because of inflation.
A growing number of the 8,000 members of the RPF are becoming extremely elderly and frail, living on small pensions and facing real hardship as inflation bites into what little they get, the group said.
Thomson Reuters is one of the few major companies in Britain to have suspended inflation rises for its final salary pensioners. Most have inflation-proofing written into their pension fund rules.
CEO Tom Glocer has expressed sympathy for the plight of Reuters pensioners. “We … look forward to reaching a solution that meets our common desire to secure pensioners’ retirements,” he wrote to the PRG last year.
The rules of the current pensions agreement, established in 2006, allow for discretionary increases only when the Fund is in surplus. That agreement should have ended in 2010 but will remain in force until a new deal is negotiated with the company, which should be by next March.
● SOURCE Pension Review Group
The good old days, they're now - Tom Glocer
Sunday 11 September 2011
In the first update to his blog after what he says has been a busy summer, Thomson Reuters’ chief executive ruminates on an earlier, seemingly superior period in a perfect past “when kids were better dressed and better behaved, contemporary music did not sound like screaming Banshees and adults could make it through a meal without tweeting, texting or updating their online status”.
He writes: “In our crisis-laden times, we would all do well to remember the blessings of our present Golden Age. I have been writing for some time about the dangers of the over-indebted, no growth western economies, but I believe we are in only the early years of an Information Revolution which will outpace the Industrial Revolution. The threat of terrorism and regional violence remains real; however, we have lived more than half a century without nuclear or world war. Finally, we have global warming, depleting natural resources and super bugs, but infant mortality and life expectancy have improved in most parts of the world, and we are poised for scientific breakthroughs in green energy and the fight against cancer.
“These truly are the good old days.”
● SOURCE Tom Glocer's blog
New US West Coast bureau chief straight out of the bay
Friday 09 September 2011
Reuters’ new US West Coast bureau chief is Jonathan Weber, editor-in-chief of ● The Bay Citizen, a local website launched last year in San Francisco.
He will lead Reuters’ file from the West with a special focus on covering technology, the entertainment industry and the region's political and economic story, a Reuters announcement said. He will be based in San Francisco.
Among previous roles Weber worked for the Los Angeles Times for eight years and was co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Industry Standard, launched in 1998 as a business magazine covering technology and the Internet. There he worked with James Ledbetter, now Reuters op-ed editor.
San Francisco bureau chief Peter Henderson, who joined Reuters in 1996 as a correspondent in Moscow, will remain in San Francisco in the new role of West Coast enterprise editor.
● SOURCE SF Appeal
He will lead Reuters’ file from the West with a special focus on covering technology, the entertainment industry and the region's political and economic story, a Reuters announcement said. He will be based in San Francisco.
Among previous roles Weber worked for the Los Angeles Times for eight years and was co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Industry Standard, launched in 1998 as a business magazine covering technology and the Internet. There he worked with James Ledbetter, now Reuters op-ed editor.
San Francisco bureau chief Peter Henderson, who joined Reuters in 1996 as a correspondent in Moscow, will remain in San Francisco in the new role of West Coast enterprise editor.
● SOURCE SF Appeal
Another WSJ editor takes senior Reuters role
Wednesday 07 September 2011
Deputy managing editor and page one editor at the Journal, Freedman previously oversaw ethics and standards of high-impact stories in the newspaper and on the Dow Jones newswires. She won a Pulitzer prize in 1996 for her tobacco industry reporting at the Journal, which she joined in 1984 in Philadelphia. She became the newspaper’s page one editor in May when Michael Williams left to become Reuters global enterprise editor.
At Reuters she replaces Jim Gaines who joined in April and this week was appointed Americas editor. Previously the ethics job was held by Dean Wright who left the company in April.
Stephen Adler, a former WSJ editor who became Reuters editor-in-chief in February, said Freedman was one of the world's most esteemed journalists. He told staff: “At Reuters, Alix will help fuel our drive for journalistic excellence by working closely with reporters and editors on major stories, final-reading many signature pieces, and holding us all to the high standards set out in the Thomson Reuters Trust Principles and the Reuters Handbook of Journalism. A long-time leader of ethics training at the Journal, Alix will also collaborate with our training team to make sure we provide the best possible instruction.”
