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<title>RSS Feed</title><link>http://www.thebaron.info/index.html</link><description>News from The Baron</description><dc:language>en</dc:language><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><dc:rights>Copyright &#xa9; 2008-2010 The Baron &#x7c; All rights reserved</dc:rights><dc:date>2012-01-19T13:12:34+00:00</dc:date><admin:generatorAgent rdf:resource="http://www.realmacsoftware.com/" />
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<lastBuildDate>Thu, 19 Jan 2012 23:20:56 +0000</lastBuildDate><item><title>Reuters launches YouTube channel aimed at consumer TV market</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Reuters TV</category><dc:date>2012-01-19T13:12:34+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/956e7ce1280c41941651a28d864ec991-637.php#unique-entry-id-637</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/956e7ce1280c41941651a28d864ec991-637.php#unique-entry-id-637</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Reuters has launched a YouTube channel called Reuters TV covering hard news, finance, politics, technology and special investigations.


Reuters said the channel marks its entry into the &ldquo;rapidly growing business of online video programming&rdquo; and that it employs a &ldquo;creative editing style that is suited for internet programming and does not mimic traditional TV&rdquo;.


&ldquo;This deal with YouTube gives Reuters a way to showcase our collection of talented journalists and compelling video from around the world,&rdquo; said Dan Colarusso, who joined Reuters as global head of programming in November from Bloomberg Television where he was managing editor.   &ldquo;It will offer unique insights and images that other media companies simply can&rsquo;t match.&rdquo;


The new shows were developed by global executive producer Barclay Palmer.   Reuters said &ldquo;They highlight a high-energy, high-quality production style that is unique to any business news broadcasts on traditional television.&rdquo;


The 10 programmes featured on the channel are


● Reuters Investigates, featuring investigative journalism and special reports from around the world


● The Trail, with political reporters covering the presidential candidates on the campaign trail


● Felix TV, with finance blogger Felix Salmon


● Media Bite, featuring Peter Lauria, editor of technology, media and telecommunications


● Tech Tonic, with Anthony De Rosa, Reuters Digital&rsquo;s social media editor


● Freeland File, with digital editor Chrystia Freeland interviewing top newsmakers


● Fast Forward, hosted by Chrystia Freeland and featuring Reuters&rsquo; top commentators and journalists


● Money Clip, with Lauren Young, personal finance editor and former editor at BusinessWeek and SmartMoney


● Rough Cuts, with Jen Rogers, showcasing news video that video journalists shoot around the world


● Decoder, explaining the key topics in the news.


● SOURCE Thomson Reuters


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>CEO James Smith appointed a Thomson Reuters director</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>James Smith</category><category>Thomson Reuters</category><category>Tom Glocer</category><dc:date>2012-01-19T14:24:46+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/f7209ef4a93c40aefcf1f203a72752f7-636.php#unique-entry-id-636</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/f7209ef4a93c40aefcf1f203a72752f7-636.php#unique-entry-id-636</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[James Smith, Thomson Reuters&rsquo; new chief executive, has been appointed to the board of directors, the company announced on Thursday.


Smith, 52, succeeded Tom Glocer, also 52, as CEO on 1 January after three months as chief operating officer.   Previously, he had been chief executive officer of the group&rsquo;s professional division where he oversaw the legal, tax & accounting and intellectual property & science businesses.   Smith joined the Thomson Newspaper group in 1987.


● SOURCE Thomson Reuters


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Another challenging year for Thomson Reuters - CEO James Smith</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Thomson Reuters</category><category>James Smith</category><category>Tom Glocer</category><dc:date>2012-01-19T17:04:50+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/c3134def28fe02eda78c462ccebd4bfd-635.php#unique-entry-id-635</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/c3134def28fe02eda78c462ccebd4bfd-635.php#unique-entry-id-635</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Two weeks into his new job as Thomson Reuters chief executive, James Smith, pictured, warned staff on Wednesday that 2012 will be another challenging year.&nbsp;  Market conditions remain uncertain in many places and quite difficult in others.&nbsp;  The lagging nature of the group&rsquo;s subscription-based business model means that it takes time to turn the ship, especially in choppy seas, he said in a message heralding the beginning of a new year and what he called a new era.


&ldquo;During my break, I could not help but reflect on the opportunity and the responsibility of leading Thomson Reuters as CEO,&rdquo; Smith told the group&rsquo;s 55,000 employees.&nbsp;  &ldquo;In thinking about the best way to begin, it was helpful to dream about where I wanted to end.&nbsp;  What do I want Thomson Reuters to be known for when my tenure as CEO has ended?


&ldquo;I want us to be known for:


&ldquo;● Our intimate understanding of customers, their needs and how we can help them achieve their business goals;


&ldquo;● The quality of our products;


&ldquo;● The excellence of our customer service;


&ldquo;● The caliber, character and engagement of our people;


&ldquo;● And a level of teamwork that makes possible a truly &lsquo;boundaryless&rsquo; organization, where the whole delivers far more than just the sum of its parts.


&ldquo;If we can accomplish all that, the financial results will take care of themselves.&rdquo;


To do that, however, would need change in the way some things are done and focus on new measurements of success.


&ldquo;In the coming weeks, expect to hear more about how we will set targets and keep track of our progress in critical areas like&nbsp;competitive position&nbsp;and customer satisfaction.&nbsp;  We will elevate the dialog surrounding new product development and sales effectiveness.&nbsp;  We will bring renewed commitment to the development of our people and to improving the diversity of our workforce.&nbsp;  And we will address aspects of our performance culture to make sure we all celebrate and share in each other&rsquo;s successes.&rdquo;


Smith, who took over from Tom Glocer at the turn of the year, added that there would be plenty of tactical priorities and key initiatives to focus on in the coming year.   All of them would reflect the long-range goals he had set out.


&ldquo;I have no doubt that 2012 will be another challenging year.&nbsp;  Market conditions remain uncertain in many places and quite difficult in others.&nbsp;  The lagging nature of our subscription-based business model means that it takes time to turn the ship, especially in choppy seas.


&ldquo;But regardless of the short-term challenges, I am confident that we have begun laying the foundation for a successful future.&nbsp;  As I reflected over my holiday break on all the changes we announced at the end of 2011, I could not think of one decision I would have changed.&nbsp;  The senior team is in place.&nbsp;  It has never been stronger, nor more committed to mutual success&hellip;


&ldquo;I have never been more confident of our ability to succeed in the long term.&nbsp;  Our best days are ahead of us.&rdquo;


● SOURCE Thomson Reuters


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Obituary: Allan Dowd</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Obituary</category><dc:date>2012-01-17T23:03:36+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/74c1924119cb43c1d56d63a077e80b05-634.php#unique-entry-id-634</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/74c1924119cb43c1d56d63a077e80b05-634.php#unique-entry-id-634</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Dedicated master of quirk Allan Dowd, pictured, died this month in a Vancouver hospital at the age of 52.   Allan, who delighted in the oddball stories that everyone loves to read, joined Reuters in Vancouver in 1998 after several years working in Maine as a stringer for Reuters, Maine Public Radio and other news organisations.   Born in Rochester, New York, where his mother still lives, Allan was an old-school Reuters all-rounder, able to tackle any story that might come up including business, commodities and sports.   But he was happiest with politics, general news and brights, where he really made his mark on the news file.   His colleagues speak fondly of his dry humour, and of his stories.   There was the tale about the sasquatch, and whether it had any connection to the UFO, or the one of the single feet that washed up on BC coasts &ndash; four right feet and one left foot, according to a 2008 story &ndash; and where they might be from.   He could write with sensitivity and tenacity, as shown by his years of coverage of Vancouver&rsquo;s notorious case of dozens of missing women, and the gruesome trial of murderer Willie Pickton.


&nbsp;


Allan went to his doctor with what he thought was a mysterious, hard-to-shake cold in July, just weeks after reporting on the rioting that erupted when Vancouver lost in the finals of the Stanley Cup.   It turned out to be a particularly aggressive form of lymphoma, and he died on 10 January.   His mother, and his sister Laura were with him.   Special thanks from the Reuters family to all the Vancouver journalists who stepped in to help when Allan fell sick, but especially to his Reuters colleague Nicole Mordant.


Janet Guttsman


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>FT awards Devin Wenig&#x2c; ex-markets CEO&#x2c; for jargon</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Devin Wenig</category><dc:date>2012-01-12T10:31:47+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/740aec2d0ddc9a42f66d6eb800587674-633.php#unique-entry-id-633</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/740aec2d0ddc9a42f66d6eb800587674-633.php#unique-entry-id-633</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Devin Wenig, the former markets division chief executive who left Thomson Reuters abruptly last July after slower than expected Q2 growth, has been named by the Financial Times as a winner of its annual jargon awards.


Wenig, pictured, receives the FT&rsquo;s so-called guff award for the most spurious use of percentages over 100 per cent, said the newspaper&rsquo;s associate editor, Lucy Kellaway. 


Now eBay&rsquo;s president of global marketplaces business, &ldquo;He said he was a mere &lsquo;1,000 per cent committed&rsquo; to his new job but added an explanation that craftily kept up the mathematical theme.   &lsquo;At this point in my career, a big platform, big brand, and global impact were all part of what I was solving for in prioritising opportunities&rsquo;&rdquo;.


● SOURCE Financial Times | AUDIO


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Reuters hires Pulitzer winner and deputy social media editor</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Steve Secklow</category><category>Matthew Keys</category><category>Alix Freedman</category><category>Stephen Adler</category><category>Anthony De Rosa</category><dc:date>2012-01-09T18:32:34+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/cde9dbce5729b29c4649cb2ceca2f3ef-632.php#unique-entry-id-632</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/cde9dbce5729b29c4649cb2ceca2f3ef-632.php#unique-entry-id-632</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Steve Secklow, pictured, a former Reuters stringer in Philadelphia who became a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal, is joining Reuters in London as a member of the expanding investigations team.   Matthew Keys, another award-winner, has been hired as deputy social media editor.


Secklow shared a 2007 Pulitzer with three Journal colleagues for a series on backdated stock options.   In 2003 he and Alix Freedman, now Reuters&rsquo; global editor for ethics and standards, were Pulitzer finalists for their series on corruption in the United Nations&rsquo; oil-for-food programme.   He has also won or shared the George Polk journalism award three times, including in 1996 for exposing a Ponzi scheme in a story edited by Stephen Adler, now Reuters&rsquo; editor-in-chief.


Keys, who will be based in New York and report to social media editor Anthony De Rosa, will produce online content for ● Reuters.com, expand Reuters&rsquo; presence on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Tumblr and new platforms, and play a key role in helping to train Reuters journalists on best practices in social media.


He was recently nominated for an Online News Association award in the category of &ldquo;Breaking News excellence&rdquo; for his coverage of the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan.   Before joining Reuters he was an online content producer and manager for KTXL FOX40, a Tribune Broadcasting television station in Sacramento, and an online news producer for KGO-TV, the ABC affiliate in San Francisco.


● SOURCE Talking Biz News


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Thomson Reuters remains committed to Eikon - product chief</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Eikon</category><category>Philip Brittan</category><category>Tom Glocer</category><category>Devin Wenig</category><dc:date>2011-12-29T23:55:09+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/ab6d1fd515ed34e9e3f33da65a064da5-631.php#unique-entry-id-631</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/ab6d1fd515ed34e9e3f33da65a064da5-631.php#unique-entry-id-631</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Thomson Reuters is committed to Eikon, the market data desktop launched with much fanfare in 2010 but poorly received by its target customers, and will be rolling out new capabilities in 2012, the company executive in charge of the product said in an interview on Thursday.


&ldquo;It is still clear to me that the product is the future of the company and that commitment has never waned,&rdquo; said Philip Brittan, who joined the firm in May and now runs its Eikon group as global head of desktop/mobile platform.   &ldquo;I think it&rsquo;s exactly the right strategy to bring all of our customers onto one single platform and allow our customers to leverage that set of assets in a much more powerful and flexible way.&rdquo;


Market observers say a confluence of factors contributed to Eikon&rsquo;s sluggish start, the website Wall Street & Technology said.


It said that with the news that chief executive Tom Glocer is stepping down, the industry is questioning what went wrong with Eikon.   Thomson Reuters had high expectations for it, reportedly investing close to $1 billion in the product, holding launch celebrations in 78 offices worldwide and live events in 14 cities that brought in Wall Street decision makers for demonstrations and executive speeches.   An advertising campaign &ndash; the company&rsquo;s largest in its history &ndash; touted the product as a market data platform for &ldquo;The New Eikons of Finance&rdquo;.


All seemed to be going well.   Members of the executive team even rang the New York Stock Exchange opening bell on October 4, 2010, and Devin Wenig, CEO of the markets division, gave interviews.


&ldquo;Nine months later Wenig unexpectedly quit along with five key members of staff, after reportedly being asked to make faster and more extensive structural changes than planned.   A few months later Glocer expressed regret for the fast pace of Eikon&rsquo;s launch, and one month after that in early December, the company announced Glocer&rsquo;s replacement.&rdquo;


Industry experts say that it was a confluence of factors.   &ldquo;In an economy where cost cutting is rampant on Wall Street, it&rsquo;s hard for any company to make a major platform switch,&rdquo; says one industry executive, who requested anonymity.   In addition to the cost of the new platform, there are integration and training costs associated with a major platform change.   These costs are not easy to swallow in a difficult economic environment.


The executive added: &ldquo;Eikon was not nearly as successful as Thomson Reuters would have liked, which is to a certain extent why Devin is gone and I&rsquo;m sure had something to do with Glocer leaving.&rdquo;


But Brittan says Eikon is exactly where it should be according to the company&rsquo;s metrics.   He admits, as with any new product, there was some &ldquo;teething&rdquo; that had to be worked through early on.   &ldquo;There is a process to maturing technology and getting the early kinks worked out,&rdquo; Brittan says.   &ldquo;There was no one smoking gun that everyone experienced, just some little things like &lsquo;this isn&rsquo;t showing up right&rsquo; or &lsquo;when I do this giant flex sheet it uses a lot of memory,&rsquo; or &lsquo;the layout on screen isn&rsquo;t how I want it&rsquo;.&rdquo;   These things were fixed very quickly, he said.


Brittan says speed was another issue that came up early during the release.   &ldquo;Speed is something that we are constantly optimising,&rdquo; he says.   &ldquo;Speed of retrieval of news stories was sluggish according to some, and now it is multiples faster.   Creating charts and downloading data into excel, all these things are dramatically faster.


&ldquo;The product we have out today is dramatically different from the Version 1 roll out of a year ago,&rdquo; he explains.   &ldquo;The initial product had some gaps, which we&rsquo;ve been filling.&rdquo;


Brittan adds: &ldquo;Our goal is still to transition existing customers to Eikon and to best serve our customers.   We&rsquo;ve got new customers and we&rsquo;ve got a bunch of customers who have successfully migrated over.   We&rsquo;re not forcing customers to change.   We realise it&rsquo;s an organic thing.   We will naturally see the migration in time if the product is the best product.   It is relatively new just one year out, so we will move customers at the pace that they want to move.&rdquo;


What&rsquo;s next?   &ldquo;We'll be rolling out new capabilities on close to a monthly basis.   And in six months we&rsquo;ll have a bunch of new capabilities.   I don't want to talk about them.   I just plan to deliver them.&rdquo;


● SOURCE Wall Street & Technology


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Those we lost in 2011</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Obituaries</category><dc:date>2011-12-28T10:04:59+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/254a172e40c6f95b8146a68de1045031-630.php#unique-entry-id-630</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/254a172e40c6f95b8146a68de1045031-630.php#unique-entry-id-630</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The following Reuters people died in 2011:


● Sabah al-Bazee, 30, stringer. 


● Erdmuthe Greis-Behrendt, 74, former editorial assistant.


● Shaun Best, 43, photographer.


● Pat Caton, 60, former human resources adviser. 


● Robert Eksuzyan, 81, former translator.


● Ronald Farquhar, 88, former correspondent.


● Frank Fitter, 79, former economic services editor, staff executive and welfare officer.


● Ron Harris, 86, former staff manager.


● Bill Hartley, 73, former sub-editor.


● John Lawrenson, 80, former executive. 


● Allan Maitland, 80, former correspondent.


● Clare McDermott, 82, former correspondent and editor.


● Mark Nichols, former sub-editor.


● Michael Posner, 79, former correspondent.


● Dennis Savage, mid-80s, former commodities journalist.


● Gilbert Sedbon, 94, former correspondent.


● Ron Sly, 83, former chief sub-editor.


● Richard Williams, 56, former correspondent and chief sub-editor. 


Go to ● RIP for further details


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Thomson Reuters pulls healthcare sale</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Thomson Reuters</category><dc:date>2011-12-22T14:57:59+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/99c3a618495bdf829318ec52f5c0cf31-629.php#unique-entry-id-629</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/99c3a618495bdf829318ec52f5c0cf31-629.php#unique-entry-id-629</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Thomson Reuters has suspended the sale of its healthcare business, citing tough economic conditions that made it difficult to fetch the right price.


Since announcing the planned divestiture in June, global economic conditions have become more challenging and the company believes they are not conducive to concluding a transaction that reflects the fair value of the healthcare business at this time, a Thomson Reuters statement said on Thursday.   &ldquo;Thomson Reuters is committed to continuing to invest in and grow the Healthcare business until improved market conditions allow the company to complete a divestiture at attractive terms.&rdquo; 


Thomson Reuters said the business continues to perform well with strong revenue growth and expanding margins.   Results of the business will continue to be included within &ldquo;other businesses&rdquo; in group financial statements.   The company had previously said the sale of the healthcare unit was not expected to have a material impact on its 2011 outlook.


The business supplies healthcare data and analysis to companies, government agencies and health professionals.   Revenue was about $450 million in 2010.


A company spokesman declined to tell Reuters what parties had considered buying the business or what prices might have been discussed.   Two months ago, India&rsquo;s second-largest software services exporter, Infosys, was said by Indian media to be keen to acquire the business for $700 million to $750 million, but Infosys said it &ldquo;is not in discussions for the acquisition of Thomson Reuters&rsquo; Healthcare business at present&rdquo;.


● SOURCE Reuters


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Changes make TR &#x27;more unified internally&#x27; - James Smith</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>James Smith</category><category>Tom Glocer</category><category>Peter Warwick</category><category>Deirdre Stanley</category><category>James Powell</category><category>David Craig</category><dc:date>2011-12-19T22:33:11+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/786b1de4a66f1c46855b1212877c9ca8-628.php#unique-entry-id-628</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/786b1de4a66f1c46855b1212877c9ca8-628.php#unique-entry-id-628</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Thomson Reuters&rsquo; new chief executive James Smith, who takes over from Tom Glocer on 1 January, confirmed two top appointments on Monday and said that after a year of challenges and changes everyone would be relieved &ldquo;to put this period of realignment behind us&rdquo;.


The changes &ldquo;will make us more unified internally and more competitive in the marketplace for years to come,&rdquo; Smith said in a message to employees.   He referred to working &ldquo;to turn the world&rsquo;s greatest collection of news and information assets into the world&rsquo;s greatest news and information company&rdquo;, and said &ldquo;We have already come a long way since we announced our next generation of business leaders at the beginning of this month.&rdquo;


Following last week&rsquo;s appointment of Peter Warwick as chief people officer, Smith confirmed Deirdre Stanley as general counsel and James Powell as chief technology officer.   &ldquo;Both of them have remarkable track records and both are committed to working side by side with our business leaders to take this company into a new era,&rdquo; he said.


&ldquo;All of our organizational decisions are based on straightforward, durable principles: everything starts and ends with the customer, business is a team sport, and simpler is better.   During the weeks ahead we will bed down our organizational structure, continuing to streamline the company and push authority, accountability and resources closer to the customer.   I know it will be a relief for everyone to have the structure and leadership team firmly in place and to put this period of realignment behind us.


&ldquo;2011 has been a year of challenges and changes.   Those changes will make us more unified internally and more competitive in the marketplace for years to come.&rdquo;


Separately, the president of the new financial and risk business unit that includes Reuters news agency, David Craig, told staff that after a year of tumultuous change, 2012 would be a defining year &ldquo;and I am confident that the team and structure now in place will set us up to re-start our growth engine.   There is no doubt that the markets are tough, and are likely to get worse in 2012 &ndash; but that should not deter us.   Even in a downturn, and in markets that are changing fast, there are opportunities if we are agile enough to seize them.&rdquo;


● SOURCE Reuters



]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Editorial jobs go in Toronto&#x2c; New York&#x2c; Chicago - reports</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Editorial</category><dc:date>2011-12-15T23:55:01+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/57464f031249d9bea6fd56e3da0de524-627.php#unique-entry-id-627</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/57464f031249d9bea6fd56e3da0de524-627.php#unique-entry-id-627</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Reuters is moving its Canada-based online desk to India.   Some 17 jobs out of 22 in Toronto are affected.   Five positions will remain there.   The rest will be taken up in Bangalore.   At the same time, other editorial jobs &ndash; including those of managers &ndash; have also been cut in New York and Chicago this week.


The Canadian Media Guild, which represents about 60 people in Reuters&rsquo; Toronto office and others across Canada, said 17 permanent and five temporary workers were being cut.   They were people who posted news stories and pictures to the ● Reuters website.   The online operation has been based in Toronto since 2005.   After the cuts, it will have five employees there.   The cuts affect roughly one-third of Reuters&rsquo; editorial operations in Toronto, said the Guild.


Reuters said it had greatly increased the number of website staff over the last eight months.   &ldquo;As part of restructuring of our production staff, we&rsquo;re moving some roles in our global online newsroom from Toronto to Asia.   The online visuals desk remains in Toronto,&rdquo; the company said in a statement.


Staff in New York and Chicago were also laid off.   The Newspaper Guild of New York said: &ldquo;In one of the shabbiest moves made by this increasingly shabby company, seven of our Guild colleagues at 3XSQ and one at the Chicago office were laid off on Monday, December 12.   Members of the client administrator group &ndash; some of whom have worked here for over 30 years &ndash; walked into the office Monday morning only to be told, twelve days before Christmas, &lsquo;Your job is gone, as of today.&rsquo;


&ldquo;As soulless as this layoff of Guild members was, it was better than what happened to a handful of editorial managers this week.   Upper management simply picked a few and sent them packing.   If there&rsquo;s any question about the worth of union membership, the answer can be found at the empty desks of managers who had no Guild contract.&rdquo;


It added: &ldquo;This seems standard operating procedure for this new administration: long chirpy emails from the top brass on how well we&rsquo;re doing and how much high-priced talent we&rsquo;re hiring, but public silence on the forced departures of the workers who have created this success.   There&rsquo;s one printable word to describe it: shabby.&rdquo;


● SOURCE The Toronto Star | Canadian Business | Newspaper Guild of New York


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Analysts lower TRI price target to &#x24;26</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Thomson Reuters</category><category>Shares</category><dc:date>2011-12-15T17:46:09+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/38d1cb3857e2ce264bea2506651c8780-626.php#unique-entry-id-626</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/38d1cb3857e2ce264bea2506651c8780-626.php#unique-entry-id-626</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Equities research analysts at Piper Jaffray lowered their price target on Thomson Reuters shares to $26.00 on Thursday in a research note issued to investors.


TRI opened at $26.18 in New York.   Thomson Reuters has a 52-week low of $25.58 and a 52-week high of $42.15.   The stock&rsquo;s 50-day moving average is $27.87 and its 200-day moving average is $31.20.   The company&rsquo;s market capitalisation is $21.665 billion and price-to-earnings ratio 15.68.


● SOURCE Localized


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Reuters managers leave in end-of-year cull</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Thomson Reuters</category><category>James Smith</category><category>Peter Warwick</category><category>Stephen Dando</category><category>Tom Glocer</category><dc:date>2011-12-14T22:48:55+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/167fe8ad492898bf763a1488c1fdd35e-625.php#unique-entry-id-625</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/167fe8ad492898bf763a1488c1fdd35e-625.php#unique-entry-id-625</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Thomson Reuters&rsquo; incoming chief executive James Smith on Wednesday announced the appointment of a chief people officer &ndash; Peter Warwick &ndash; to take over the human resources function from Stephen Dando on 1 January with support from Dando until the end of March.


Warwick is currently chief operating officer of the group&rsquo;s professional division and has been chief executive officer of the legal and tax and accounting businesses.


Dando is one of several Reuters era managers including senior editorial figures said by sources in New York to be leaving the company. 


 


Smith, who takes over from Tom Glocer at the turn of the year, said solid progress had been achieved on the Customer First organisational design work and senior leadership appointments.


He said it concludes the Thomson-Reuters integration and the company now enters a new era.


● SOURCE Thomson Reuters


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Huge challenges for Reuters in 2012 - Stephen Adler</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Reuters</category><category>Editorial</category><category>Stephen Adler</category><category>Tom Glocer</category><category>James Smith</category><dc:date>2011-12-14T23:24:57+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/e645d72725ac8e338db37a4af1d70273-624.php#unique-entry-id-624</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/e645d72725ac8e338db37a4af1d70273-624.php#unique-entry-id-624</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Reuters faces enormous challenges in 2012 and beyond, editor-in-chief Stephen Adler said on Wednesday.


&ldquo;We must accelerate our pursuit of journalistic excellence, with the understanding that our news is a central resource for Thomson Reuters that must serve all the company&rsquo;s customers,&rdquo; he said in an end-of-year message to editorial staff seen by The Baron.


&ldquo;As we&rsquo;ve discussed many times, winning in our highly competitive markets requires us to differentiate ourselves by offering more value &ndash; not just more of the same.   We will succeed by providing a combination of smart, forward-looking news coverage, more exclusives, richer enterprise journalism, effective data mining, memorable story-telling, targeted community-building, trenchant commentary and analysis, and better designed, easier-to-navigate news delivery channels.&rdquo;


&nbsp;


Adler said: &ldquo;Throughout the year, many of you have asked: How do we remain fast, accurate, and fair while also providing the depth and insight you keep talking about?   How do we consider the needs of a broad customer base when we&rsquo;ve been asked to focus more narrowly in the past?   There&rsquo;s no easy answer, so we will have to ask the right questions with each assignment.   Sometimes the value of a story will come from chasing the news and reporting each incremental move.   Sometimes it will come from stepping away from the day-to-day to develop a longer-term story that will ultimately benefit the reader more.   Often we will need to operate on two tracks simultaneously, with some people focusing on immediate news and others looking beyond the moment to go deeper and help our coverage win not just the hour or day, but the week, month and year.   All this requires judgment more than blanket rules, which is why we&rsquo;ve tried to cut down on many of the edicts.&rdquo;


&nbsp;


Adler said Reuters moves into 2012 with extraordinary backing from the new corporate leadership, the same staunch support received from Tom Glocer and his team in 2011.   &ldquo;Tom&rsquo;s commitment to excellence, and his clarion call that news is the heart and soul of the company, have brought us to this moment and helped us lay the groundwork for stronger performance in the coming months.   We will now be led by incoming CEO Jim Smith, to whom I reported when he was running the professional businesses and I was working to integrate news into their products.   Jim spent much of his career in Thomson newspapers and has a deep understanding of, and great passion for, journalism.   I can tell you from personal experience that Jim will be an ardent advocate for news quality and editorial integrity.   As you get to know him, you'll also find that he is an extraordinary leader who combines great business instincts and discipline with humor, warmth, and decency.


&nbsp;


&ldquo;Bottom line: I am optimistic, energized, and eager to embrace the opportunities ahead.   Our goal today, as it was when I began the job, is to be the number-one news provider in the world.   As before, I&rsquo;m in favor of anything that gets us there and against anything that gets in the way.&rdquo;


● SOURCE Reuters


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>EU to test Thomson Reuters&#x27; RICs commitments</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Thomson Reuters</category><dc:date>2011-12-14T10:46:54+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/2c32d1c2d687c29247f4093a9db290c2-623.php#unique-entry-id-623</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/2c32d1c2d687c29247f4093a9db290c2-623.php#unique-entry-id-623</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The European Commission is asking for comments from other market players on commitments offered by Thomson Reuters to address concerns that it is abusing its market position in real-time data feeds.


&ldquo;The commitments proposed by Thomson Reuters should allow financial institutions to switch more easily between different providers of financial data and stimulate competition between data vendors,&rdquo; competition commissioner Joaquin Almunia said in a statement on Wednesday.


Thomson Reuters offered to allow customers to licence additional usage rights for Reuters Instrument Codes and to provide them with the information needed to cross-reference RICs with other data, the commission said.   The codes identify securities used by financial institutions to retrieve data from real-time data feeds.


The European Commission opened an investigation into the codes in 2009, saying customers may potentially be locked-in to working with the company because replacing the codes required &ldquo;a long and costly procedure&rdquo; to rewrite or reconfigure software applications.


The commission was concerned that Thomson Reuters was abusing its dominant market position &ldquo;by prohibiting customers from using RICs for retrieving data from alternative providers and mapping them for such a purpose to alternative symbols,&rdquo; the commission said.


● SOURCE Dow Jones


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Lord Mark Malloch-Brown becomes Trust Principles trustee</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Trust Principles</category><category>Mark Malloch-Brown</category><category>Pehr Gyllenhammar</category><dc:date>2011-12-12T16:41:10+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/538b95722e1cd0e229582cfca3453186-622.php#unique-entry-id-622</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/538b95722e1cd0e229582cfca3453186-622.php#unique-entry-id-622</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, pictured, former journalist, international diplomat and British government minister, has joined Thomson Reuters Founders Share Company as a director.


Directors of the Founders Share Company act as trustees of the Thomson Reuters Trust Principles, which were established by Reuters in 1941 and adopted by the merged company when Thomson Corporation acquired Reuters in 2008.   They govern the way in which Thomson Reuters operates throughout the world.


&ldquo;Lord Malloch-Brown is most welcome as a Director and Trustee.&nbsp;  He has a wealth of international experience, not least in prominent positions in the United Nations and in world-class NGOs.&nbsp;  His background as a journalist is an element that is appreciated in a company such as ours,&rdquo; said Pehr Gyllenhammar, chairman of the Founders Share Company&rsquo;s board.


Malloch-Brown said: &ldquo;A free press is as important a guarantee of an open society as any.   As media freedom faces new challenges of technology and economics as well as the enduring ones of editorial standards and securing free speech, the Thomson Reuters Trust Principles look more relevant than ever.   I am proud to have this opportunity to support them.&rdquo;


 


Malloch-Brown is chairman of Europe, Middle East & Africa, FTI Consulting. ﻿  Previously he served as minister of state in the British government&rsquo;s Foreign and Commonwealth Office, with responsibility for Africa, Asia and the United Nations.&nbsp;  He had also served as United Nations deputy secretary-general, administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, vice president of external affairs at the World Bank and founded the Economist Development Report.&nbsp;  He worked as a journalist at The Economist and was a political consultant.   He is chairman of the Royal Africa Society, trustee of the Shell Foundation and a member of the boards of the International Crisis Group, the Open Society Foundation, Save the Children International, the Centre for Global Development and the Children&rsquo;s Investment Fund Foundation.


● SOURCE Reuters


● Trust Principles


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Obituary: Allan Maitland</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Obituary</category><category>Allan Maitland</category><dc:date>2011-12-11T12:54:46+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/e85ae1a73472ede3b3a4f27ad21054a4-621.php#unique-entry-id-621</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/e85ae1a73472ede3b3a4f27ad21054a4-621.php#unique-entry-id-621</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Allan Maitland, pictured, former correspondent and editor, died on Saturday after suffering from lung cancer for five years.   He was 80 one month ago. 


After Cambridge University and military service in Cyprus and Egypt, Maitland joined Reuters as a trainee journalist in 1962.   His first posting was to Brazil.


He was assigned to Saigon in 1969 to join the reporting team covering the Vietnam War.   There he quickly found himself covering a Viet Cong attack on a South Vietnamese military base.   Two years ago Maitland recounted his experiences for a multi-media project for the Imperial War Museum in London.   Asked how he coped, he replied: &ldquo;The adrenalin was up and one got on with it.&rdquo;


After Vietnam Maitland reported the conflict in Cambodia and then the Portuguese revolution.


He retired in 1990, leaving as associate editor of the staff magazine Reuters World.


● Allan Maitland in Vietnam: &lsquo;The adrenalin was up&hellip;&rsquo;


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Tom Glocer might have stayed longer but for &#x27;bad luck and overconfidence&#x27;</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Tom Glocer</category><category>James Smith</category><dc:date>2011-12-08T22:21:51+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/36b86527ff13f26d3819660355913d91-620.php#unique-entry-id-620</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/36b86527ff13f26d3819660355913d91-620.php#unique-entry-id-620</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Tom Glocer might have stayed longer as Thomson Reuters chief executive were it not for a mix of bad luck and overconfidence, The Economist said on Thursday.


Glocer, whose retirement was announced a week ago, brought Reuters from the verge of bankruptcy to a state of rude health during seven years as the organisation&rsquo;s CEO, the weekly said.   &ldquo;But he has done less well as chief executive of Thomson Reuters, the company created when Thomson, a Canadian purveyor of professional information for lawyers, accountants and others, bought Reuters in 2008.   Bloomberg, the firm&rsquo;s American rival, has almost wiped out its once-clear lead.&rdquo;


New information platform Eikon, launched last year to compete with terminals offered by Bloomberg, has been taken up by just 8,000 out of Thomson Reuters&rsquo; 400,000 financial-data subscribers, The Economist said.


&ldquo;Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg are the big fish in the professional-publishing pond, at least eight times larger than their nearest competitor.   Bloomberg, besides expanding its terminals business, which has over 300,000 customers (at about $20,000 a pop), is pushing into government-related news and data&hellip;


&ldquo;So what happened to Mr Glocer&rsquo;s winning streak?   His allies say his departure was always just a matter of time: once a firm buys another, it completes the takeover by putting its own people in charge.   The Thomson family still owns 55% of the company, and some think the generous price [$17.2 billion] Mr Glocer secured from Thomson for Reuters made him all the more vulnerable.


&ldquo;But he might have stayed longer were it not for a mix of bad luck and overconfidence.   Eikon, intended to replace Reuters&rsquo; grab bag of services with a single offering, was designed to be more user-friendly than Bloomberg&rsquo;s devices, but it was launched hastily and with flaws.   With hindsight, a more gradual upgrade might have been more prudent.&rdquo;


Perhaps Glocer&rsquo;s replacement James Smith can do better, The Economist said.   &ldquo;He will almost certainly have a freer hand, and some upgrades to Eikon are planned for next year.   But these are still stormy seas.&rdquo;   According to Claudio Aspesi, an analyst at investment bank Sanford C.   Bernstein, it took most professional-publishing firms three to four years to recover from the 2001 recession.   This time, Bernstein predicts, revenue growth at Thomson Reuters will not reach pre-crash levels until at least 2015.


One area of potential growth, though, is trading services.   Changes in financial regulation in America and Europe will force a lot of trading in derivatives from the murky world of private &ldquo;over-the-counter&rdquo; deals onto exchanges, where contracts will be standardised and prices quoted.   This presents both Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg with an opportunity to gather and sell data on these markets and perhaps to capture a share of the trade by linking banks and their clients through their own electronic trading platforms.   The market for these derivatives is gigantic.   A competitive edge there could make a big difference to both companies&rsquo; fortunes.


● SOURCE The Economist


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>TR: Sorry tale of upheaval&#x2c; clashes and disappointments - editor</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Thomson Reuters</category><category>Tom Glocer</category><category>Rupert Murdoch</category><dc:date>2011-12-07T20:17:57+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/a85a3843b070da925f88579cafb3e629-619.php#unique-entry-id-619</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/a85a3843b070da925f88579cafb3e629-619.php#unique-entry-id-619</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The Thomson Reuters merger has not lived up to the expectations of either consumers or shareholders and instead, like so many mergers and acquisitions, it has turned into a sorry tale of upheaval, clashes and disappointments, a London-based editor said on Wednesday.


The 2008 acquisition was billed as the deal that would blow rivals like Bloomberg out of the water.   The idea was to create a Goliath in the $24 billion market for screen-based financial information that is used by banks and investment institutions around the world, wrote Richard Wachman, City editor of The Observer.


&ldquo;The reality has been a sorry tale of management upheaval, culture clashes and disappointing product launches.   In the latest chapter of the saga, chief executive Tom Glocer has announced his accelerated departure amid rumours he is being nudged out by Canada&rsquo;s Thomson family, the dominant shareholder, and former owner of the Times before Rupert Murdoch,&rdquo; Wachman wrote in The Observer&rsquo;s sister newspaper The Guardian.


&ldquo;Analysts say the share price has underperformed and complain that hoped-for synergies and innovation haven&rsquo;t come through, despite all the trumpet blowing at the time of the transaction.   The launch of the company&rsquo;s new Eikon product was behind schedule and the offering was less robust than the market had envisaged, although adjustments may put that right.&rdquo;


Bloomberg is closing the gap on Thomson Reuters after being well behind four years ago, Wachman said.   Florida-based Burton-Taylor International Consulting&rsquo;s research reveals that in 2007 Thomson Reuters spoke for more than 36 per cent of the market against 25 per cent for Bloomberg.   But according to its estimates Bloomberg will have nearly caught up in 2011 with a 30.8 per cent market share against 31.4 per cent for Thomson Reuters.


&ldquo;Something has gone horribly wrong.   At the very least, the task of melding these two companies together has been far more complex than originally envisaged.   A less kind interpretation is that management, which has cut many hundreds of jobs, has taken its eye off the ball, losing hapless investors billions along the way.&rdquo;


● SOURCE The Guardian


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Reuters extends journalism training to New York and Asia</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Journalism</category><category>Stephen Adler</category><dc:date>2011-12-07T18:10:40+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/d40bc57743439aa60c38991e09cb2925-618.php#unique-entry-id-618</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/d40bc57743439aa60c38991e09cb2925-618.php#unique-entry-id-618</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Reuters announced on Wednesday it will extend its journalism trainee programme from London to New York and across Asia.


The scheme offers nine months of training for university graduates with a proven interest in financial news and grasp of key economic trends.   Working journalists and other professionals wanting to move into journalism can also apply.   Applicants should exhibit a passion for journalism with evidence of editorial work experience, a competitive instinct, and speak and write fluently in English.   Advanced skills in other languages, particularly Arabic, Russian, Mandarin or German, financial and data expertise, and multimedia will be given special consideration.


Editor-in-chief Stephen Adler said: &ldquo;We are reinvesting in journalism through this highly competitive training program and, at the same time, strengthening our position as an industry leader.   While other news organizations have discontinued similar efforts, Reuters has more than doubled the size of its program.   This year, we are proud to offer 15 jobs for trainees who successfully complete the program.&rdquo;


● SOURCE MarketWatch


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>New Thomson Reuters CEO backs editorial hiring plans - Stephen Adler</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Thomson Reuters</category><category>James Smith</category><category>Stephen Adler</category><category>Tom Glocer</category><category>Michael Williams</category><category>Dan Colarusso</category><category>Editorial</category><dc:date>2011-12-07T09:44:08+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/e670b7ad29a4ef9b547407fa2de1372e-617.php#unique-entry-id-617</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/e670b7ad29a4ef9b547407fa2de1372e-617.php#unique-entry-id-617</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Thomson Reuters&rsquo; new chief executive James Smith supports Reuters&rsquo; editorial growth strategy, Stephen Adler, editor-in-chief, said and will not curtail his hiring spree.


&ldquo;We&rsquo;re full speed ahead,&rdquo; Adler told The Wall Street Journal&rsquo;s MarketWatch website.


 


Some media analysts aren&rsquo;t quite so sure, columnist Jon Friedman said.   They suggest that Smith&rsquo;s promotion as replacement for CEO Tom Glocer signifies the company&rsquo;s desire to undercut Adler&rsquo;s go-go spending ways.   They believe that Thomson Reuters&rsquo; challenges will force Adler, appointed to the top editorial job in February, to curtail the big spending and eventually shrink the size of his staff.


Friedman said Adler couldn&rsquo;t have sounded more confident that Smith, who takes over on 1 January, will continue to have &ldquo;an extraordinary commitment&rdquo; to Adler&rsquo;s strategy of investing heavily to strengthen its commitment to enterprise reporting and to recruit journalists such as the WSJ&rsquo;s Michael Williams and Bloomberg television executive Dan Colarusso.


&ldquo;Adler said he, too, has heard the whispers from Thomson Reuters&rsquo; critics but declared: &lsquo;This doesn&rsquo;t change anything&rsquo;,&rdquo; Friedman wrote.


&ldquo;What&rsquo;s also not likely to change is the industry&rsquo;s confusion about what Adler wants to accomplish,&rdquo; Friedman wrote.   &ldquo;Does he want his operation to be true to its roots as a British-based wire service that reports doggedly on financial markets or a gleaming long-form journalism operation that wants to be known for its enterprise and investigative reporting?   Can Adler make both sides co-exist?&rdquo;


Adler has tried hard to change the culture of Reuters by wooing a plethora of non-wire-service journalists, Friedman said.   &ldquo;He is betting that he can maintain a strong position in the meat-and-potatoes work of covering the financial markets while making a name for Reuters in enterprise writing.


&ldquo;In his first year, Adler and his team have succeeded in changing the company&rsquo;s rather stodgy image.   Now, they must find a way to continue the momentum at a time when the world at large expects him to rein in his growth plans.&rdquo;


● SOURCE MarketWatch


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Executive changes beginning of the end of turbulent period - new CEO</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Thomson Reuters</category><category>James Smith</category><category>Tom Glocer</category><dc:date>2011-12-02T14:48:28+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/fcaf54bfa9caba1fbfddbb036e96b9f6-616.php#unique-entry-id-616</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/fcaf54bfa9caba1fbfddbb036e96b9f6-616.php#unique-entry-id-616</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Thomson Reuters&rsquo; next chief executive James Smith, pictured, on Friday set out his priorities for the company when he takes over from Tom Glocer on 1 January and said Thursday&rsquo;s announcement was the beginning of the end of a turbulent period of executive changes.