● SOURCE The New York Observer | Media Bistro | Huffington Post
TRI hits new 52-week low in New York
Wednesday 07 September 2011
Thomson Reuters shares hit a new 52-week low as they traded at $28.75, below the previous 52-week low of $28.91. Average volume has been 1.1 million shares over the past 30 days.
The stock closed at $28.90 in New York and C$28.59 in Toronto on Tuesday.
US financial blog The Street said the shares were down 19.8 per cent year to date as of the close of trading on Friday.
The Street Ratings recently downgraded Thomson Reuters to hold from buy. It cited strengths in multiple areas, such as compelling growth in net income, revenue growth and impressive record of earnings per share growth. “However, as a counter to these strengths, we also find weaknesses including a generally disappointing performance in the stock itself, generally poor debt management and poor profit margins.”
● SOURCE The Street
The stock closed at $28.90 in New York and C$28.59 in Toronto on Tuesday.
US financial blog The Street said the shares were down 19.8 per cent year to date as of the close of trading on Friday.
The Street Ratings recently downgraded Thomson Reuters to hold from buy. It cited strengths in multiple areas, such as compelling growth in net income, revenue growth and impressive record of earnings per share growth. “However, as a counter to these strengths, we also find weaknesses including a generally disappointing performance in the stock itself, generally poor debt management and poor profit margins.”
● SOURCE The Street
Ousted markets chief Devin Wenig joins eBay
Tuesday 06 September 2011
Wenig, 44, a close associate of chief executive Tom Glocer, headed Thomson Reuters’ markets division, which includes Reuters news agency. He also led the integration of Reuters following its 2008 takeover by Thomson.
Announcing Wenig’s hire, eBay trumpeted his business and strategic acumen. He will report to president and CEO John Donahoe, who said “Devin’s deep global operating and leadership experience, combined with his record of delivering innovation and of understanding global technology platforms and communities, makes him uniquely qualified to lead our eBay Marketplaces business”.
Postscript: Website eCommerceBytes said eBay wooed Wenig with a $13.5 million package, comprising annual salary of $750,000 with bonuses; $2.4 million in stock options; $1.8 million in restricted stock units; a target award of $1.8 million performance based restricted stock units; another award of restricted stock units valued at $6 million and participation in eBay’s incentive plan with a target bonus of 100 per cent of base salary.
Wenig, moving from the US east coast to the west, tweeted: “For sale on eBay. 3 dozen really nice ties!”
● SOURCE PaidContent | eCommerceBytes
Reuters picks up retrenched media columnist
Tuesday 06 September 2011
Jack Shafer, pictured, based in Washington, will cover media and politics for Reuters. Prior to working at The Washington Post Company’s ● Slate website Shafer spent 11 years editing two alternative weeklies – San Francisco Weekly and Washington City Paper.
Editor-in-chief Stephen Adler said in an internal announcement on Tuesday: “Jack’s arrival at Reuters adds to a rapidly strengthening opinion and analysis bench. Award-winning writers David Cay Johnston and David Rohde have recently joined Reuters as columnists, Felix Salmon continues to set the pace among financial bloggers, and the Reuters column line-up includes regular contributions from Larry Summers and Mohamed El-Erian.”
New York magazine reported: “The deep-pocketed news service, which under the digital leadership of Chrystia Freeland has been on a hiring spree, began talking to Shafer in June, well before the surprise Slate layoff. No wonder Shafer's post-layoff interviews were so jovial.”
Shafer, who was dropped by Slate only last month, said on Twitter that Reuters editors “interrupted my plans to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, and criticize after dinner with an offer — which I’ve accepted — to write about media and politics for Reuters. I’m damn happy. Thanks, oh, my tweeps.”
● SOURCE New York Magazine | Poynter | Adweek
Reuters names former magazine editor as Americas editor
Tuesday 06 September 2011
Editor-in-chief Stephen Adler and his deputy Paul Ingrassia said in an internal message to editorial staff: “We’re delighted to announce that our search for an Americas Editor has reached a most welcome conclusion. Jim Gaines, whom we’ve all come to know and respect in recent months, will be moving into the Americas role.”
Gaines, pictured, joined Reuters in April as editor for ethics, standards and innovation after a brief stint at News Corp’s The Daily, an iPad news application. He spent most of his career at Time Inc, where his last job was corporate editor. In his new role he will direct and coordinate coverage of major global stories when Ingrassia, who also joined in April, is absent. Gaines will continue to oversee, with Reinhard Krause in London, Reuters’ global photography department.