&ldquo;Thomson Reuters is a company built to win in the information age,&rdquo; he said in a message to the group&rsquo;s 55,000 employees.   &ldquo;We have sustainable franchises.   We have differentiating competitive advantage in many areas.   And &ndash; most importantly &ndash; we have talented, dedicated people.


&ldquo;We do many things very well.   But there are some things we must do better.   Yesterday&rsquo;s announcement sets in place our next-generation leadership team.   It is the beginning of the end of a turbulent period of executive changes.   As I have said before, I believe business is a team sport.&rdquo;   The executives appointed to head new business units form a world-class team of operators that will lead to great heights in years to come.


Among the team&rsquo;s first tasks will be completion of the organisation design work of the past several weeks.   &ldquo;That effort carries the project name &lsquo;Customer First,&rsquo; because we are organizing our business around our customers and their needs.   That customer theme is at the top of the list of things we must do better. 


&ldquo;Simplifying the organization and our approach to customers is another.   Those will be guiding principles.&rdquo;


Smith said he intended to focus on


● Defining and pursuing the most promising growth vectors in financial services


&nbsp;


● Continuing to broaden the company&rsquo;s value proposition beyond core content and research with high-value tools, software and services&nbsp;


● Exploiting its unique position at the intersection of regulation and finance


● Accelerating development of the business in fast-growing geographies around the world


● Simplifying internal commercial policies and practices


&nbsp;


● Improving underlying technology platforms and dramatically improving product quality and customer experience


&nbsp;


● Making Thomson Reuters the best place in the world to work.


&nbsp;


Smith, chief operating officer until the change of command takes effect, promised an update on the new operating model before the year ends.


 


He added: &ldquo;I accepted the CEO job with a great sense of personal excitement and gratitude to the many people who have been responsible for my success.   That includes Tom Glocer.   His shoes will be impossible to fill; I will have to do the job in my own way.   But I also accepted with a deep sense of duty and commitment to the tens of thousands of my colleagues who have dedicated their talents, efforts and professional lives to this organization.   Business may begin and end with the customer, but it is the Thomson Reuters people in the middle who make it all happen.&rdquo;


● SOURCE Thomson Reuters


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Reuters shakes up global desk operations</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Editorial</category><category>Stephen Adler</category><category>Paul Ingrassia</category><category>Reginald Chua</category><category>Jean Yoon</category><category>Matthew Tostevin</category><category>Ciro Scotti</category><dc:date>2011-12-01T22:18:25+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/9a4a92f9e4703b6b23906adb280e47e1-615.php#unique-entry-id-615</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/9a4a92f9e4703b6b23906adb280e47e1-615.php#unique-entry-id-615</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Reuters announced a major shake-up of its worldwide desk operations after a two-month review.   Henceforth there will be a unified desk in each of the organisation&rsquo;s three regions &ndash; Asia; Europe, the Middle East and Africa; and Americas.


In a joint statement to staff, editor-in-chief Stephen Adler and his deputy Paul Ingrassia said a strong desk had always been central to upholding and improving Reuters&rsquo; standards and quality, &ldquo;and it&rsquo;s important that we staff and organize the desk to draw the most from its deep well of specialist knowledge and to ensure that the file is edited clearly and quickly&rdquo;.


After a review by Reginald Chua, former editor of the Asian Wall Street Journal now Reuters data editor, they said the specialist &ldquo;tracks&rdquo; within each desk will remain, but they will report to a single strong desk head, who in turn reports to the regional editor.&nbsp;  &ldquo;This structure will allow the desk head the flexibility to manage the staff more efficiently and adjust to the flow of stories while at the same time bringing to bear deep knowledge of asset classes and issues.&nbsp;  It should also provide better career opportunities for desk editors, who can move across specialist areas more easily.


&ldquo;And critically, it will ensure that desk operations have strong advocates in the new chiefs, who will also play key roles in upholding Reuters&rsquo; standards.&rdquo;


The new desk chiefs are


● Asia - Jean Yoon, based in Singapore.&nbsp;  She joined Reuters in 1995 in Seoul as a correspondent and is currently general manager for South East Asia and the Pacific.


● Europe, Middle East and Africa - Matthew Tostevin moves to London from Africa, where he is general manager, to run the EMEA desk.&nbsp;  Tostevin joined Reuters in Congo in 1995 after reporting for BBC radio from a series of African war zones.


● Americas - Ciro Scotti, former managing editor of BusinessWeek, before and after its acquisition by Bloomberg, joins Reuters as desk head.&nbsp;  After leaving Bloomberg Businessweek in October 2010, he helped manage the merger of Newsweek and the online publication The Daily Beast.&nbsp;  Since April he has been executive editor of The Fiscal Times, a website devoted to analysis of and commentary on the major issues confronting&nbsp;America and the global economy.


&ldquo;Ciro will start next Monday, and we expect that Jean and Matthew will transition into their new roles by the end of the year,&rdquo; Adler and Ingrassia said.&nbsp;  &ldquo;They&rsquo;ll be spending the next few months working through the details of the new desk structure, which we expect to implement in phases by the first quarter of next year.&nbsp;  We&rsquo;ll announce more details once the desk heads have settled into their new roles.&rdquo;


As part of the desk review, the role that Top News plays in leading and managing the most important stories of the day was also examined.&nbsp;  &ldquo;We need to ensure that those stories &ndash; which cross asset classes and regions and are of interest to the broadest range of our readers &ndash; are among the most insightful, sharpest and best-written on the file.


&ldquo;So we&rsquo;ve decided to build on a successful pilot project in Asia and increase the staffing of Top News in all the regions, including adding several lead writers to each team to handle the top stories.&nbsp;  This will ensure more continuity of editing and more attention to those stories.&nbsp;  We&rsquo;ll also rotate top editors from the desk through the Top News teams, both to bring more specialist knowledge to bear and to hone editing skills on the desk.&nbsp;  We&rsquo;ll announce more details about these changes in the coming weeks and months.&rdquo;


● SOURCE Reuters


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Tom Glocer out as Thomson family appoints new CEO</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Tom Glocer</category><category>James Smith</category><category>Thomson Reuters</category><category>David Thomson</category><category>Thomson family</category><dc:date>2011-12-01T23:47:32+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/477dbeacdec62846e81e66d24c7252bb-614.php#unique-entry-id-614</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/477dbeacdec62846e81e66d24c7252bb-614.php#unique-entry-id-614</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Tom Glocer is stepping down and will be replaced as chief executive by chief operating officer James Smith on 1 January, Thomson Reuters said on Thursday.   The change is happening more quickly than had been expected, indicating the Thomson family which owns 55 per cent of the company is taking tight control of its largest asset.


The Financial Times quoted people close to the company as saying that David Thomson, chairman, and Geoffrey Beattie, the Canadian family&rsquo;s consigliere who runs its investment vehicle Woodbridge, have been frustrated with the Thomson Reuters share price, which has fallen from above $41 to $27.22 this year.


The company has undergone a series of structural changes and management shake-ups over the past six months to address the disappointing performance of its markets division, which was essentially the old Reuters and mainly served financial institutions.


Glocer, 52, pictured left, has led Thomson Reuters since 2008, when Canada&rsquo;s Thomson family completed its acquisition of Reuters.   A mergers and acquisitions lawyer, he joined Reuters in 1993 and became the agency&rsquo;s first American chief executive and the first not to have been a journalist in 2001.


He negotiated Reuters&rsquo; sale to the owner of Thomson Financial shortly before the global financial crisis.   The merged group enjoyed almost three years of better than expected cost savings from the deal, but has struggled in the last year to roll out a financial services product called Eikon that was meant to unify the two legacy companies&rsquo; multiple data products.


By replacing him, the Thomson family effectively removes the last senior Reuters executive from the merged company&rsquo;s top echelon.


Smith, pictured right, is a former journalist who joined the Thomson Newspaper Group in 1987.   Until a few months ago he was head of the professional unit, which sells legal, tax and accounting products.   That business has weathered the financial crisis much better than markets.


&ldquo;By the end of the year, the organizational strategy and budget work I have been leading will be complete, and the transition plan I launched last summer will have achieved its objectives,&rdquo; Glocer said in a statement.   &ldquo;Jim Smith is a very talented executive with whom I have worked closely over the past four years; he is ready to lead Thomson Reuters.&rdquo;


The company&rsquo;s stock has lost about 30 per cent of its value over the past six months as its banking and financial customers laid off thousands of employees and slashed costs.


David Thomson said in a statement: &ldquo;Tom will be remembered as the individual who turned around Reuters ten years ago, led the company to growth and guided its sale to form Thomson Reuters.   Over the past four years, Tom successfully directed an extensive integration, expanded our business internationally, revitalized the Reuters news organization and championed talent across the entire business.   The board joins me in thanking Tom for his dedication and service to our company and wishes the very best for him and his family.&rdquo;


He added: &ldquo;Jim Smith will provide strong leadership for Thomson Reuters at this juncture.   He has earned the respect and confidence of his colleagues and the board alike.   His instincts and his customer focus have been the basis of a remarkable career in our business.


&ldquo;Working with Tom Glocer, the board oversaw the successful execution of an established succession plan in the second half of 2011 and we look forward to beginning the new year with a new management team, new organizational structure, and ever stronger commitment to deliver long-term, sustainable value for all shareholders.&rdquo;


The new organisational structure will consist of the following business units: financial and risk, legal, intellectual property and science, tax and accounting, and global growth organisation.


● VIDEO 


● SOURCE Thomson Reuters | Reuters | The New York Times | Financial Times


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Thai minister &#x27;certain&#x27; military killed Reuters cameraman</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Reuters</category><category>Hiro Muramoto</category><dc:date>2011-11-29T14:54:10+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/b168814a797b451fbc3f8713c52ee7e5-613.php#unique-entry-id-613</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/b168814a797b451fbc3f8713c52ee7e5-613.php#unique-entry-id-613</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Thai investigators have clear evidence that the military was responsible for the death of Reuters cameraman Hiro Muramoto during political violence last year, a deputy prime minister said on Tuesday.


Witness testimony confirmed with certainty that the bullet that killed him was fired by a soldier, Chalerm Yubamrung told reporters.   &ldquo;For certain, the death was caused by a government official because we have witnesses who state that they saw the event when it happened,&rdquo; he said following a meeting with Japan&rsquo;s ambassador to Thailand.   Muramoto, pictured, was a Japanese national based in Tokyo.   &ldquo;The direction in which the bullet was shot was confirmation that it came from the government officials&rsquo; side,&rdquo; Chalerm said.


Muramoto, 43, was killed by a high-velocity bullet wound to the chest while covering clashes between anti-government &ldquo;red shirt&rdquo; protesters and troops in Bangkok on 10 April 2010.   He was among 25 people, including several soldiers, who died that night in one of the worst bouts of political violence in Thailand in decades.   Unidentified gunmen dressed in black clothes and balaclavas were seen among the demonstrators.


Chalerm&rsquo;s comments followed the issue on Monday of a police summons for former prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva and former deputy prime minister Suthep Thaugsuban to answer questions related to the unrest, during which 91 people were killed and more than 1,800 wounded.


The evidence stated by Chalerm concurs with witness accounts in a leaked copy of a preliminary investigation by the Department of Special Investigation (DSI) seen by Reuters last December, which said the shot came from the direction of troops.   A witness was quoted as saying he saw &ldquo;a flash from a gun barrel of a soldier&rdquo;, then watched Muramoto fall to the ground after he was shot while filming security forces.


The issue of whether the military was behind Muramoto&rsquo;s death is sensitive in a country where the armed forces are extremely powerful and deeply politicised.


DSI director-general Tharit Pengdit issued a statement on 27 February that contradicted the initial findings, saying the bullet came from a type of rifle not used by soldiers that day.   But in September, the DSI pressed for a new probe into the case, a dramatic reversal from its earlier stance.


Chalerm said he told the ambassador during Tuesday&rsquo;s meeting that the probe would soon be concluded and there would be no political intervention in the proceedings.   &ldquo;I expressed to the Japanese ambassador: &lsquo;Let us be certain as regards our investigation.   There will be no intervention&rsquo;,&rdquo; he said.   The head of the probe, police Major-General Anuchai Lekbumrung, told Reuters that work on the case was continuing.   It had yet to be sent to public prosecutors and Suthep and Abhisit would be questioned on Friday, he added.


Tharit told Reuters on Tuesday the DSI and the police were in agreement on the findings reached so far and believed there was sufficient evidence to show Muramoto was killed by a gun fired by a soldier.


The protracted investigation appears to have picked up pace since prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra took office in August after her Puea Thai Party&rsquo;s resounding victory over Abhisit&rsquo;s Democrat Party, which was in power at the time of the unrest.   Yingluck is the sister of ousted former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, the figurehead of the red-shirt protest movement long opposed by the military and Thailand&rsquo;s establishment.


● SOURCE Reuters


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Thomson Reuters stock plumbs new 52-week low ahead of Thanksgiving</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Thomson Reuters</category><category>Shares</category><dc:date>2011-11-23T16:59:30+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/ab1108fef4d535ab7cdcff9f5ab34d7c-612.php#unique-entry-id-612</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/ab1108fef4d535ab7cdcff9f5ab34d7c-612.php#unique-entry-id-612</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Thomson Reuters shares plumbed a new 52-week low in New York on Wednesday as markets headed into the US Thanksgiving Day holiday.   The stock traded at $25.75, below its previous 52-week low of $26.11, before recovering slightly to close 2.40 per cent down at $26.06. 


TRI&rsquo;s average volume has been 1.3 million shares over the past 30 days.   Over the past 52 weeks, the shares have traded between today&rsquo;s low of $25.75 and a high of $42.15.


Financial News Network said the stock has potential upside of 27.1 per cent.   Analysts&rsquo; consensus price target is $32.86.


● SOURCE The Street | Financial News Network


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Reuters hires Bloomberg editor to head TV programming</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Dan Colarusso</category><category>Chrystia Freeland</category><category>Chris Cramer</category><dc:date>2011-11-22T21:37:34+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/cd55d0a8f6582552b5c0a695bfaaca15-611.php#unique-entry-id-611</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/cd55d0a8f6582552b5c0a695bfaaca15-611.php#unique-entry-id-611</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[High-profile change at Reuters continued on Tuesday with fresh blood at the head of the agency&rsquo;s television programming.


Dan Colarusso, who has held top editorial posts at the New York Post, Cond&eacute; Nast&rsquo;s Portfolio and briefly at Business Insider, is joining as global head of programming from Bloomberg Television where he was managing editor.


Both companies are trying to expand their video reach to a more general business audience while continuing to jockey for position among Wall Street traders and firms.   Last year, Reuters introduced a video on demand option for its subscribers called Reuters Insider.   Colarusso will take over responsibility for it and will report directly to Chrystia Freeland, editor of Thomson Reuters Digital.   He replaces Chris Cramer, who will become editor at large and will focus on several key projects as Reuters expands its multimedia focus.


● SOURCE Paid Content


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Tom Glocer sees great things ahead for news</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Thomson Reuters</category><category>Tom Glocer</category><category>Robert Daleo</category><category>Stephane Bello</category><category>James Smith</category><dc:date>2011-11-22T22:07:14+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/b8cc6fee62ce574502e117101117586a-610.php#unique-entry-id-610</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/b8cc6fee62ce574502e117101117586a-610.php#unique-entry-id-610</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Many people at Thomson Reuters are tired of organisational change and the rumour mill is hyperactive, CEO Tom Glocer said on Tuesday, but many of the group&rsquo;s businesses are growing strongly and he sees great things ahead for news as a core distinguishing asset for the whole company.


The company&rsquo;s financial position is rock-solid, the balance sheet is strong and the credit rating excellent, he said in a message to the group&rsquo;s 55,000 staff worldwide as Americans prepare to celebrate Thursday&rsquo;s Thanksgiving holiday.   Robert Daleo has done an exemplary job as chief financial officer and the transition to Stephane Bello is going smoothly.


Glocer said that before the year is out decisions will be taken and announced and 2012 will begin with a shared road map for success.   &ldquo;Meanwhile, the best thing you can do from any perspective is to stay focused on meeting your 2011 objectives.&rdquo;


He told employees: &ldquo;We can feel good about the work under way to rekindle growth in the businesses that have been struggling.&nbsp;  I have been leading a major strategy effort focused on the financial information market, which I reviewed with our Board just last week.&nbsp;  In some areas we have a steep climb ahead, but we have what it takes ultimately to succeed and I am working closely with the leaders of those businesses to get us back on the path to robust growth.&rdquo;


Glocer mentioned powerful growth in the group&rsquo;s enterprise, trading marketplaces, legal, tax and accounting, and intellectual property and science businesses.   Regionally, the company was growing in rapidly developing markets in Asia, the Middle East/Africa, and Latin America.


&ldquo;I am working directly with Media and Editorial, and I can tell you first-hand that we have built the strongest news organization I&rsquo;ve seen in my 18 years working here.&nbsp;  I see great things ahead for News as a core distinguishing asset for the whole company.&rdquo;


Glocer said he was working together with chief operations officer James Smith to&nbsp;align the company with its customers&rsquo; evolving needs.&nbsp;  &ldquo;From talking to colleagues across our businesses, though, I know that many people are tired of organizational change and that the rumor mill is hyperactive.&nbsp;  I understand.&nbsp;  Change and the uncertainty that comes with it are hard to handle.&rdquo;


He said a new operating model called Customer First was taking time because Smith was collaborating with the group&rsquo;s business and functional leaders to get it right.&nbsp; 


&ldquo;Yes, our markets are changing.&nbsp;  That&rsquo;s true for most big companies these days.&nbsp;  The fact that we are changing to keep pace may be a source of anxiety for some, but overall it should be a source of comfort.&nbsp;  Any company that tries to stand still today will find itself moving backward,&rdquo; he said.   &ldquo;This Thanksgiving, I am thankful for all the good things about&nbsp;our company and that Thomson Reuters is blessed with many thousands of talented people who will settle for nothing less than excellence.&rdquo;


● SOURCE Thomson Reuters


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Reuters affirms Thailand commitment despite layoffs</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Reuters</category><dc:date>2011-11-22T12:56:12+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/537f81cafa717a5ac3cefef2bc9d3b97-609.php#unique-entry-id-609</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/537f81cafa717a5ac3cefef2bc9d3b97-609.php#unique-entry-id-609</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Reuters Software (Thailand) said it remains committed to Thailand despite a recent reorganisation that resulted in layoffs.   The country's largest software employer said Thailand is still one of the top three development centres for Thomson Reuters.


Vichitra Sophon, head of human resources at Thomson Reuters Thailand, said the local unit was rotating resources to serve a dynamic environment.   The company last month laid off 40 quality assurance staff out of its 1,400 employees.   She said job rotations were considered normal for global firms but acknowledged that layoffs of a particular group were significant for the company.   The company's focus on technology to improve software would result in a reduced need for quality assurance staff in the future.   It would also focus on automated quality assurance.


&ldquo;We have several development centres globally.   Each location has its own expertise from different countries including specialists from the Philippines responsible for content, Indian experts on accounting and Thai experts for financial systems,&rdquo; Vichitra said.


Thomson Reuters Thailand has two business units: Thomson Reuters operating intelligent information with 200 employees, and Reuters Software (Thailand) with 1,400 staff handling software development.


● SOURCE Bangkok Post


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>NUJ to hold strike ballot after &#x27;insulting&#x27; Thomson Reuters offer</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Thomson Reuters</category><dc:date>2011-11-21T14:39:34+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/89dd1703fe7b13adde6afe738d7cbf8f-608.php#unique-entry-id-608</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/89dd1703fe7b13adde6afe738d7cbf8f-608.php#unique-entry-id-608</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The National Union of Journalists is to ballot its members at Thomson Reuters in the UK over strike action following what the union called an &ldquo;insulting below inflation pay offer&rdquo;.


The Thomson Reuters NUJ chapel said in a statement: &ldquo;This chapel rejects the below-inflation offer of 1.5 per cent across the board as insulting after three years of real-term pay cuts. 


&ldquo;This chapel insists on a return to the previous practice of annual across-the-board pay rises at least in line with inflation.   It demands 7 per cent across the board and in light of our continuing pay dispute, and the company&rsquo;s failure to come close to our demand, the chapel will proceed with its ballot for industrial action.&rdquo;


Michelle Stanistreet, NUJ general secretary, said: &ldquo;Our members at Thomson Reuters have said enough is enough.   Over the past years they have tried to meet the management half way on pay issues, despite the fact that pay agreements dating even before the credit crunch have been derisory.   They are getting to the point where they can no longer afford to work for Thomson Reuters because they cannot afford to pay their train fares to work or pay their bills.   Voting for industrial action is their only option.&rdquo;


● SOURCE Journalism


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Reuters stringer who worked for president won&#x27;t cover Yemen again</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Mohamed Sudam</category><dc:date>2011-11-17T22:48:00+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/0d68391eb1a5f684a1c2033763589374-607.php#unique-entry-id-607</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/0d68391eb1a5f684a1c2033763589374-607.php#unique-entry-id-607</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Reuters defended the work of long-time Yemen stringer Mohamed Sudam on Thursday amid outrage from opposition activists over his employment by the government as a personal translator to President Ali Abdullah Saleh but said he would no longer work for Reuters from Yemen, though he would probably still provide reports from elsewhere in the Middle East.


&ldquo;Sudam&rsquo;s work as a Reuters stringer over the course of many years has been fair and accurate,&rdquo; the company said in a statement.   &ldquo;When he became a translator for the president, he disclosed his role to Reuters.&rdquo;


&ldquo;On reviewing the matter, however, we believe it&rsquo;s not appropriate to use a stringer who is also working for the government.&rdquo;


Sudam was briefly detained last month by opposition forces because of his connection to the government.   His employment by the president began several years ago.


A Facebook page and Twitter hashtag created under the name &ldquo;Shame on Reuters&rdquo; voiced anger at Reuters over Sudam&rsquo;s dual role.


● SOURCE The New York Times


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Pension talks &#x27;constructive and positive&#x27;</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Pensions</category><category>Greg Meekings</category><category>Angela Dean</category><category>Tom Glocer</category><dc:date>2011-11-15T11:26:25+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/ca3a0b048c861fe06ba6a2900a1ae481-606.php#unique-entry-id-606</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/ca3a0b048c861fe06ba6a2900a1ae481-606.php#unique-entry-id-606</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The Pension Review Group has reacted with cautious optimism to a letter from the chairman of Reuters&rsquo; two UK pension funds in which he says discussions with Thomson Reuters on a new pension agreement have been &ldquo;constructive and positive&rdquo;.


The comments by Greg Meekings, chairman of Reuters Pension Fund and Supplementary Pension Scheme, were in response to an earlier letter from PRG chairman Angela Dean in which she underlined pensioners&rsquo; continuing concerns about the declining value of their pensions.   RPF, the larger of the two funds, has nearly 8,000 members.


With discretionary annual increases paid in only three of the last nine years the real value of RPF pensions has dropped substantially because of inflation, the PRG said.   The group calculates that pensioners would need an increase of 16.7 per cent to bring the value of pensions back to the levels of early 2003.   The rise needed will jump to 23.3 per cent if no increase is awarded in January. 


Discussions between RPF, SPS and the company aim to produce a new pensions agreement effective from 31 March 2012.   The current agreement allows for annual inflation increases only if the fund is in surplus.   Both the RPF and the SPS are currently in deficit.   The company&rsquo;s last major injection of funds was in 2006.


The PRG said it was encouraged by comments made last December by chief executive Tom Glocer expressing his concern about the position of UK pensioners and calling on those responsible to find a way of resolving the problem, both now and in the future.   &ldquo;I care a lot about our obligations to our pensioners and all our pension plans around the world,&rdquo; Glocer said in a talk to The Reuter Society.   &ldquo;We&rsquo;ll do whatever we need to do.&rdquo; 


The PRG met last month to consider Meekings&rsquo; letter and decided to await the outcome of current discussions before taking any further action, in the hope that positive comments so far would translate into an agreement which would guarantee an annual increase in pensions. 


The group was established in 2004 by retired staff of Reuters.   Its objective is to restore inflation-linked increases and bring certainty to pensioners in future by ensuring there is a sound agreement in place that protects the value of pensions and the security of the pension fund. 


● SOURCE Pension Review Group


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Bloomberg v Thomson Reuters battle about to get bloodier - WSJ</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Bloomberg</category><category>Thomson Reuters</category><category>Tom Glocer</category><dc:date>2011-11-14T09:17:41+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/10f831065269d7bc3c2d5dde96ce2821-605.php#unique-entry-id-605</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/10f831065269d7bc3c2d5dde96ce2821-605.php#unique-entry-id-605</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Retrenchments on Wall Street are likely to hurt the market for financial data, intensifying competition between Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.   Steps the two firms took to diversify in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis are being tested.


The $23.7 billion global market for financial data is expected to grow only about two per cent this year, according to market data research and consulting firm Burton-Taylor International Consulting, down from 4.2 per cent growth last year, the Journal said.   While the market shrank slightly in 2009, it grew in the low double-digits from 2006 to 2008.


These businesses tend to ebb and flow with Wall Street employment.   The global finance industry is downsizing as firms brace for a prolonged slowdown due to weak growth, tighter regulations and instability in Europe. 


Bloomberg so far has managed to sharply outperform the broader market.   It expects 2011 revenue to rise about 11 per cent to $7.6 billion, chief executive Dan Doctoroff said.   Revenue rose 10 per cent last year, when the company topped 300,000 subscribers to its terminal, a bundle of financial data, tools and news that costs subscribers about $20,000 a year.   Thomson Reuters offers its comparable product for about the same price, though cost varies depending on features, the Journal said.


It said Burton-Taylor estimates Bloomberg lifted its share of the overall market to 30.3 per cent last year from 25.1 per cent in 2005.   In contrast, Thomson Reuters&rsquo; share slid to 33.2 per cent last year from 37.4 per cent in 2005.   Thomson Reuters&rsquo; stock is down about 20 per cent year-to-date.


Bloomberg executives said the company likely will slow hiring in 2012 after increasing the size of its work force by about 35 per cent over the past three years.   &ldquo;We feel like we need to give the organization a little more time to breathe,&rdquo; Doctoroff said.


Thomson Reuters&rsquo; financial services business, which has a little more than 400,000 customers of various desktop products, increased revenue 5.5 per cent to $5.64 billion in the year&rsquo;s first nine months.


&ldquo;The financial-services division, which accounts for just over half of Thomson Reuters&rsquo;s revenue, has stumbled amid the disappointing performance of Eikon, its new desktop offering for financial professionals,&rdquo; the Journal said.   &ldquo;The product now has about 8,000 active users a year after its launch, which it said was slower than expected.   Executives said recently that a recent reorganization of the Markets division is likely to improve sales in 2012, though it won&rsquo;t drive revenue growth in Markets until 2013.&rdquo;


 


Chief executive Tom Glocer said Eikon started slowly in part because the product wasn&rsquo;t ready for &ldquo;every type of user at every institution&rdquo;.   An upgrade is pending.   He also said Eikon was just one of several investments that overall have helped revenue in markets edge up in the most recent quarter ended 30 September.


Meanwhile, the professional division, which serves the legal, tax and accounting industries, increased revenue by 10 per cent to $3.93 billion during the first nine months.


&ldquo;Thomson Reuters, Mr.   Glocer said, has recognized for a long time the trend toward &lsquo;fewer bums on seats&rsquo; in the financial-services sector and has shifted dollars to fast-growing areas such as governance risk and compliance, which helps financial institutions cope with growing regulatory burdens,&rdquo; the Journal reported.


&ldquo;I think we&rsquo;re well positioned even in a downturn because of the other weapons we have,&rdquo; Mr.   Glocer said.   Thomson Reuters spent about $850 million last year on acquisitions across its businesses.


● SOURCE The Wall Street Journal


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Tom Glocer enforces Thomson Reuters ethics code</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Thomson Reuters</category><category>Tom Glocer</category><dc:date>2011-11-13T00:23:11+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/53f60fe3ede6293d862fdd367ebc2371-604.php#unique-entry-id-604</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/53f60fe3ede6293d862fdd367ebc2371-604.php#unique-entry-id-604</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Thomson Reuters CEO Tom Glocer, pictured, has ordered the group&rsquo;s 55,000 employees in more than 100 countries to read its code of business conduct and ethics and report colleagues who break or bend the rules.


All staff are required to electronically acknowledge that they have read the code and must do so by the end of January at the latest.   Improper activities can be reported on a business compliance and ethics hotline.


Nothing is more important to the business than customers&rsquo; trust, Glocer said in a memo circulated last week to all staff under the heading &ldquo;Integrity matters&rdquo;.


&ldquo;We&rsquo;ve earned our reputation over many decades.   It could be destroyed in a single day, by one thoughtless action.   That&rsquo;s why you need to carefully review our Code of Business Conduct and Ethics &hellip; even if you've read it before.   It&rsquo;s there so we all understand the conduct that is expected of us, and it tells you whom to consult for guidance on complex issues.   It&rsquo;s vitally important to me &ndash; and I&rsquo;m sure it is to you as well &ndash; to be part of a company with such a long-established reputation for integrity.


&ldquo;Integrity matters.   Judge every action not only by whether it&rsquo;s legal or permitted by the Code but whether it&rsquo;s right.


&ldquo;If you see any of our colleagues breaking or even bending our guidelines, report that immediately to your manager, the Human Resources department or the attorney who supports your business.   Failing that, the Hotline is available to you in many languages, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.   It is every employee&rsquo;s right and responsibility to use one of these avenues to report improper activities.&rdquo;


Glocer added: &ldquo;No business deal or strategic objective is worth sacrificing the reputation that we worked so hard to build and of which we are all so justifiably proud.&rdquo;


● SOURCE Thomson Reuters


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Social media accord ends union dispute with TR</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Thomson Reuters</category><category>Deborah Zabarenko</category><category>Jim Gaines</category><dc:date>2011-11-08T09:38:22+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/50573767a781ad89d6a9a7833550f048-603.php#unique-entry-id-603</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/50573767a781ad89d6a9a7833550f048-603.php#unique-entry-id-603</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[A US union and Thomson Reuters have agreed on a social media policy that preserves employees&rsquo; rights to discuss wages, hours and working conditions on Facebook, Twitter and similar networks.


The Newspaper Guild of New York said on Monday: &ldquo;Aside from guaranteeing our freedom to express ourselves about job conditions on these networks, the agreement also puts to rest the final dispute the Guild had with Thomson Reuters stemming from the company&rsquo;s declaration of impasse in contract talks back in January 2010.&rdquo;


The union had filed an unfair labour practice charge with the US National Labor Relations Board after environment correspondent Deborah Zabarenko, who chairs the union&rsquo;s unit at Thomson Reuters, was reprimanded for a message she posted on a Reuters Twitter feed.   The text of the message, in response to a management request for suggestions on how to make the company &ldquo;the best place to work,&rdquo; was: &ldquo;One way to make this the best place to work is to deal honestly with Guild members.&rdquo;


The Guild withdrew all other unfair labour practice charges as part of a contract settlement ratified in July.   With the social media agreement, finalised on 20 October with an e-mail exchange between its president Bill O&rsquo;Meara and Reuters Americas Editor Jim Gaines, the Guild has asked the NLRB to withdraw this final charge.


The new social media policy underscores rights workers have under the National Labor Relations Act to publicly discuss working conditions.   However, it does not give Guild members a licence to make personal attacks against colleagues or managers, or against individual Thomson Reuters stories or products on social media. 


It states: &ldquo;Our wish is for people to benefit safely from social networks, not to muzzle anyone.   Journalists are people too, with all the rights of citizens.   If we want to tweet or post about a school play, a film or a favorite recipe, we are free to do so.   When dealing with matters of public importance and actual or potential subjects of coverage, however, Reuters journalists should be mindful of the impact their publicly expressed opinions can have on their work and on Reuters.   In our Twitter and Facebook profiles, for example, we should identify ourselves as Reuters journalists and declare that we speak for ourselves, not for Thomson Reuters.&rdquo;


The policy adds: &ldquo;When writing as Reuters journalists, whether for the file or online, we are guided 24 hours a day by the ethics of our organization as embodied in the Code of Conduct and the Trust Principles, which require us to be responsible, fair and impartial.&rdquo; 


&ldquo;We expect our journalists to reach conclusions through reporting, but they must also demonstrate the intellectual discipline to keep their conclusions susceptible to further reporting, which requires a posture of open‐mindedness and enlightened skepticism.   This is difficult to demonstrate in the social networks&rsquo; short forms and under the pressure of thinking‐writing‐posting in real time.   But maintaining this posture is critical to our credibility and reputation as journalists.   When in doubt about a post, tweet or other action on social networks, we must enlist a second pair of eyes, even at the cost of some delay.&rdquo;


The policy specifically states that nothing in it should be interpreted as inhibiting the exchange of ideas about matters that deal with employees&rsquo; common welfare.   Nor is there any prohibition on using social media for speech protected by the National Labor Relations Act, such as candidly discussing wages, hours and working conditions.


The tension is clear, says the company.   &ldquo;Social networks encourage fast, constant, brief communications; journalism calls for communication preceded by fact‐finding and thoughtful consideration.&rdquo;


It adds: &ldquo;At all costs, we must avoid flame wars, incendiary rhetoric and loose talk.&rdquo;


● SOURCE The Newspaper Guild of New York | Thomson Reuters social media policy


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Analyst cuts price target on TR stock</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Thomson Reuters</category><category>Shares</category><category>Tom Glocer</category><dc:date>2011-11-02T17:54:12+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/2f3d31ccf929eb3de13c4da0267b163d-602.php#unique-entry-id-602</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/2f3d31ccf929eb3de13c4da0267b163d-602.php#unique-entry-id-602</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[A Canadian analyst cut his price target for Thomson Reuters shares by $5 to $35 on Wednesday following the company's third quarter results.


Robert Bek of Toronto investment bank CIBC said Tuesday&rsquo;s results &ndash; a higher-than-expected rise in third-quarter profit and revenue &ndash; were &ldquo;decent&rdquo;.   But he noted chief executive Tom Glocer&rsquo;s forecast that growth in its key markets division will likely have to wait until 2013 as restructuring efforts announced in July play out.


&ldquo;As such, we believe the Street will discount numbers further while waiting on execution,&rdquo; Bek said.   He  maintained a &ldquo;sector performer&rdquo; rating on the stock.


Thomson Reuters shares traded 0.24 per cent higher at $29.09 in New York on Wednesday.   In Toronto the stock was 0.57 per cent lower at C$29.53.


● SOURCE The Globe and Mail


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Tom Glocer: &#x2018;We&#x2019;re not magicians&#x2019;</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Tom Glocer</category><category>Thomson Reuters</category><category>Financial</category><category>Jennifer Saba</category><category>James Smith</category><dc:date>2011-11-01T15:47:50+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/1e663b31b025dce9cc7e13d5fb636b40-601.php#unique-entry-id-601</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/1e663b31b025dce9cc7e13d5fb636b40-601.php#unique-entry-id-601</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Benefits of the recent reorganisation at Thomson Reuters may not fully kick in until 2013, chief executive Tom Glocer said on Tuesday.


&ldquo;We&rsquo;re not magicians,&rdquo; he said in an interview after the company reported a higher-than-expected rise in third-quarter profit and revenue.


Glocer was interviewed in New York by Reuters&rsquo; media correspondent Jennifer Saba who said he is under pressure from the board and the controlling shareholder, Canada's Thomson family, to increase the group&rsquo;s market share, particularly for its financial industry products.   Sources familiar with the board's thinking said in July he had about a year to make that happen, she reported.


 


In September Thomson Reuters said it would merge its two operating divisions &ndash; the strongly performing professional serving mainly lawyers and accountants, and  the struggling markets, which targets banks and other financial institutions.


&ldquo;We expect the benefit of these changes will improve sales performance in 2012 and benefit 2013 revenue growth,&rdquo; Glocer said in a statement accompanying the Q3 release.


&ldquo;What is clear at this point is that 2012 will not look particularly good,&rdquo; said Claudio Aspesi, a London analyst.   &ldquo;Things are going to get worse before they get better ... even 2013 is a statement of optimistic faith in a recovery.&rdquo;


Glocer said conditions remained tough in the financial markets.   &ldquo;But that&rsquo;s not a good enough excuse as various competitors were still able to grow their businesses," he said in a memo to staff.   The company would grow by driving sales in fast-growing markets and taking share in slower ones, he said.


As part of the September shakeup, James Smith, former head of the professional division, was elevated to the new role of chief operating officer, putting him in a strong position to succeed Glocer.


● SOURCE Reuters


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Thomson Reuters Q3 earnings beat estimates</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Thomson Reuters</category><category>Financial</category><category>Shares</category><category>Tom Glocer</category><category>James Smith</category><dc:date>2011-11-01T14:08:21+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/9d720a20f87f6ed6e7eb76c1ba2ee17c-600.php#unique-entry-id-600</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/9d720a20f87f6ed6e7eb76c1ba2ee17c-600.php#unique-entry-id-600</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Thomson Reuters&rsquo; third-quarter profit rose by 10 per cent, higher than expected, as strength in its professional division offset weakness in the markets business.


The company, in Q3 results announced on Tuesday, reaffirmed its outlook for 2011 as its margins improved.


In September the company said it would merge the professional division, which serves mainly lawyers and accountants, with the struggling markets division, which targets banks and other financial institutions.


&ldquo;We expect the benefit of these changes will improve sales performance in 2012 and benefit 2013 revenue growth,&rdquo; chief executive Tom Glocer said in a statement.


Markets accounts for about 58 per cent of overall group revenue.   The division posted revenue growth of just one per cent as banks continued to slash jobs and costs.


The company has also been hurt by the slow uptake of its new Eikon desktop product for traders and analysts, Reuters reported.   It sold or migrated 32,000 Eikons by the end of September, up from 28,000 three months earlier.


&ldquo;Conditions were challenging in some of our markets, but that&rsquo;s not a good enough excuse as various competitors were still able to grow their businesses,&rdquo; Glocer said in a memo to staff.   The company would grow by driving sales in fast-growing markets and taking share in slower ones, he said.


In July Reuters reported sources familiar with board thinking saying Glocer was under pressure from directors and the company&rsquo;s controlling shareholder, Canada&rsquo;s Thomson family, to improve performance.   At that time, sources said he had about a year to make that happen.


James Smith, former head of the professional division, was elevated to the new role of chief operating officer in September, putting him in a strong position to succeed Glocer.


Thomson Reuters reported third-quarter revenue of $3.26 billion, up five per cent before currency changes.   Analysts had expected $3.23 billion.


 


Revenue in the professional division, which accounts for 42 per cent of overall revenue, increased 10 per cent after growing eight per cent in the second quarter.   The one per cent revenue growth in markets was unchanged from the second quarter.


Adjusted earnings per share rose to 56 cents from 45 cents in the same quarter last year.   Analysts had expected 53 cents.


Thomson Reuters said it still expects revenue to grow by a mid-single-digit percentage rate in 2011.


The company&rsquo;s underlying operating margin improved to 22 per cent, from 21.2 per cent a year earlier.


Thomson Reuters shares have fallen 20 per cent this year, worse than the market at large.


● SOURCE Reuters


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Mark Wood&#x2019;s digital Future shock</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Mark Wood</category><dc:date>2011-10-27T14:40:23+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/aa2c94fe9416a42ffc82833600acf1ab-599.php#unique-entry-id-599</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/aa2c94fe9416a42ffc82833600acf1ab-599.php#unique-entry-id-599</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Mark Wood, pictured, former Reuters editor-in-chief, was appointed chief executive of Future Publishing, a UK-based international special-interest media group, on Thursday after its CEO and finance chief resigned suddenly.


Future publishes magazines for computer games, cars, cycling, music and photography fans.   Its titles include Fast Car, Classic Rock and Guitar World.   Wood became a non-executive director in April 2009 and UK chief executive in August 2010.


In July, the company said the faster transition of its US business to a primarily digital model and a reorganisation of its UK business were expected to result in job cuts and one-time cash costs.   Future's shares have lost more than 60 per cent of their value this year.


&ldquo;The recent restructuring which positions the company for its digital future has allowed the Board this opportunity to achieve substantial savings by eliminating an entire tier of corporate overhead,&rdquo; Future said in a statement.


Wood dismissed speculation that Future might sell off its US business.   &ldquo;There are no plans at all to sell it off,&rdquo; he said.   &ldquo;On the contrary we are bringing the US and UK operations closer together.   My plan is quite clearly to integrate the businesses much more.   The US is a very big market for all our digital products, the results of the Apple store sales prove that, but we need to do a lot more.&rdquo;


Wood joined Reuters in 1976 and was editor-in-chief from 1989 to 2000 when he took charge of the group&rsquo;s strategic media investments and alliances as managing director of Reuters Content Partners.   Between 1977 and 1987 he was a correspondent in Vienna, East Berlin, Moscow and Bonn.   He later became chairman and then chief executive of UK television news provider ITN until September 2008.


● SOURCE Reuters



]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Reuters changes direction&#x2c; pushes Insiders outside</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Reuters Insider</category><category>Stephen Adler</category><dc:date>2011-10-25T20:35:41+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/2ccfed498d1a160ed5c1d2380c1397c4-598.php#unique-entry-id-598</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/2ccfed498d1a160ed5c1d2380c1397c4-598.php#unique-entry-id-598</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[A year and a half after launching a key new product aimed at shaping the future of news, Thomson Reuters has changed its direction and fired many of the people who made it.


Reuters Insider, an online interactive financial video service dubbed &ldquo;YouTube for traders&rdquo; when it was launched in May 2010, was aimed at 500,000 financial subscribers paying up to $2,000 a month to receive a stream of 3,000 online news clips a week.   Clients could access it on desktops, BlackBerries, iPhones and iPads, live or on-demand.