Previously Gaines worked for Newsweek, radio station WNET, a digital multimedia general interest magazine called FLYP, and his own multimedia publishing company in Washington where he lives.
● SOURCE Reuters
Ex-Reuters men move into top jobs at FT
Friday 02 September 2011
Barber, who also becomes associate editor, was previously the FT’s bureau chief in Brussels, Rome and Frankfurt. He joined the paper in 1997 as European news editor. Barber left Reuters in 1989 to join The Independent after serving as a correspondent in New York, Washington, Warsaw, Moscow and Belgrade.
Carnegy, the FT’s executive editor, also becomes the paper’s new Paris bureau chief. His previous roles during 20 years at the FT include world news editor, financial news editor, international company news editor and deputy managing editor. He began his journalism career in 1978 at Reuters, where he stayed for seven years, working in the UK, Ireland, South Africa, Turkey and the Middle East.
FT editor Lionel Barber said: “Hugh Carnegy and Tony Barber bring vast amounts of experience to their new roles at a time when the eurozone crisis remains one of the most important stories in the world.”
● SOURCE Press Gazette
Bugs aside, Reuters is halfway to full editorial system rollout
Thursday 01 September 2011
The new Lynx Editor system, which replaces the decades-old System 77/Coyote, has been successfully adopted in Asia and much of Europe, the Middle East and Africa. More than half of Reuters’ text journalists now rely almost exclusively on Lynx Editor to write, edit and file copy.
This is a big achievement, Adrian Dickson, pictured, global head, news product, said in a message to editorial staff.
Deployment in Europe is due to be completed by the end of September before moving to the Americas in the last months of the year. Remaining national services in Asia, the Middle East and Europe as well as a handful of smaller teams will start migrating to Lynx Editor in the first quarter of 2012.
“If all goes well by mid 2012 all Reuters journalists will be on the same editing system, capable of sharing stories and communicating with each other via screentop for the first time ever,” Dickson said.
“We’re only halfway there but already it’s been a long journey and not without its challenges. Twice in the last month Lynx users in Asia were forced to shift back briefly to System 77/Coyote following a systems outage that temporarily prevented journalists from using Lynx to edit and file copy.”
The first outage began with a small hardware failure that created instability in a data centre software system. The problem was compounded by errors in incident management. The second was caused by “errors in the release of a database script designed to optimize Lynx Editor performance … Fortunately technical teams learned the lessons of the previous incident and this time they were fast to shift users on to a support system.”
Dickson said: “These setbacks are never welcome. But they’re not unusual in projects of this magnitude given their complexity and spread across several geographies. Nor should we be surprised if we face similar incidents in the future. Over time journalist, support and development teams will become more practiced at anticipating bugs and at reacting quickly and effectively when they arise…
“We remain confident Lynx has the resiliency to manage the 10,000 plus stories that are filed over Reuters systems on most weekdays. We are also convinced Lynx is robust enough to continue to grow with us as demand for our news increases in the future.”
● SOURCE Reuters
How Reuters beat Irene
Thursday 01 September 2011
Editor-in-chief Stephen Adler, thanking text, visuals staff and stringers for a strong performance, did not say how many photographers were out in the storm that shut down New York last weekend. The story provided a great opportunity to showcase Reuters’ breadth and expertise, he said.
“Some of our journalists hunkered down near Irene’s path to chronicle the storm’s destruction. TV put out 23 live signals over three days, totaling more than 20 hours of live cover. We had more photographers in motion on this story than any other in recent memory. Text reported on the human impact of the story, the effects on power companies and their customers, the mass transit lockdown in New York City, the likely impact on Wall Street trading, the corporate winners and losers, the flooding across New Jersey and Vermont, and the costs to federal and state government, the economy and the insurance companies.
“Staff in Miami, Washington, New York and Boston, tracked the storm’s path, reported on Irene’s effects locally, wrote our trunk stories, blogged for ● Reuters.com, edited and filed to our clients, and directed our coverage. Many spent the weekend in local hotels to ensure they could get to the office, some returning home later to deal with flooded basements. Other U.S. bureaus not directly involved in coverage and editing centers in London and Asia volunteered to help if necessary. And the editorial technical and facilities staff worked with us every step of the way to ensure we had what we needed to cover the story.”
● SOURCE Reuters