Reuters built TV studios in Hong Kong, London and New York to produce original content for the new service.   It was part of a $1 billion technology investment in a project called New Era, New Tools, which was designed to address challenges faced by the financial services community.   Insider followed the launch of Elektron, a high speed data distribution network, and was to be fully integrated into Eikon, a new information desktop that aimed to create a common platform for all of the group&rsquo;s financial products.


Stephen Adler, editor-in-chief, said on Tuesday Reuters Insider would now broaden its reach to include non-financial audiences while reducing the number of video programmes targeted solely at financial clients.


&ldquo;The new approach, with more emphasis on high impact than high volume, will necessarily result in the reduction and redeployment of Reuters Insider Editorial staff,&rdquo; he announced in an internal message obtained by The Baron.


&ldquo;As most of you know, Reuters Insider was launched last year with the goal of bringing exclusive multimedia programming to our financial clients.   We introduced innovative technology, built a video team for original content, and invited financial institutions to create their own video channels as well.   The response from institutions was strong, with more than 300 participating.   Meanwhile, our team of talented journalists and analysts has done important work,&rdquo; Adler said.


&ldquo;We have since learned that Reuters Insider&rsquo;s exclusive focus on the financial world has limited our ability to provide high-value video to our professional, agency, and consumer audiences.   With our new strategy, we will continue to provide a platform for institutional customers while pursuing our plans to integrate Reuters Insider into Eikon.   But we will also be able to cover topics of interest to our many other audiences.


&ldquo;We have ambitious plans for our video and multimedia programming, and deploying our resources in new and creative ways will help us provide more value to our customers across the company&rsquo;s businesses.   Those video professionals who remain with us will have an exciting task ahead.   To those who are leaving, I extend my thanks for your many contributions and wish you the best in future endeavors.&rdquo;


● SOURCE Reuters


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Stephen Adler spells it out: stick to Reuters standards</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Stephen Adler</category><category>Alix Freedman</category><category>Michael Williams</category><dc:date>2011-10-18T21:09:58+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/6518dde13813307109a6700d4de5da28-597.php#unique-entry-id-597</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/6518dde13813307109a6700d4de5da28-597.php#unique-entry-id-597</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Five days after Reuters published an inflammatory report that alleged billionaire financier George Soros was behind the Occupy Wall Street protest movement, editor-in-chief Stephen Adler on Tuesday spelled out to staff the need to stick to the agency&rsquo;s editorial standards.


&ldquo;We aim to provide deeper understanding through tough, accurate, fair reporting, not through expressing personal opinions in news coverage or stating or even implying conclusions unless they are rigorously supported by all the facts,&rdquo; he said in an internal memo obtained by The Baron.


Adler did not refer explicitly to the controversial news item last Thursday which was derided by media critics in the United States for editorial mishandling and failing to meet Reuters&rsquo; standards.


&ldquo;A great virtue of our cherished reputation for accuracy is that readers actually rely on what we write, and they feel betrayed when we fall short of our high standards.   We therefore have a responsibility to be worthy of their trust every day.   This doesn&rsquo;t mean every subject of every story has to be pleased with what we have reported,&rdquo; he said. 


The Newspaper Guild of New York said &ldquo;the seriously flawed story and the company&rsquo;s handling of it have drawn strong criticism from inside and outside the company, indicating an erosion of trust in the news we provide&rdquo;.


The company&rsquo;s new editor for standards and ethics, Alix Freedman, was quoted by The Atlantic Wire as saying, &ldquo;We update stories all the time when we get more information.&rdquo;


&ldquo;While that&rsquo;s superficially true, it&rsquo;s not the whole truth,&rdquo; the Guild said.   &ldquo;This wasn&rsquo;t an update; this was a story that was seriously flawed at best, and more likely not a story at all.   It should have been corrected or withdrawn in a forthright fashion.&rdquo;


It added: &ldquo;One of the worst things about this incident is that it could have been avoided, if the editorial safeguards that have preserved our reputation for decades were followed. ...  The story was stopped on the Americas Desk, questions were raised and it was suggested that the piece be killed or substantially revised.   Instead of heeding this advice, managers took over the story and transmitted the flawed version.&rdquo;


Adler also said he was getting a number of questions about Reuters online op-ed and blogging initiatives.   &ldquo;How, some people inside and outside Reuters are asking, can we purport to be independent and unbiased when we publish opinion columns and edgy online commentaries?&rdquo;


His answer referred to the Trust Principles established 70 years ago to protect Reuters&rsquo; integrity, independence and freedom from bias.


&ldquo;In my view, the issue comes down to whether we are adding value for our readers,&rdquo; Adler said.   &ldquo;Are we helping them make smart decisions, achieve fresh insights, and influence the global conversation?   We&rsquo;re already doing this brilliantly through our own financial commentary service, Breakingviews.   I believe that providing a forum for other intelligent commentary on a variety of topics also helps fulfill our mission, as long as we disclose clearly that the ideas presented reflect the views of the individual writers and not of Thomson Reuters.   As an organization, we are abiding by the Trust Principles because we come to the process with no political or ideological agenda but rather with a straightforward commitment to the vigorous exchange of views in the public interest.&rdquo;


...As you know, one of our top editorial priorities is to add insight, context, and depth to our stories to supplement &ndash; not replace &ndash; the speed, accuracy, and fairness for which Reuters has long been known.   The idea is to provide more value to our readers so they can make smart decisions, achieve fresh insights, and influence the global conversation.


This newer focus, with its acceleration of efforts in enterprise reporting, exclusivity, and in-depth coverage of breaking news, has produced some terrific journalism, along with a bit of confusion.   To review, here is what I said on the topic when I became editor in chief in February: ...  But in order to fulfill Thomson Reuters mission, we have to aim even higher and compete even harder.   This means being second to none in speed, accuracy, relevance, and fairness but also and crucially in enterprise, insight, analysis, and originality.   Building our strength in these areas is essential to our becoming a must-read among global professionals, who are looking for understanding as well as information.&rdquo;


To annotate, &ldquo;speed, accuracy, relevance, and fairness&rdquo; remain absolutely essential.   We aim to provide deeper understanding through tough, accurate, fair reporting, not through expressing personal opinions in news coverage or stating or even implying conclusions unless they are rigorously supported by all the facts.


Someone asked [enterprise editor] Mike Williams on a recent staff call how we could maintain our journalistic standards while embarking on investigative reporting.   Mike was a little dumbstruck and responded that high journalistic standards and investigative journalism aren&rsquo;t just compatible, they are inextricably connected.   I entirely agree: We uncover hard-to-get facts through meticulous, dogged reporting, and we report what we learn fairly and dispassionately &ndash; with no other agenda than informing our readers.   The story&rsquo;s heat emanates from the depth of reporting and understanding it reflects, not from loose logic, innuendo, or what some internally call &ldquo;banalysis.&rdquo;


A great virtue of our cherished reputation for accuracy is that readers actually rely on what we write, and they feel betrayed when we fall short of our high standards.   We therefore have a responsibility to be worthy of their trust every day.   This doesn&rsquo;t mean every subject of every story has to be pleased with what we have reported.   Indeed, if we are reporting deeply and well, we will uncover wrongdoing and other circumstances that reflect poorly on individuals or institutions.&nbsp; ...  But even when a story is critical, it must be accurate and fair.   And when we do make a mistake, we must correct it fully, openly, and as quickly as possible.   I know this ethically demanding approach to journalism runs deep in the culture of Reuters.   It remains core to our belief system and our behavior even as we pursue more in-depth modes of coverage.


On a related topic, I&rsquo;m getting a number of questions about our online op-ed and blogging initiatives.   How, some people inside and outside Reuters are asking, can we purport to be independent and unbiased when we publish opinion columns and edgy online commentaries?   In my view, the issue comes down to whether we are adding value for our readers: Are we helping them make smart decisions, achieve fresh insights, and influence the global conversation?   We&rsquo;re already doing this brilliantly through our own financial commentary service, Breakingviews.   I believe that providing a forum for other intelligent commentary on a variety of topics also helps fulfill our mission, as long as we disclose clearly that the ideas presented reflect the views of the individual writers and not of Thomson Reuters.   As an organization, we are abiding by the Trust Principles because we come to the process with no political or ideological agenda but rather with a straightforward commitment to the vigorous exchange of views in the public interest.


I look forward to hearing your thoughts on any of these issues.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Blogger disowns &#x27;biased&#x27; Reuters report</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Felix Salmon</category><category>Jim Impoco</category><dc:date>2011-10-14T01:03:46+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/16fab85af4f042582a7ab487b2103e27-596.php#unique-entry-id-596</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/16fab85af4f042582a7ab487b2103e27-596.php#unique-entry-id-596</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[One of Reuters&rsquo; most prominent commentators has publicly distanced himself from a controversial news report that linked Occupy Wall Street protests in New York to billionaire financier George Soros.


&ldquo;The article is particularly problematic from my perspective because I&rsquo;m incredibly proud of Reuters&rsquo;s long tradition of impartial journalism,&rdquo; Felix Salmon, pictured, wrote after the article drew a burst of criticism in the blogosphere.


&ldquo;I&rsquo;m on the opinion side, not bound by such things, and if you think I&rsquo;m biased you&rsquo;re right.   (I should mention here explicitly that this post, just like everything else on this blog, is my personal opinion.   It may or may not be shared by others within the organization.   But it should emphatically not be taken as representing the views of Thomson Reuters.)


&ldquo;Reuters news stories like the one about OWS are held to a very high standard of integrity, independence, and freedom from bias.   And there&rsquo;s lots in this article which tilts hard to the right," Salmon wrote.


&ldquo;Reuters cannot &mdash; must not &mdash; get a reputation as a right-wing media outlet.   We have to report the news as impartially as we can.   In this case, there was no story, and nothing to report.   Inventing a tenuous and intellectually-dishonest link between Soros and OWS might get us traffic from Matt Drudge &mdash; but that&rsquo;s traffic which, frankly, we don&rsquo;t particularly value or care for.   Much more importantly, it serves to undermine the heart of what Reuters stands for.   And we can never afford to do that.&rdquo;


The offending article headed &ldquo;Who&rsquo;s behind the Wall Street protests?&rdquo;   began: &ldquo;Anti-Wall Street protesters say the rich are getting richer while average Americans suffer, but the group that started it all may have benefited indirectly from the largesse of one of the world&rsquo;s richest men.&rdquo;


Soros and the protesters deny any connection, it said.   &ldquo;But Reuters did find indirect financial links between Soros and Adbusters, an anti-capitalist group in Canada which started the protests with an inventive marketing campaign aimed at sparking an Arab Spring type uprising against Wall Street.&rdquo;


As adverse comment mounted, editors recast the article with a denial by Soros&rsquo;s spokesman.   Jim Impoco, executive editor for Thomson Reuters Digital, tweeted: &ldquo;Here&rsquo;s an update cum clarification of Reuters&rsquo; Soros-Occupy Wall Street story.&rdquo;   The update was headed &ldquo;Soros: not a funder of Wall Street protests&rdquo;.   It began: &ldquo;George Soros isn&rsquo;t a financial backer of the Wall Street protests, despite speculation by critics including radio host Rush Limbaugh that the billionaire investor has helped fuel the anti-capitalist movement.&rdquo;


New York magazine commented: &ldquo;The wire service and aspiring &lsquo;best journalism organization in the world&rsquo; ran an odd story this morning, insinuating that billionaire financier George Soros is secretly funding the Occupy Wall Street protests.   The evidence, unlike the innuendo, is awfully thin.&rdquo;


It concluded: &ldquo;This story might not be out of place on Fox News, but at Reuters, which has always taken pains to stay above the partisan fray, it smells suspiciously like Drudge bait.   (Sure enough, The Drudge Report ran a link to the item, with the headline: &ldquo;WIRE: Who&rsquo;s behind &lsquo;Occupy&rsquo;?&rdquo;)   For a company that &ldquo;aims to report the facts, no rumours,&rdquo; an attempt to tie Occupy Wall Street to conservatives&rsquo; favorite billionaire boogeyman feels poorly thought-out, at best.&rdquo;


Among reader comments on the Reuters report:


● &ldquo;Yellow journalism at its finest.   Shame on Reuters.&rdquo;


● &ldquo;Yet more evidence that editorial standards at Reuters continue to hit new lows.&rdquo;


Media commentator Jay Rosen examined the story &ndash; in all its versions &ndash; in detail and remarked: &ldquo;Reuters vs.   Reuters: News agency makes an ass of itself by trying to connect George Soros to Occupy Wall Street.&rdquo;


● SOURCE Felix Salmon | Reuters | New York  | The New York Observer | Eqentia | Poynter


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Infosys says it is not in talks to buy TR&#x27;s healthcare business</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Thomson Reuters</category><dc:date>2011-10-13T10:08:50+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/b9fb0ae9f6e491b057ffd7e681541a21-595.php#unique-entry-id-595</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/b9fb0ae9f6e491b057ffd7e681541a21-595.php#unique-entry-id-595</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[India's second-largest software services exporter, Infosys, said on Thursday it is not in talks to acquire Thomson Reuters&rsquo; healthcare business.


Denying earlier media reports, Infosys said in an e-mailed statement, &ldquo;this is to clarify that Infosys is not in discussions for the acquisition of Thomson Reuters&rsquo; Healthcare business at present.&rdquo;


Press Trust of India news agency reported on Wednesday that Infosys was keen to acquire the business, which supplies healthcare data and analysis to companies, government agencies and healthcare professionals.   The Bangalore-based firm&rsquo;s CEO and managing director SD Shibulal said at a press conference: &ldquo;We are dating ... not yet engaged&rdquo;.   He added: &ldquo;... we need to understand each other.   So, we are definitely ... we have an intention to get engaged.&rdquo; 


Thomson Reuters said in June it was planning to sell the business.   India&rsquo;s Business Standard newspaper reported last month that Infosys was close to buying it for $700 million to $750 million.


● SOURCE Money Control


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>TR healthcare sale: &#x27;Dating ... not yet engaged&#x27;</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Thomson Reuters</category><dc:date>2011-10-12T13:56:22+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/1fd45016a57a89898dcb16e6ebe04814-594.php#unique-entry-id-594</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/1fd45016a57a89898dcb16e6ebe04814-594.php#unique-entry-id-594</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[India&rsquo;s Infosys Technologies said on Wednesday it is keen to acquire Thomson Reuters&rsquo; healthcare business. 


&ldquo;We are dating ... not yet engaged&rdquo;, CEO and managing director SD Shibulal said at a press conference.   &ldquo;... we need to understand each other.   So, we are definitely ... we have an intention to get engaged,&rdquo; he added. 


Bangalore-based Infosys, India&rsquo;s second largest software company, has been reported to be close to acquiring the business for $700-$750 million. 


In June, Thomson Reuters said it planned to sell the unit, which supplies healthcare data and analysis to companies, government agencies and health professionals.   It had revenues of about $450 million in 2010.


● SOURCE Economic Times


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Obituary: Mark Nichols</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Obituary</category><category>Mark Nichols</category><category>Robert Marshall</category><dc:date>2011-10-11T20:01:50+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/23b0175a1dc81c8b7b6a264ada4b6ddf-593.php#unique-entry-id-593</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/23b0175a1dc81c8b7b6a264ada4b6ddf-593.php#unique-entry-id-593</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Mark Nichols, a sub-editor on Reuters&rsquo; Nordesk in London in the 1960s, died in hospital in Toronto at age 74 on 21 September.


Nichols worked for Reuters from 1964 to 1968, translating the file into North American-friendly usage, after spending four years with The Canadian Press wire service in Toronto.


&ldquo;He was a big influence on my life, especially at Nordesk in the 1960s, where I saw him as the personification of the journalist that I &ndash; with six months of experience at CP under my belt &ndash; wanted to be,&rdquo; journalist Robert Marshall said.


During his time as a writer for Time Canada from 1969 to 1977, Nichols was inducted into the Canadian News Hall of Fame in 1971.   He became&nbsp;editor of the Imperial Oil Review from 1978 to 1980 and then&nbsp;served as&nbsp;a section&nbsp;editor at Maclean&rsquo;s, Canada's weekly news&nbsp;magazine, from 1983 to 2000, overseeing Canada news and, later, technology and science.


&ldquo;There really wasn't an assignment that Mark could not handle or a subject that he could not distill into a silken narrative,&rdquo; Robert Lewis, former editor-in-chief at Maclean&rsquo;s, wrote in a eulogy.   &ldquo;He wrote about politics, business and the arts with aplomb.&rdquo;


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>James Smith aims for change plan by 1 January</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>James Smith</category><dc:date>2011-10-05T21:44:34+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/b077c97af837d0f8f31014eb458ec326-592.php#unique-entry-id-592</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/b077c97af837d0f8f31014eb458ec326-592.php#unique-entry-id-592</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Thomson Reuters&rsquo; new chief operating officer James Smith, pictured, has set out his strategy for a change plan to be in place by 1 January 2012.


A new drive for sales growth will be backed by an organisation which puts the customer at the heart of every decision.   &ldquo;Any changes we make will be guided by this simple operating principle,&rdquo; he told staff on Wednesday.


Smith, appointed COO a week ago, said a small team would facilitate dialogue on how to best shape internal efforts and direct resources to support customer-facing businesses.


&ldquo;We will tackle our work in multiple steps.   The first step will be locking down the organisation and the operating plan that must be in place on January 1.   We need credible, realistic budgets as well as management teams who are committed to delivering.   We also must establish the operating mechanisms and rhythms that will support greater teamwork and the transparent flow of information across the company,&rdquo; he said.


&ldquo;The next steps will be further structured dialogues that will guide the evolution of our thinking about key strategic and operating issues.   My commitment to you is that these will be open conversations, involving multiple voices from across the business.&rdquo;


Smith said some decisions would be made fairly quickly; others would take longer.   &ldquo;But all will be the result of open dialogue and a desire to promote agility, speed decision-making and place authority and accountability as close as possible to the front lines.&rdquo;


● SOURCE Reuters



]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Obituary: Frank Fitter</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Obituary</category><category>Frank Fitter</category><dc:date>2011-09-30T22:16:02+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/3792dbda1353dc8a8f81cfcf355da4f0-591.php#unique-entry-id-591</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/3792dbda1353dc8a8f81cfcf355da4f0-591.php#unique-entry-id-591</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[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.&nbsp;  He was appointed evening editor in 1969, office manager in 1977, staff executive in 1979 and welfare officer in 1981.


&nbsp;


He retired on 9 July 1987, his 55th birthday, after 38 years with Reuters.&nbsp;  Fitter died on 14 September.


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Obituary: Dennis Savage</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Obituary</category><category>Dennis Savage</category><dc:date>2011-09-29T14:54:58+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/e0f2333f386549637cc49412f0b30007-590.php#unique-entry-id-590</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/e0f2333f386549637cc49412f0b30007-590.php#unique-entry-id-590</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Dennis Savage, a long-serving commodities journalist in Comtelburo and Reuters Economic Services, died on Sunday in the Journalists&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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.


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Another major shake-up as Thomson Reuters disbands dual structure</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Thomson Reuters</category><category>Tom Glocer</category><category>Robert Daleo</category><category>James Smith</category><category>Stephane Bello</category><category>David Thomson</category><category>Devin Wenig</category><dc:date>2011-09-28T20:51:27+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/4ca7f05c6be807a172129709ceac0607-589.php#unique-entry-id-589</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/4ca7f05c6be807a172129709ceac0607-589.php#unique-entry-id-589</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[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 &ldquo;transition to a set of focused business units&rdquo; reporting to head office.


Both Daleo and Smith were Thomson Corporation executives when the Toronto-based company bought Reuters in 2008.


&nbsp;


&ldquo;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,&rdquo; said Glocer.   &ldquo;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.&rdquo;


&nbsp;


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.


&nbsp;


David Thomson, chairman of Thomson Reuters, said: &ldquo;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&rsquo;s contributions to the businesses have been immense.   Our evolution into a global electronic information company owes a great debt to him.   Bob&rsquo;s advice and leadership will be sorely missed, but those qualities remain in place over the months ahead to all our benefit.&rdquo;


&nbsp;


&ldquo;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,&rdquo; said Glocer.   &ldquo;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.&rdquo;


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&rsquo;s exit, which was seen as a sign of the group&rsquo;s controlling shareholder, Canada&rsquo;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.


&ldquo;Certainly for the first two years it worked very well like that.   This year, I concluded markets wasn&rsquo;t coming out of the integration the way it needed to and I had to take the first step in July,&rdquo; he said.   &ldquo;In the perfect world, markets would have been growing faster this year and I would have moved in an orderly way to this structure&rdquo; in 2012, he said.


The FT said Smith&rsquo;s promotion could elevate his standing as a possible internal successor to Glocer, who said: &ldquo;He&rsquo;s always been in the frame as far as I&rsquo;m concerned, but I&rsquo;m not planning to go anywhere.&rdquo;


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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;s broader product strategy had not changed, nor had the goal of creating a strong performance culture.


&ldquo;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.&rdquo;


● SOURCE Reuters | Financial Times


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Obituary: Robert Eksuzyan</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Obituary</category><category>Robert Eksuzyan</category><category>John Morrison</category><category>Robert Evans</category><category>Zhora Nikitin</category><category>Richard Balmforth</category><category>Sidney Weiland</category><dc:date>2011-09-24T21:22:52+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/72e62346cd5cf329b2f57d12aa3cf5db-588.php#unique-entry-id-588</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/72e62346cd5cf329b2f57d12aa3cf5db-588.php#unique-entry-id-588</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Robert Eksuzyan, pictured, who died in his homeland of Abkhazia on Saturday at the age of 81, served Reuters for more than 40 years as a translator and indefatigable fixer in Moscow bureau, from the Soviet period of Brezhnev, through Gorbachev&rsquo;s Perestroika, the chaos of Yeltsin&rsquo;s years to Putin&rsquo;s Russia of today.   Over that period he became the bureau&rsquo;s historical memory.


But for several generations of correspondents, this irascible, short-fused but utterly endearing&nbsp;ethnic Armenian was much more than just a fixer: his honesty and integrity &ndash; despite the&nbsp;ideological pressures he worked under until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 &ndash; made him a loyal and reliable friend.   He had a clear devotion to Reuters,&nbsp;and a deep respect for the correspondents who worked for it and their families.   He was a hilarious raconteur &ndash; 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&nbsp;former Moscow bureau chief in the 1980s, said:&nbsp;&ldquo;I would love to have had a chance to explain to him the sense of &lsquo;You had a good innings&rsquo;.&rdquo;   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 &ndash; 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: &ldquo;One day, Abkhazia will bring the United States to its knees!&rdquo;


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 &ndash; or more often notice what was not said &ndash; 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&rsquo;s pre-war military purges and went on to beat a war-time death sentence and service in a &lsquo;punishment battalion&rsquo; 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 &ndash; 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: &ldquo;I have been telling people for ages round here that Britain would win.   Nobody believed me.&rdquo;   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 &ldquo;there was food in the shops even outside London as well!&rdquo;   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&nbsp;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 &ndash; and at least one stroke &ndash; 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.


&ldquo;He considered Reuters his home,&rdquo; 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 &ndash; as they told him &ndash; &ldquo;too friendly&rdquo; with our &ldquo;bourgeois correspondents&rdquo;.   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&nbsp;


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Reuters v Bloomberg battle &#x27;may change news&#x27;</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Alix Freedman</category><category>Stephen Adler</category><category>Tom Glocer</category><dc:date>2011-09-22T23:21:23+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/046969d8819f809fe41a2399cfd02284-587.php#unique-entry-id-587</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/046969d8819f809fe41a2399cfd02284-587.php#unique-entry-id-587</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[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&rsquo;s new job she will work &ldquo;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&rdquo;.


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.


&ldquo;The growth of Thomson Reuters since their merger in 2008 and the rise of Bloomberg &hellip; are major developments in journalism that aren&rsquo;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,&rdquo; he said.   &ldquo;Unlike the leading newspapers in this arena that also have formidable ranks of reporters, commentators and editors &ndash; the New York Times, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal &ndash; 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.&rdquo;


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. 


&ldquo;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 &lsquo;impatient with the company&rsquo;s performance.&rsquo;


Like Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters&rsquo; 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.


&ldquo;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 &hellip;


&ldquo;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.&rdquo;   Osnos said The Wall Street Journal's loss of Freedman was much more than a job shift.   &ldquo;It is a measure of bigger changes in how news and data are being collected, paid for, and distributed.&rdquo;


● SOURCE The Atlantic


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Police drop sources order</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Thomson Reuters</category><category>Harold Evans</category><category>David Thomson</category><category>Tom Glocer</category><category>Stephen Adler</category><dc:date>2011-09-20T23:46:17+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/e0643cf50ad1012d18f27367719e3966-586.php#unique-entry-id-586</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/e0643cf50ad1012d18f27367719e3966-586.php#unique-entry-id-586</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Police dropped an attempt to force The Guardian to reveal confidential sources for stories related to Britain&rsquo;s phone-hacking scandal.   Leading newspaper editors earlier roundly condemned the bid at a Thomson Reuters event at which the regulation of the press was debated.


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&rsquo;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: &ldquo;It&rsquo;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.&rdquo;


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 &ldquo;The Press We Deserve&rdquo; that Britain&rsquo;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&rsquo;s note: The original version of this report headed &ldquo;Police drop sources order after Thomson Reuters debate&rdquo; 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


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Exciting times ahead for Reuters&#x2c; says Stephen Adler</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Stephen Adler</category><category>The Reuter Society</category><dc:date>2011-09-20T12:38:30+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/e17f157c577d7d2a06f65ae5d252fea6-585.php#unique-entry-id-585</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/e17f157c577d7d2a06f65ae5d252fea6-585.php#unique-entry-id-585</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Reuters is trusted to be fast, accurate and fair but still has a way to go to be the dominant news organisation worldwide, editor-in-chief Stephen Adler, pictured, told former staff members.   Those at the top of Thomson Reuters want to own the world&rsquo;s best news organisation and they want to invest in it, he said at a special meeting of The Reuter Society on Monday.


It is in the Trust Principles that Reuters is supposed to be the world&rsquo;s best news organisation, and in the present environment, with other businesses weakening and with Reuters&rsquo; 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, &ldquo;inciseful&rdquo; storytelling, &ldquo;we&rsquo;re not nearly the best in the world&rdquo;. 


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.


&ldquo;People, when they say that, are thinking about memorability, about the big stories, about the things that really change people&rsquo;s thinking.   So there&rsquo;s enormous praise for fast, accurate and fair but I think we&rsquo;re living in a world that needs both.&rdquo;


Adler, a former Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek editor appointed Reuters editor-in-chief in February, said Reuters&rsquo; editorial has a good, strong budget, though funding was not unlimited.   &ldquo;But our budget is so substantially bigger than anything any other news organisation I&rsquo;ve ever seen that, when I came in and I saw the budget I said, you know, this is something I can work with&hellip;


&ldquo;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&rsquo;s important to business generally and they think it&rsquo;s important to the company&rsquo;s place in the world.&rdquo;


The aim is to reach a high-end audience in terms of people interested in ideas, decision makers thinking about what&rsquo;s going on in the world in a serious way.   &ldquo;That&rsquo;s the tier we want to reach.&rdquo;


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.   &ldquo;We don&rsquo;t want anybody else to be better.   Where we are is we&rsquo;re in an interim period.   We&rsquo;ve done a little bit to refresh the website, it&rsquo;s a little better than it was before, but some time next year I think you&rsquo;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&rsquo;re going to dramatically improve it.&rdquo;


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: &ldquo;We need to be strong in the United States because it&rsquo;s the world&rsquo;s largest economy and because the political system is really important and because it&rsquo;s a regulatory environment affecting the entire world and the fact we&rsquo;re truly committed to being global we have to be a whole lot better in the US than we are.   I think that&rsquo;s the first principle.&rdquo;


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.   &ldquo;So I think the premise is wrong.   The fact is I have hired a lot of senior people who I&rsquo;ve worked with in the past, I think they&rsquo;re some of the best journalists in the world, I think it&rsquo;s the best leadership team in any news organisation in the world, but it is significantly more diverse than it was characterised.&rdquo;


He dismissed talk about Reuters being &ldquo;The Wall Street Journal in exile&rdquo;.   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. 


&ldquo;So what we&rsquo;ve done is we&rsquo;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 &hellip; basically, when you join the organisation you have to have mandatory training.&rdquo;


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.  


&ldquo;What I really don&rsquo;t like is the merging of opinion and news in a news story and we do watch out for that,&rdquo; he said.


&ldquo;We want to be relevant in a contemporary media world and we want to do it in a way that&rsquo;s respectful of and consistent with the Reuters tradition but not one that makes us irrelevant going forward.&rdquo;


Referring to talk about current Reuters journalists being up in arms about the agency&rsquo;s direction, Adler said he did not see that at all.   &ldquo;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&rsquo;re really excited, and everywhere I go there is a sense that we&rsquo;re going to a world of extraordinarily ambitious journalism and we&rsquo;re going to raise the level of journalism and there&rsquo;s tremendous energy and excitement around that.&rdquo;


Photo: Corrie Parsonson


● CLICK to view edited video highlights of the meeting


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Harold Evans on Rupert Murdoch &#x27;the stiletto&#x27;</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Harold Evans</category><category>Rupert Murdoch</category><category>Robert Maxwell</category><dc:date>2011-09-19T11:16:42+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/31d3c72b7c685507805c3893762a2ea2-584.php#unique-entry-id-584</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/31d3c72b7c685507805c3893762a2ea2-584.php#unique-entry-id-584</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Sir Harold Evans, pictured, Reuters editor-at-large, censures his former employer Rupert Murdoch in a new preface to his 1983 book, Good Times, Bad Times, re-published today as an ebook and paperback.


Describing media ownership rivalry between Murdoch and Robert Maxwell, one-time owner of Mirror Group Newspapers, Evans writes: &ldquo;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.&rdquo;   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.   &ldquo;Editor-at-large means you're free to create as much havoc as they will tolerate,&rdquo; he said at the time.


● CLICK to read Harold Evans&rsquo; new preface in full as published by The Guardian


● Harold Evans&rsquo; books


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Thais call for new probe into Reuters TV cameraman&#x27;s death</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Hiro Muramoto</category><category>Stephen Adler</category><dc:date>2011-09-17T16:14:10+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/2636c15fc96f6ddb546deae5fc00c9fa-583.php#unique-entry-id-583</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/2636c15fc96f6ddb546deae5fc00c9fa-583.php#unique-entry-id-583</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Thai authorities are seeking a new investigation into the death of Reuters cameraman Hiro Muramoto, pictured, and 12 other civilians killed during political unrest last year.   Troops may have had a hand in the shootings, they said.


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 &ldquo;red shirt&rdquo; protesters and troops in Bangkok&rsquo;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 &ldquo;a flash from a gun barrel of a soldier&rdquo;, 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 &ldquo;to complain about an initial department finding&rdquo;.   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 &ndash; an extraordinarily sensitive issue in Thailand where the military is extremely powerful and deeply politicised.


&ldquo;We want the court to be the one who investigates this so that the result can be accepted by all,&rdquo; Tharit told Reuters.   &ldquo;The DSI has insisted from the beginning that we found soldiers may have been involved in the deaths.&rdquo;


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&rsquo;s Criminal Court for a final investigation.


&ldquo;We welcome this development and have always wanted to see this case fully investigated in a transparent manner.   Muramoto-san&rsquo;s family and Reuters colleagues deserve to know how this tragedy occurred and who was behind it,&rdquo; 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


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Reuters aims to become best in the world &#x2013; Stephen Adler&#xa;</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Stephen Adler</category><category>Paul Ingrassia</category><category>Jack Shafer</category><category>Alix Freedman</category><category>Jonathan Weber</category><category>Stuart Karle</category><category>Reginald Chua</category><category>Michael Williams</category><category>Jim Gaines</category><category>Harold Evans</category><category>Chrystia Freeland</category><category>James Ledbetter</category><category>David Rohde</category><category>David Cay Johnston</category><dc:date>2011-09-16T16:50:07+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/fe03053a782ce372e9c12ecb7e833d9f-582.php#unique-entry-id-582</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/fe03053a782ce372e9c12ecb7e833d9f-582.php#unique-entry-id-582</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Reuters wants to raise its profile, increase the impact of its journalism and be as influential in the United States as it is in the rest of the world.


&ldquo;Indeed, to be fully effective as a global organisation, we have to be as influential and as well known in the US &ndash; the world&rsquo;s largest economy &ndash; as we are elsewhere in the world,&rdquo; editor-in-chief Stephen Adler, pictured, said in an interview published on Friday.   &ldquo;Our mandate at Reuters is to become the best journalism organisation in the world,&rdquo; he said.


Reuters&rsquo; recent hiring spree, including a handful of Pulitzer Prize-winners, has quickly attracted the media world&rsquo;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.   &ldquo;I think what we&rsquo;re making a bigger effort to do is not only be first with events,&rdquo; Ingrassia said, &ldquo;but very quickly and analytically ... report the meaning and impact of those events.&rdquo;


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&rsquo; 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.


&ldquo;Our audience base is thus quite different from anyone else&rsquo;s, as is our revenue model,&rdquo; Adler said.   &ldquo;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.&rdquo;


As part of Reuters&rsquo; 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&rsquo;t have imagined such a slew of hires coming back-to-back.   But Adler &ndash; a former deputy managing editor at the Wall Street Journal and Businessweek editor-in-chief just before Bloomberg&rsquo;s acquisition of the magazine &ndash; started making big moves shortly after becoming Reuters editor-in-chief earlier this year.


Adler&rsquo;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.


&ldquo;Adler&rsquo;s leadership team isn&rsquo;t all Journal ex-pats,&rdquo; The Huffington Post said.   Adler hired Jim Gaines, a former Time Inc. executive most recently at News International&rsquo;s iPad application The Daily and Harold Evans joined as an editor-at-large.   &ldquo;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&hellip;


&ldquo;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,&rdquo; Ledbetter said.   Since he took over, Reuters has hired not only Shafer but two former New York Times reporters with Pulitzers on their resum&eacute;s: David Rohde and David Cay Johnston.   &ldquo;It&rsquo;s getting to be quite a stable,&rdquo; Ledbetter said.


While recent buzz may help raise Reuters&rsquo; 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.&rdquo;


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&rsquo; greater investment in enterprise and investigative reporting.


Both Adler and Ingrassia, however, balk at any suggestion that there&rsquo;s a Pulitzer mandate.   &ldquo;Prize-hunting, per se, is not the objective here,&rdquo; Ingrassia said.


&ldquo;As I&rsquo;ve said to the staff, we want to do work that is so memorable and so distinguished that it is recognised by our peers,&rdquo; Adler said.   &ldquo;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.&rdquo;


● SOURCE The Huffington Post


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Reuters to expand opinion offering</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>James Ledbetter</category><dc:date>2011-09-15T19:21:49+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/160abd0b2f34505ba8b9d0fdce91d79e-581.php#unique-entry-id-581</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/160abd0b2f34505ba8b9d0fdce91d79e-581.php#unique-entry-id-581</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[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: &ldquo;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&rsquo; readers, existing and potential, care about &hellip; 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.&rdquo; 


Ledbetter was asked about Reuters&rsquo; &ldquo;reliable model in being a straightforward wire service, without worrying about unique content or opinion pieces&rdquo;.   He replied: &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t see the two as in any way mutually exclusive.   You don&rsquo;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 &mdash; 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: &ldquo;Well, there&rsquo;s a genuine issue there that&rsquo;s not in any way exclusive to us, which is, &lsquo;How do you make sure that the fantastic voices that you&rsquo;ve gone to all this trouble and expense to hire get heard?&rsquo;   Certainly, there are opinion aggregation websites where there are so many contributors that it&rsquo;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.&rdquo;


 


● SOURCE Adweek


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Thomson Reuters close to selling healthcare business</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Thomson Reuters</category><dc:date>2011-09-15T18:09:03+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/01c73c717fb7f9c77292381bf752bd2a-580.php#unique-entry-id-580</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/01c73c717fb7f9c77292381bf752bd2a-580.php#unique-entry-id-580</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[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&rsquo;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. 


&ldquo;It's public knowledge that we are selling the healthcare division but we&rsquo;re not making any comment on the process,&rdquo; a Thomson Reuters spokesman said.


● SOURCE Reuters


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Pensioners press for automatic inflation increases</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Pensions</category><category>Greg Meekings</category><category>Angela Dean</category><category>Tom Glocer</category><dc:date>2011-09-12T16:10:28+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/6e9038e55b4be9548073cb051b3dada8-579.php#unique-entry-id-579</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/6e9038e55b4be9548073cb051b3dada8-579.php#unique-entry-id-579</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[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. 


&ldquo;Our concern is that pensioners will be presented with a solution &hellip; which may not be acceptable to us," the group&rsquo;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.   &ldquo;We &hellip; look forward to reaching a solution that meets our common desire to secure pensioners&rsquo; retirements,&rdquo; 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


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>The good old days&#x2c; they&#x27;re now - Tom Glocer</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Tom Glocer</category><dc:date>2011-09-11T11:46:38+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/ff95dcbd1f1be75fc72f2e84af92fe68-578.php#unique-entry-id-578</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/ff95dcbd1f1be75fc72f2e84af92fe68-578.php#unique-entry-id-578</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Forget talk about the good old days.   These are the good old days, says Tom Glocer, and the best is yet to come in an information revolution which will outpace the industrial revolution.


In the first update to his blog after what he says has been a busy summer, Thomson Reuters&rsquo; chief executive ruminates on an earlier, seemingly superior period in a perfect past &ldquo;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&rdquo;. 


He writes: &ldquo;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. 


&ldquo;These truly are the good old days.&rdquo;


● SOURCE Tom Glocer's blog


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>New US West Coast bureau chief straight out of the bay</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Jonathan Weber</category><category>James Ledbetter</category><category>Peter Henderson</category><dc:date>2011-09-09T21:02:03+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/abf1b09f2f5ee8e978950b2abcc89c3e-577.php#unique-entry-id-577</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/abf1b09f2f5ee8e978950b2abcc89c3e-577.php#unique-entry-id-577</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Reuters&rsquo; 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&rsquo; 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


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Another WSJ editor takes senior Reuters role</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Alix Freedman</category><category>Jim Gaines</category><category>Dean Wright</category><category>Stephen Adler</category><dc:date>2011-09-07T20:32:35+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/6c3cff602c88d1821b0ce4d288d0d493-576.php#unique-entry-id-576</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/6c3cff602c88d1821b0ce4d288d0d493-576.php#unique-entry-id-576</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Reuters&rsquo; recruitment from The Wall Street Journal continues apace: the latest high-profile hire is Alix Freedman, pictured, a WSJ veteran who becomes Reuters&rsquo; third global editor for ethics and standards in five months.


 


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.&nbsp;  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&rsquo;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: &ldquo;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.&rdquo;


● SOURCE The New York Observer | Media Bistro | Huffington Post


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>TRI hits new 52-week low in New York</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Shares</category><dc:date>2011-09-07T08:59:17+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/e9afc65ccefd4ab5feb6520fc59f5a6f-575.php#unique-entry-id-575</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/e9afc65ccefd4ab5feb6520fc59f5a6f-575.php#unique-entry-id-575</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[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.   &ldquo;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.&rdquo;


● SOURCE The Street


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Ousted markets chief Devin Wenig joins eBay</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Devin Wenig</category><category>Tom Glocer</category><category>Markets Division</category><dc:date>2011-09-06T23:22:11+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/54e18bce92a920f0425f3525ee5ebb68-574.php#unique-entry-id-574</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/54e18bce92a920f0425f3525ee5ebb68-574.php#unique-entry-id-574</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Devin Wenig, pictured, ousted seven weeks ago in a major management shake-up at Thomson Reuters, is joining eBay.   He will be president of its global marketplaces unit, which includes the flagship auction site and the e-commerce company&rsquo;s separate classifieds and online tickets businesses.


Wenig, 44, a close associate of chief executive Tom Glocer, headed Thomson Reuters&rsquo; markets division, which includes Reuters news agency.   He also led the integration of Reuters following its 2008 takeover by Thomson. 


Announcing Wenig&rsquo;s hire, eBay trumpeted his business and strategic acumen.   He will report to president and CEO John Donahoe, who said &ldquo;Devin&rsquo;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&rdquo;.


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&rsquo;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: &ldquo;For sale on eBay. 3 dozen really nice ties!&rdquo;


● SOURCE PaidContent | eCommerceBytes


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Reuters picks up retrenched media columnist</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Jack Shafer</category><category>Stephen Adler</category><category>David Cay Johnston</category><category>David Rohde</category><category>Felix Salmon</category><category>Chrystia Freeland</category><dc:date>2011-09-06T21:21:46+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/3f13028006853abedb1f04973de7bc18-573.php#unique-entry-id-573</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/3f13028006853abedb1f04973de7bc18-573.php#unique-entry-id-573</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Reuters&rsquo; latest high-profile recruit in an editorial hiring spree is a US columnist who was recently laid off as media critic of an online news, politics and culture magazine.


Jack Shafer, pictured, based in Washington, will cover media and politics for Reuters.   Prior to working at The Washington Post Company&rsquo;s ● Slate website Shafer spent 11 years editing two alternative weeklies &ndash; San Francisco Weekly and Washington City Paper.


 


Editor-in-chief Stephen Adler said in an internal announcement on Tuesday: &ldquo;Jack&rsquo;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.&rdquo;


New York magazine reported: &ldquo;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.&rdquo;


Shafer, who was dropped by Slate only last month, said on Twitter that Reuters editors &ldquo;interrupted my plans to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, and criticize after dinner with an offer &mdash; which I&rsquo;ve accepted &mdash; to write about media and&nbsp;politics for Reuters.   I&rsquo;m damn happy.   Thanks, oh, my tweeps.&rdquo;


● SOURCE New York Magazine | Poynter | Adweek


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Reuters names former magazine editor as Americas editor</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Stephen Adler</category><category>Paul Ingrassia</category><category>Jim Gaines</category><category>Reinhard Krause</category><dc:date>2011-09-06T11:47:02+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/695dead83fcd6402081d5c15e02460b3-572.php#unique-entry-id-572</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/695dead83fcd6402081d5c15e02460b3-572.php#unique-entry-id-572</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Reuters has appointed a former editor of Time, Life and People magazines to oversee the work of all of its journalists in North America and Latin America.


Editor-in-chief Stephen Adler and his deputy Paul Ingrassia said in an internal message to editorial staff: &ldquo;We&rsquo;re delighted to announce that our search for an Americas Editor has reached a most welcome conclusion.   Jim Gaines, whom we&rsquo;ve all come to know and respect in recent months, will be moving into the Americas role.&rdquo; 


Gaines, pictured, joined Reuters in April as editor for ethics, standards and innovation after a brief stint at News Corp&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Ex-Reuters men move into top jobs at FT</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Tony Barber</category><category>Hugh Carnegy</category><dc:date>2011-09-02T11:01:25+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/5c33ce6f561993b8c80d5e05a72e27bb-571.php#unique-entry-id-571</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/5c33ce6f561993b8c80d5e05a72e27bb-571.php#unique-entry-id-571</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Two former Reuters correspondents have been promoted to senior jobs at the Financial Times.   Tony Barber (left) and Hugh Carnegy (right) are appointed to the newly created roles of Europe editor and European managing editor.


Barber, who also becomes associate editor, was previously the FT&rsquo;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&rsquo;s executive editor, also becomes the paper&rsquo;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: &ldquo;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.&rdquo;


● SOURCE Press Gazette


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Bugs aside&#x2c; Reuters is halfway to full editorial system rollout</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Editorial</category><category>Adrian Dickson</category><dc:date>2011-09-01T13:19:31+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/189580c5b948149a726cf0bc9454a0e6-570.php#unique-entry-id-570</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/189580c5b948149a726cf0bc9454a0e6-570.php#unique-entry-id-570</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Despite setbacks, Reuters has reached a major milestone in plans to overhaul its news production systems, crossing the halfway point in the migration in August.


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&rsquo; 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.


&ldquo;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,&rdquo; Dickson said.


&ldquo;We&rsquo;re only halfway there but already it&rsquo;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.&rdquo;


The first outage began with&nbsp;a small hardware failure that created instability in&nbsp;a data centre software system.   The problem was compounded by errors in incident management.   The second was caused by &ldquo;errors in the release of&nbsp;a database script designed to optimize Lynx Editor performance &hellip;&nbsp;Fortunately&nbsp;technical teams&nbsp;learned the lessons of the previous incident and this time they were fast to shift&nbsp;users on to a support system.&rdquo;


Dickson said: &ldquo;These setbacks are never welcome.   But they&rsquo;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&nbsp;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&hellip;


&ldquo;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.&rdquo;


● SOURCE Reuters


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>How Reuters beat Irene</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Stephen Adler</category><category>Editor-in-Chief</category><category>Editorial</category><dc:date>2011-09-01T11:37:09+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/9c4e483e253e3dd9b7774dbb81e82fb2-569.php#unique-entry-id-569</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/9c4e483e253e3dd9b7774dbb81e82fb2-569.php#unique-entry-id-569</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Reuters fielded more photographers to cover Hurricane Irene than on any other story in recent memory.


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&rsquo; breadth and expertise, he said.


&ldquo;Some of our journalists hunkered down near Irene&rsquo;s path to chronicle the storm&rsquo;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.


&ldquo;Staff in Miami, Washington, New York and Boston, tracked the storm&rsquo;s path, reported on Irene&rsquo;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.&rdquo;


● SOURCE Reuters


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>NZPA closes&#x2c; three new wires fill gap</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>New Zealand Press Association</category><dc:date>2011-08-31T10:56:17+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/46f90db90f07cd25b7200e07999f7852-568.php#unique-entry-id-568</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/46f90db90f07cd25b7200e07999f7852-568.php#unique-entry-id-568</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[New Zealand&rsquo;s national news agency, once a junior partner in the ownership of Reuters, ended an era of 131 years&rsquo; reporting on Wednesday.


The New Zealand Press Association ceased operations following the withdrawal of its two competing major shareholders, Australian-owned newspaper publishers Fairfax Media and APN.   Their move hastened a decline as the agency struggled with reorganisations in media ownership and technological changes affecting news media worldwide.


Three new wires are filling the void &ndash; APN News & Media&rsquo;s APNZ, its main rival Fairfax New Zealand&rsquo;s FNZN, and a new Australian Associated Press service, NZN. 


Founded in 1880 as the United Press Association, the cooperative adopted the name NZPA in 1942.   Together with the AAP, in 1947 it became a minority owner of Reuters alongside Britain&rsquo;s Press Association and Newspaper Proprietors&rsquo; Association.   As part of the deal, some Australian and New Zealand journalists became Reuters correspondents, especially in the Pacific area.   NZPA correspondents in London worked out of Reuters&rsquo; headquarters, then at 85 Fleet Street.


At its birth the New Zealand wire had 26 subscribing newspapers, rising to a peak of 74 by the end of World War I.   But in recent years its client base had fallen back to 26.


 


The NZPA&rsquo;s final story, signed off by all of its journalists, read:


Wellington, Aug 31 NZPA - This is the final message from the New Zealand Press Association.


Since 1880 there have been hundreds of thousands of stories and hundreds of millions of words recording our country's development and daily doings.


We now sign off.


It has been a pleasure and a privilege.


ENDS


● SOURCE Stuff | TVNZ | BBC


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Thomson Reuters shares downgraded to hold from buy</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Shares</category><dc:date>2011-08-29T18:34:04+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/af5393364b42265b9ee1ab74a5e92269-567.php#unique-entry-id-567</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/af5393364b42265b9ee1ab74a5e92269-567.php#unique-entry-id-567</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Thomson Reuters has been downgraded by TheStreet Ratings to hold from buy.


The US digital financial media firm said the company&rsquo;s strengths can be seen in multiple areas, such as compelling growth in net income, revenue growth and impressive record of earnings per share growth.


&ldquo;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.&rdquo;


TheStreet noted net income growth from the same quarter one year ago has significantly exceeded that of the S&P 500 and the media industry, but revenue growth trails the industry average. 


It said the company has underperformed the S&P 500 Index, declining 12.88 per cent from its price level a year ago.   &ldquo;Looking ahead, we do not see anything in this company's numbers that would change the one-year trend.   It was down over the last twelve months; and it could be down again in the next twelve.&rdquo;


Thomson Reuters shares were 1.69 per cent higher at $30.64 in New York and 1.66 per cent higher at C$30.03 in Toronto.


● SOURCE The Street


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Obituary: Ronald Harris</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Obituary</category><category>Ronald Harris</category><dc:date>2011-08-26T13:46:43+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/aeebf3600a3b47e280bbfd1792ea17a5-566.php#unique-entry-id-566</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/aeebf3600a3b47e280bbfd1792ea17a5-566.php#unique-entry-id-566</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Ronald Harris, pictured, who died in June aged 86, was a former telegrapher and trades union activist who swapped sides to become a Reuters staff manager.


An obituary in The Guardian written by his granddaughter, Sally Panter, said he was known for his grit, determination, intellect and good humour, all of which he used to improve the everyday lives of many.


Born in Manchester, Harris&rsquo;s first real act of self-will came at the age of&nbsp;12 when he defied his father, an ardent Manchester City fan, and began to support United, to which he became devoted.   &ldquo;My great-grandfather stopped his pocket money for good, but in typical style, Ron got a newspaper round to pay for the admission and walked each Saturday to Old Trafford,&rdquo; she wrote.


His early career was interrupted by World War II, during which he served in the navy as a telegrapher.   Called up on Christmas Day 1942, he was assigned to HMS Offa, part of a destroyer flotilla on Arctic convoys escorting merchant shipping to Murmansk and Archangel.


&ldquo;Ron was profoundly affected by&nbsp;his experiences of D-Day in 1944 and his time on the wartime Arctic convoys, and went on to become the chairman of&nbsp;the Russian Convoy Club in London,&rdquo; his granddaughter said.   After the war he told of the severe weather conditions, dangers from ice packs and German U-boats, and the poor prospects of survival if anyone went overboard.   He returned to Normandy in 2009 for the 65th anniversary commemorations of the landings.


After the war Harris used his telegraphy skills at the Post Office in Manchester, where he became a trade union activist, going on to serve as a senior official at the National Graphical Association.   &ldquo;His move to Reuters in 1976 did not win him many friends in the unions, but at Reuters he was fair and caring with a passion for improving working conditions.&rdquo;


● SOURCE The Guardian


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Disappearing headlines and other faults of flawed terminal</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Thomson Reuters</category><category>Tom Glocer</category><category>Adrian Dickson</category><dc:date>2011-08-22T23:14:48+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/2b8084cd7809161e486361b9efecf668-565.php#unique-entry-id-565</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/2b8084cd7809161e486361b9efecf668-565.php#unique-entry-id-565</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Problems with Thomson Reuters&rsquo; flawed new flagship desktop platform, part of a $1 billion technology upgrade, have been highlighted in an internal memo that acknowledges faults and goes some way to explaining why it has not been a runaway hit with financial professionals.


Eikon was launched last September as a fundamental shift for the company and the financial services industry it serves.   It incorporates social networking features like Facebook, Twitter and instant messaging and is available on multiple computer platforms and smart phones.   It was intended to be a key milestone in Thomson Reuters&rsquo; strategy to replace dozens of disparate legacy products and build an open and connected global financial community. 


Customers were expected to take up Eikon quickly but with many financial businesses still struggling to recover from the global economic crisis, sales have not been spectacular.   Six senior executives left the company in July and chief executive Tom Glocer took personal charge of the group&rsquo;s main operating division.


Thomson Reuters hoped that updated features allowing users to comment, chat and e-mail charts, stories and other data would challenge messaging and more intuitive search tools featured in the latest Bloomberg terminal.


Within the organisation, more than 650 journalists have been using Eikon since the beginning of this year and usage data shows that between 50 and 60 per cent of them are using the new terminal on a routine basis.   Users prefer it for enhanced corporate views pages, better market-monitoring tools, more powerful historical and analytical displays and a more intuitive navigation experience, said Adrian Dickson, global head of news product, in an internal memo obtained by The Baron.


&ldquo;However we, like Eikon customers generally, have also asked for improved speed, performance and urgent attention to bugs and defects.   The Eikon team has acknowledged the platform&rsquo;s shortcomings and over the next six months will focus on performance improvements over the introduction of new content and functionality.&nbsp;  This means that many of the gaps that we and others see in the News Experience will remain until the core stability and functionality of Eikon is perfected.&rdquo;


Dickson said Eikon was much more demanding on data networks and on computer memory which can result in sluggish response times.   &ldquo;Eikon developers are prioritising improvements to overall speed and resilience, which in the case of News means improving the speed with which stories are retrieved as well as ensuring headlines do not randomly disappear.&rdquo;


&nbsp;


Reuters stories are delayed up to two minutes to be made available for searches, Dickson said, adding: &ldquo;Therein lies the problem.&rdquo;   He said the Eikon development team has made the disappearing story problem the top priority among issues to be repaired in the Eikon news space.   &ldquo;They plan to have a fix in place by early September.&rdquo;


&nbsp;


Dickson listed other faults that had discouraged some journalists from migrating to Eikon for their regular reporting and editing tasks and said a fix was scheduled for mid-October.   Other fixes will be in place in the first quarter of next year.   New systems are being built that should allow editors to track what stories customers are clicking in near real-time, thus helping editors understand what stories drive traffic, at what times of the day, by which customer types and in what geographies. 


Journalists in New York, Washington, Chicago and Toronto were the first to be trained on Eikon earlier this year.   London is next, followed by Paris and Frankfurt.   Face-to-face training will also take place in Bangalore, Hong Kong and Beijing before the end of 2011.   Singapore, Tokyo and Sydney will be completed by Q1 2012.   Eikon will begin to be rolled out to medium and small bureaus in the second quarter.


&ldquo;There are flaws in Eikon, as the company has acknowledged, but the platform has rich tools that work in some of our key areas of coverage,&rdquo; Dickson said.   &ldquo;As Eikon is stabilized and improved, journalists will become more confident using its multiple features which should help them produce more original and insightful stories&hellip;


&nbsp;


&ldquo;The Eikon platform is critical to our future and all journalists need to understand how news is being displayed on the new terminal.   Therefore we are planning to install at least one stand-alone Eikon terminal in every bureau throughout the course of 2012.&rdquo;


● SOURCE Reuters


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Obituary: Erdmute Greis-Behrendt</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Obituary</category><category>Erdmute Greis-Behrendt</category><dc:date>2011-08-16T12:19:50+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/4958024c29a666701ca4b8bdd796fa65-564.php#unique-entry-id-564</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/4958024c29a666701ca4b8bdd796fa65-564.php#unique-entry-id-564</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Erdmute Greis-Behrendt, the legendary &ldquo;Miss B&rdquo; and pillar of Reuters&rsquo; 30 year-long presence in communist East Germany, died on Monday. 


Erdmute, pictured in the East Berlin bureau in the late 1970s, was 74 and died after a long, courageous battle against cancer, Annette von Broecker writes.   She is survived by her son Max and husband Thomas.


Erdmute, an East German graduate, joined Reuters in November 1959 and helped Peter Johnson set up Reuters&rsquo; and the western world&rsquo;s first media bureau in East Berlin as an editorial assistant, her journalistic ambitions cruelly controlled and curtailed by East Germany&rsquo;s foreign ministry.   Erdmute kept the bureau going throughout the upheavals of Berlin&rsquo;s recent history, from the building of the wall, alongside Adam Kellett-Long 50 years ago, to its collapse 28 years later.   She then became a member of Reuters&rsquo; first united Berlin reporting bureau, retiring in 1997.


Among the many Reuter correspondents who gained their first journalistic experience out in the cold war were, among others, the late Brian Horton, Jack Altman, Frederick Forsythe, Tony Grey, Colin McIntyre, Derek Parr, Mark Wood, Mark Brayne and, at the time of German reunification, Martin Nesirky and Paul Taylor. 


I am sure that everyone who had met Erdmute was impressed by her kindness, her devotion to her work and her reliability.   I will remember her humour and her wonderful, crystal-clear laughter, her red hair and gentle smile.   I saw Erdmute&nbsp;last June.   We knew each other for 52 years, because I joined Reuters two weeks before her but on the other side of the iron fence &ndash; in West Berlin.   We were friends.   I am very sad.


Erdmute will be buried in her husband's family grave in Thuringia on 2 September.


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Thomson Reuters shares to go ex-dividend</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Thomson Reuters</category><category>Shares</category><dc:date>2011-08-15T16:06:47+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/756918cdc152ba93af1ef3e8d1e124a8-563.php#unique-entry-id-563</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/756918cdc152ba93af1ef3e8d1e124a8-563.php#unique-entry-id-563</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Thomson Reuters shares go ex-dividend on 16 August.   Owners of shares at market close in New York and Toronto on 15 August are eligible for a dividend of 31 cents per share.   At a price of $31.76 on 14 August, the dividend yield is 3.9 per cent.


Over the past 30 days, the average traded volume for the stock has been just under one million shares per day at 964,000.   The group&rsquo;s market capitalisation is $26.4 billion.   As of the close of trading on Friday, the shares were down 15.4 per cent year to date.


TheStreet Ratings rates Thomson Reuters as a buy.   It says the company&rsquo;s strengths can be seen in multiple areas, such as its compelling growth in net income, revenue growth, impressive record of earnings per share growth, good cash flow from operations and notable return on equity.   &ldquo;We feel these strengths outweigh the fact that the company has had lackluster performance in the stock itself.&rdquo;


● SOURCE The Street


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Thomson Reuters to expand new data system</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Tom Glocer</category><category>Devin Wenig</category><category>Jon Robson</category><dc:date>2011-08-15T15:30:48+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/a152e7e5cffac2983c3feca141784d9e-562.php#unique-entry-id-562</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/a152e7e5cffac2983c3feca141784d9e-562.php#unique-entry-id-562</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Thomson Reuters is to add foreign exchange data and trading services to Elektron, its flagship high-speed market data system launched last year.


The group hopes the addition can provide a bright spot in its markets division, which accounts for the majority of group revenues but has been performing below expectations, the Financial Times reported.   Tom Glocer, chief executive, took over direct management of markets last month in a shake-up that involved the departure of the division&rsquo;s chief executive, Devin Wenig, and other senior managers.


&ldquo;Banks need to find ways to cut costs but can&rsquo;t ignore the technology infrastructure,&rdquo; Jon Robson, president, enterprise solutions, told the FT.   He added that Elektron would look to do more cross-asset class trading.   &ldquo;It&rsquo;s primarily equities services at the moment, but it will do over-the-counter trading too,&rdquo; he said.


● SOURCE Financial Times


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Thomson Reuters Foundation partners The Baron</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Foundation</category><category>Barry May</category><dc:date>2011-08-11T18:14:06+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/6674c817ce1740a3b35fd00fee863456-561.php#unique-entry-id-561</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/6674c817ce1740a3b35fd00fee863456-561.php#unique-entry-id-561</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The Thomson Reuters Foundation has selected The Baron as a content partner for its TrustMedia news website.


Articles published on The Baron will be featured on ● www.trust.org/trustmedia, which reports on Reuters journalism, media and development training programmes around the world.   TrustMedia offers journalists the opportunity to learn the skills and values to succeed through training programmes.   It also trains organisations to interact with the media.


Increasing numbers of Reuters people past and present &ndash; as well as others &ndash; regularly visit The Baron to keep abreast of news about the organisation.   Editor Barry May is delighted to welcome the Foundation&rsquo;s 7,000 alumni to their ranks.


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Reuters overhauls North American news pictures</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Stephen Adler</category><category>Reinhard Krause</category><category>Jim Gaines</category><dc:date>2011-08-10T20:44:56+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/607b3c03057d21056d7f1abb015b8db8-560.php#unique-entry-id-560</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/607b3c03057d21056d7f1abb015b8db8-560.php#unique-entry-id-560</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Reuters is focusing its news pictures coverage more sharply on the United States and at the same time moving some photo editing jobs from Washington to a new North American picture desk in Toronto.


The change reflects increased demand for pictures from the United States, says Stephen Adler, editor-in-chief.


&ldquo;In keeping with our desire to let journalists be journalists and separate content from operations, we have decided to make a few changes in the structure of Reuters photography,&rdquo; he said in an internal message obtained by The Baron.


 


&ldquo;From now on, Regional Picture Editors will be aided by their respective general managers with operational and administrative tasks, from budgets to safety issues,&rdquo; Adler said.   The picture editors will continue to report to the global pictures editor, Reinhard Krause,&nbsp;who will run day-to-day photography and report to Jim Gaines, who joined Reuters in April from Rupert Murdoch&rsquo;s digital tablet venture, The Daily, as ethics editor.


&nbsp;


Washington photographers and the picture desk in the US capital will now concentrate on the White House, US politics and other stories from the Washington, DC area, as well as the upcoming presidential campaign, including coverage of the primaries.


Up to four jobs on Washington&rsquo;s picture desk will move to a new North American picture desk in Toronto and several more will be added.   The new desk will assign stories and &ldquo;aggressively pursue pickup pictures&rdquo;, Adler said.&nbsp;  &ldquo;The move to Toronto is part of a business development plan that includes major investments into our coverage of North America both for international and domestic markets.&rdquo;   Details will be discussed with The Newspaper Guild of New York in coming weeks.


&ldquo;Our motive for these changes is not only to respond to the marketplace for photography &mdash; where demand for pictures from the U.S. now exceeds the next most popular nation by a factor of more than two &mdash; but, even more important, to underscore our commitment to the highest standard of photojournalism,&rdquo; Adler said.   &ldquo;Reuters&rsquo; photographers have already proven themselves among the most incisive, artful and intrepid in the field, and we are confident this structure will give them the support they deserve.&rdquo;


● SOURCE Reuters


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Reuters changes kill rule after embarrassing error</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>David Cay Johnston</category><category>James Ledbetter</category><dc:date>2011-08-01T18:09:03+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/df41af60c33a58608ad30776bd646342-559.php#unique-entry-id-559</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/df41af60c33a58608ad30776bd646342-559.php#unique-entry-id-559</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Reuters is to change how it deals with retractions on its website after being embarrassed by a new columnist who stated wrongly that Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation had received billions in tax refunds.


The erroneous column two weeks ago was the first by a Pulitzer Prize-winning US tax writer who had just been hired by Reuters, David Cay Johnston.


When Reuters learned the day after it had been published that the column was wrong, it posted an advisory on ● reuters.com saying the column had been withdrawn.   The column itself, however, went untouched for another couple of hours, when it was removed.   That evening, Reuters posted a follow-up column by Johnston in which he acknowledged his mistake and described how it occurred.


James Ledbetter, recently appointed Reuters op-ed editor, said that in future a notice will be posted atop an incorrect article at the same time that the advisory goes out, and an editor will strike through the wrong portion of the article.   If another article is pending, as in the recent case, the notice will say so.


&ldquo;In essence, Reuters will move from an approach that made sense when it was a wire service with no online publishing home to one commonly used by bloggers to update and correct their posts,&rdquo; the Florida-based journalism school the Poynter Institute said on its website.


&ldquo;The correction/kill policy that is followed at Reuters is long-established by the wire service,&rdquo; Ledbetter said.   &ldquo;There isn&rsquo;t a procedure for taking down something that is wrong because for the vast majority of Reuters&rsquo; existence, there was nothing to take down.&rdquo;


Under the new policy, erroneous posts will remain online even after Reuters publishes a follow-up.


&ldquo;I think it stands as a transparent record of what occurred,&rdquo; Ledbetter said.   &ldquo;I think to take it down &ndash; while I can see some argument for that &ndash; it&rsquo;s not being fully transparent with our readers about the process, and it could be subject to abuse.&rdquo;


Poynter said one advantage of the new approach is that it retains reader comments, which disappear when a post is deleted.


&ldquo;In this case, user comments could have helped Reuters and Johnston identify a critical error within a few hours of publishing the original story,&rdquo; Poynter said.   Shortly after the column was posted on the morning of 12 July, a reader suggested in a comment that Johnston had misread News Corp&rsquo;s documents.


By the time that the writer had tracked his error and an editor made the call to issue a &ldquo;kill order,&rdquo; the column had been up for more than a day and National Public Radio had interviewed Johnston about his piece.   The station brought him back the next day to explain his error.


Johnston continues to write for Reuters.


● SOURCE Poynter | Reuters


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Markets drag on &#x27;healthy&#x27; Thomson Reuters results</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Thomson Reuters</category><category>Financial</category><category>Tom Glocer</category><category>Devin Wenig</category><dc:date>2011-07-28T14:17:33+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/15342931b98d3ae8e5a8d5afdde6bd0f-558.php#unique-entry-id-558</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/15342931b98d3ae8e5a8d5afdde6bd0f-558.php#unique-entry-id-558</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Thomson Reuters reported sluggish growth in its markets division as the company struggles to accelerate adoption of a new flagship desktop for financial professionals.


Second-quarter results released on Thursday followed a management shakeout that resulted in the sudden departure of the ailing division&rsquo;s chief Devin Wenig and five other high-level executives last week.


Chief executive Tom Glocer assumed direct responsibility for a turnaround in the division, which competes with Bloomberg, Dow Jones and FactSet Research.   Division revenue excluding the impact of currency changes rose one per cent from a year earlier, slowing from the first quarter's gain of two per cent.


Overall revenue and earnings per share were within ranges the company announced last week when it became clear that improving the performance of the markets division was a priority for the board and controlling shareholder, Canada's Thomson family.


Glocer called the results &ldquo;healthy&rdquo; but noted this was due to strong growth in the professional division serving legal, accounting and other professionals.   That unit&rsquo;s revenue rose eight per cent excluding the impact of exchange rate changes.


&ldquo;Nonetheless, revenue growth in our markets division is below our expectations, and I have decided to accelerate the transformation in markets,&rdquo; Glocer said in a statement.   &ldquo;I am confident that these changes will result in improved performance.&rdquo;


Total revenue excluding divestitures was $3.2 billion, up four per cent before currency adjustments and slightly ahead of the average analyst forecast.   Adjusted earnings per share rose to 51 cents from 41 cents. 


Many financial clients are still recovering from the global economic crisis, with job cuts and pullbacks in spending.   This is hindering sales of Eikon, a new desktop platform which is aimed at pulling together dozens of disparate legacy products.


The company said it had sold more than 28,000 Eikon desktops since the launch last September.   About 3,500 are to new users, meaning that only about 24,500 of the company's roughly 500,000 financial markets users have migrated to the new product.


Reuters&rsquo; own coverage of the results said the organisational changes have thrown into question how quickly Thomson Reuters can fast-track growth in markets, which accounted for 59 per cent of the company's revenue in the second quarter.


Glocer is preparing a plan to boost the division&rsquo;s revenue growth rate and plans to present it to the board in the next two months, Reuters said.   &ldquo;He will have about a year to make it work, according to several people familiar with the board&rsquo;s thinking.&rdquo;


The markets shakeup dominated Glocer&rsquo;s earnings call with analysts who wanted to know how and when things will turn around.   He pleaded for some patience in fixing the division and discussed a 30-day plan, which involves reorganising the roles of its sales staff, and a 90-day plan, which entails repositioning the product line.   On top of that, there is a year-plus plan that calls for developing a broader strategy around Eikon and Elektron, an ultra-high speed data distribution network.


&ldquo;Any time you do this level of transformation, people need time to get their sea legs,&rdquo; Glocer said.   &ldquo;So, in the short term, we expect some disruption.   At the same time, we expect a lot of excitement on people moving forward with the new strategy in place.&rdquo;


Asked if his direct management of markets is an interim measure or a permanent one, he said, &ldquo;Permanent is a long time.   I&rsquo;m the ninth chief executive of Reuters in 160 years.&rdquo;


Thomson Reuters shares, which have tumbled in recent days, rose by 3.5 per cent after today&rsquo;s results.


● SOURCE Reuters | PaidContent


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Reuters appoints new editors and bureau chiefs in Asia</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Editorial</category><category>John Chalmers</category><category>Lincoln Feast</category><category>Mark Bendeich</category><category>Michael Flaherty</category><category>Eric Burroughs</category><category>Dayan Candappa</category><dc:date>2011-07-27T14:03:34+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/0ca2c70c49bf38ce817cd31cbf308408-557.php#unique-entry-id-557</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/0ca2c70c49bf38ce817cd31cbf308408-557.php#unique-entry-id-557</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Reuters announced new appointments to its Asia editorial team aimed at deepening specialisation, simplifying news editing and freeing &ldquo;our best journalists to produce truly compelling, agenda-setting stories&rdquo;.


● John Chalmers, editor, political and general news, Asia, takes on the new role of bureau chief South Asia, returning to New Delhi for the second time in his Reuters career.


● Lincoln Feast, deputy editor for Asia company news and head of the company news desk in Singapore, becomes bureau chief Pacific, based in Sydney. 


● Mark Bendeich, Pacific bureau chief, joins the Asia top news team as a deputy top news editor.   He will remain in Sydney. 


● Michael Flaherty, Asia editor-in-charge, company news, based in Hong Kong, becomes financial services editor, Asia. 


● Eric Burroughs, Asia financial markets editor in Hong Kong, takes on a new project to deepen market coverage across asset classes.   &ldquo;Eric will recruit and run a team that will use expert editing, smart reporting and cool technology to create a new stream of content that will support our desktop business,&rdquo; said Dayan Candappa, Asia managing editor.   &ldquo;He will launch the project in Asia and then oversee the rollout across the world, working with colleagues in EMEA and the Americas.   This is a critical project, one of the first commitments the new leadership team has made to the business and one that will help blunt challenges from Dow Jones and Bloomberg in the real-time commentary and analysis space.&rdquo;


● SOURCE Reuters


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Broker cuts Thomson Reuters for second time in four days</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Thomson Reuters</category><category>Shares</category><dc:date>2011-07-26T16:49:05+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/b7ae96e81e8ce5ea040c79573b3f90ee-556.php#unique-entry-id-556</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/b7ae96e81e8ce5ea040c79573b3f90ee-556.php#unique-entry-id-556</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[For the second time in four days, a Canadian brokerage has downgraded Thomson Reuters&rsquo; price target.   Royal Bank of Canada's brokerage RBC Dominion Securities also removed its outperform rating and said the group&rsquo;s markets division may not deliver five per cent revenue growth next year.


&ldquo;We now view the stock as largely range-bound, pending better visibility on the growth outlook for Markets,&rdquo; analyst Drew McReynolds wrote in a research report.   The company is likely to provide guidance with its fourth-quarter results in February 2012.   &ldquo;In the meantime, we expect sluggish 1 per cent to 2 per cent growth from Markets to be a headwind for the stock.&rdquo;


RBC downgraded its rating to sector perform and dropped its price target to US$42.   It had cut the target from $48 to $46 on Friday.   The stock is down 12 per cent since the end of April, and McReynolds suggests investors wait for a &ldquo;more timely&rdquo; entry point.


● SOURCE The Globe and Mail


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Thomson family behind forced TR restructure - WSJ</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Thomson family</category><category>Tom Glocer</category><category>Devin Wenig</category><dc:date>2011-07-26T17:35:28+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/d8c54788fe3f02474768dd49346e54ea-555.php#unique-entry-id-555</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/d8c54788fe3f02474768dd49346e54ea-555.php#unique-entry-id-555</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The Thomson family, impatient with Thomson Reuters&rsquo; performance, pressed for a senior management shake-up that saw the sudden departure of six top executives last week, putting pressure on CEO Tom Glocer to pull off a turnaround, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.


With Glocer now directly overseeing the markets division, which contributes almost 60 per cent of group revenue, the newspaper said the chief executive is in the line of fire if results do not improve.   Markets includes Reuters news agency.


The Journal quoted people familiar with the company saying it is not unusual for officials of Woodbridge, the Thomson family&rsquo;s investment company, to have a say in setting strategy at Thomson Reuters, where they hold a 55 per cent controlling interest.


But the family&rsquo;s move to flex its muscle spotlights the uncertain payoff from the $17 billion deal that united Thomson Corp and Reuters Group, it said.   Since the day after the merger closed in April 2008, the combined company&rsquo;s US-listed shares have risen just 0.7 per cent.


&ldquo;Thomson Reuters is scheduled to release second-quarter financial results on Thursday, which will be a crucial day for Mr Glocer,&rdquo; the Journal said.   Investors have said publicly that they are looking for an explanation of Devin Wenig&rsquo;s departure as chief executive of the markets division and more details about the division&rsquo;s results.   Wenig was a close associate of Glocer, who brought him into Reuters 17 years ago.   The Journal said many investors and company executives had considered him to be a possible successor.   Both men were former US mergers and acquisitions lawyers.


The Journal said: &ldquo;People familiar with the company said Woodbridge has methodically set financial goals for the Thomson family&rsquo;s businesses, and then expects executives to meet them, or face losing their jobs.&rdquo;


Quoting informed sources, the Journal said that after discussions between Thomson Reuters management in New York and Woodbridge officials in Toronto, Wenig declined to go along with a broad overhaul.


&ldquo;It was left to Mr Glocer to push through a more drastic proposal that consolidated the division, and wiped away layers of what the company called duplicative executive positions.&rdquo;


The Journal said that, partly due to the weak economic recovery, Thomson Reuters and Glocer have been grappling with slow sales of products for investment banks, fund managers and other finance professionals.


&ldquo;But the investment industry also has been slow to embrace Eikon, a revamped financial-data product that Thomson Reuters spent heavily on to develop.&rdquo;


Eikon was launched last September as a next-generation desktop product for financial professionals incorporating social media features like Twitter.   It brings together dozens of Reuters and Thomson legacy products.   The company said at the launch that Eikon was intended to win customers from Bloomberg and other competitors.   Clients were expected to take it up quickly, but that has not happened.   The company has migrated only about 24,500 of the roughly 500,000 users of its legacy products to Eikon and it has brought in only 3,500 new users.


Largely because of spending to develop the new product as well as other new offerings, Thomson Reuters posted a seven per cent decline in underlying operating profit last year.   The payoff was supposed to come this year, company executives told the Journal.


● SOURCE The Wall Street Journal


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Former German bank chief joins Thomson Reuters board</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Wulf von Schimmelmann</category><category>David Thomson</category><category>Thomson Reuters</category><dc:date>2011-07-25T22:54:26+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/7d18ee412970912b404893fc0ee74630-554.php#unique-entry-id-554</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/7d18ee412970912b404893fc0ee74630-554.php#unique-entry-id-554</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Thomson Reuters on Monday announced the appointment of Wulf von Schimmelmann, former CEO of Germany&rsquo;s largest independent retail bank Deutsche Postbank, to its board of directors.


David Thomson, chairman, said: &ldquo;Wulf&rsquo;s background in financial services complements our global strategy.   We look forward to having his counsel as we continue to expand our businesses in strategic markets in Europe and around the world.&rdquo;


Von Schimmelmann, 64, is a director of Accenture and of Western Union; chairman of the supervisory board of Deutsche Post DHL; and a member of the supervisory board of Maxingvest.   He began his career at McKinsey, working in Switzerland, the United States and Germany.


● SOURCE Thomson Reuters


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>London world desk gets new editors</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Ralph Boulton</category><category>Peter Millership</category><category>Angus Macswan</category><category>Alastair Macdonald</category><category>Sonya Hepinstall</category><dc:date>2011-07-22T20:56:20+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/448a44a1a20e3e280e691b70f5d719b1-553.php#unique-entry-id-553</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/448a44a1a20e3e280e691b70f5d719b1-553.php#unique-entry-id-553</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Reuters&rsquo; London world desk, currently experiencing its busiest time in many years, is to get permanent day and evening duty editors to help cope with increasing pressure.


Ralph Boulton, recently appointed editor, political & general news, Europe, Middle East & Africa, on Friday announced the appointment of Peter Millership and Angus Macswan to the posts of desk editors in charge.


Boulton told deskers: &ldquo;To improve co-ordination with bureaux and help ensure continuity on the desk itself, we will be making changes in the way WD operates.   The position of World Desk head has been abolished.   I will be overseeing the desk, but a team of Editors in Charge (EICs) will be responsible for general management of the file and staff.   The EICs will be accomplished writers with broad experience of working both in the field and on the desk.&rdquo;


At the same time, Alastair Macdonald is appointed chief lead writer and Sonya Hepinstall becomes features editor.


● SOURCE Reuters


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Major Thomson Reuters shake-up claims more scalps</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Chris Ahearn</category><category>Devin Wenig</category><category>Susan Taylor Martin</category><category>Tom Glocer</category><category>Shanker Ramamurthy</category><category>Robert Daleo</category><category>Stephen Adler</category><dc:date>2011-07-22T18:56:35+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/0947b22d3a2c99f47c8975e829550a9e-552.php#unique-entry-id-552</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/0947b22d3a2c99f47c8975e829550a9e-552.php#unique-entry-id-552</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[A major reorganisation at Thomson Reuters saw the sudden departure of five more senior executives on Friday.


Chris Ahearn, president of media, is leaving the company, along with four others in the markets division which includes Reuters news agency.


Devin Wenig, chief executive of the markets, left yesterday in a re-organisation that the company said aimed to accelerate growth in its financial data business.   Second quarter growth in markets has been &ldquo;somewhat slower than anticipated&rdquo;, the company said on Thursday.   The shares were down more than three per cent in New York on Friday.


Susan Taylor Martin, president of global investment focus accounts, replaces Ahearn as head of media.   Tom Glocer, chief executive of the entire group, takes on oversight of markets, assuming Wenig&rsquo;s role as well as running the whole business.   He said: &ldquo;These changes are intended to accelerate growth as we flatten our organisation to operate as an integrated company and unleash cross-company capabilities and operating synergies.&rdquo;


Both Ahearn, a former investment banker, and Wenig were executives of Reuters when the company was taken over by Thomson in 2008.


 


The Financial Times said Wenig&rsquo;s exit was seen as a sign that Woodbridge, the Thomson family&rsquo;s holding company, was seeking faster change after 12 months in which its shares have fallen by 9.9 per cent.   The Thomsons, Canada&rsquo;s richest family, own 55 per cent of the business.   The FT said the Thomson Reuters board has been looking for new growth strategies as it came to the end of a three-year integration period following the takeover in which cost savings had driven results.


Sources in New York said the Thomsons had decided to give the integration three years to bed down and then act if they thought performance was falling short of expectations. 


Glocer said he will manage the financial services business of markets through two closely aligned operating units: Financial Professionals & Marketplaces and Enterprise Solutions.   The Financial Professionals & Marketplaces unit will come together over the coming months through the combination of the present Sales & Trading (S&T) and Investment & Advisory (I&A) units.   This unit will be led by Shanker Ramamurthy, who joined in May from IBM where he was a general manager and currently runs S&T.


&ldquo;To give Shanker time to ramp up, I&A will report on an interim basis to Bob Daleo, CFO of Thomson Reuters, who will transition the business to Shanker in a careful and open process,&rdquo; Glocer said.   &ldquo;Editor-in-Chief Stephen Adler will also report directly to me, reflecting the cross-company role of Editorial.&rdquo;


Glocer will chair a new markets executive committee. 


&ldquo;This transformation is about driving growth, unleashing cross-company capabilities and making it easier to get things done,&rdquo; he said.   &ldquo;Importantly, it&rsquo;s also about accountability and transparency.   As we work to create a performance-driven culture, let&rsquo;s make it a culture where results speak the loudest and collaboration is the norm.&rdquo;


The other senior executives leaving are investment and advisory president Eric Frank, markets global sales and customer service managing director Joerg Floeck, markets chief marketing officer Lee Ann Daly and markets global head of human resources John Reid-Dodick.


Glocer said he was not planning any further changes of this scale at corporate level or in the professional division, where a similar streamlining effort was carried out earlier this year.


● SOURCE Reuters


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Thomson Reuters streamlines markets division&#x2c; Devin Wenig bows out</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Devin Wenig</category><category>Tom Glocer</category><category>Markets Division</category><category>Financial</category><dc:date>2011-07-21T23:37:10+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/fdbaf6b150298a89b8e5e880eb5bd0ba-551.php#unique-entry-id-551</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/fdbaf6b150298a89b8e5e880eb5bd0ba-551.php#unique-entry-id-551</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Thomson Reuters reorganised its markets division, which includes Reuters news agency and where growth has been &ldquo;somewhat slower than anticipated&rdquo; in the second quarter, and said on Thursday the unit&rsquo;s head Devin Wenig, pictured, is leaving the company.


Chief executive Tom Glocer will assume responsibility for the division.


The company reaffirmed its 2011 outlook and said it expects to report second-quarter ongoing revenues of between $3.1 billion and $3.2 billion, up four per cent.   Wall Street is looking for $3.15 billion in the Q2 results due to be announced on 28 July.


The markets division, which serves the financial services industry, will be simplified to three business units from four to help accelerate growth, the company said.   The sales and trading, and investment and advisory units will be combined.


The company gave no reason for Wenig&rsquo;s departure beyond saying it was &ldquo;coincident with these organizational changes&rdquo;.   He joined Reuters in 1993.   Before becoming chief executive of markets he was chief operating officer of Reuters prior to the 2008 takeover by Thomson.


Glocer said the changes were aimed at accelerating growth &ldquo;as we flatten our organization to operate as an integrated company and unleash cross-company capabilities and operating synergies&rdquo;. 


The Financial Times said Wenig&rsquo;s unexpected exit was seen by industry members as a sign that Woodbridge, the Thomson family&rsquo;s holding company that manages its 55 per cent ownership of Thomson Reuters, was seeking faster change after 12 months in which the group&rsquo;s shares have fallen by 9.9 per cent.


&nbsp;


● SOURCE Reuters | Press Release | Financial Times


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Hacking scandal: Stephen Adler reminds staff about Trust Principles</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Editor-in-Chief</category><category>Stephen Adler</category><category>Jim Gaines</category><category>Editorial</category><category>Trust Principles</category><dc:date>2011-07-19T15:34:17+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/5ad8212e43c7aa4901bd2ab3a0a27ddc-550.php#unique-entry-id-550</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/5ad8212e43c7aa4901bd2ab3a0a27ddc-550.php#unique-entry-id-550</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Reuters&rsquo; editor-in-chief Stephen Adler has reminded staff about the organisation&rsquo;s Trust Principles and warned &ldquo;we flirt with disaster&rdquo; if they imagine the News Corporation phone hacking scandal &ldquo;can&rsquo;t happen here&rdquo;.


The Trust Principles and Handbook of Journalism alone do not offer protection against such ethical violations as occurred at the News of the World, he said in a memo to editorial staff.   The memo also bore the name of Jim Gaines, Reuters&rsquo; ethics editor.   Both men are relatively new to the company: Adler joined in 2010 and was appointed editor-in-chief in February 2011.   Gaines joined in April from The Daily, Rupert Murdoch&rsquo;s digital paper for tablet computers, where he was managing editor.


&ldquo;Every one of us has an obligation to push back when something seems wrong, even in the happy event that it may turn out to be right after all,&rdquo; they said.&nbsp;  &ldquo;When the fairness, balance or integrity of our journalism is in question, we simply must &lsquo;pipe up&rsquo; &ndash; to a colleague, a manager, or, if that doesn&rsquo;t work, to one of us.&rdquo;


Following is the full text of the memo:


 &nbsp;&nbsp;


The News Corp. scandal is not an occasion for self-satisfaction, at Reuters or anyplace else.&nbsp;  That much should go without saying.&nbsp;  Journalists everywhere have lost some of our innocence, again.&nbsp;  However flagrant the ethical violations of News of the World, we flirt with disaster if we imagine it can&rsquo;t happen here.


&nbsp;


We are uniquely fortunate to have our Trust Principles, with their institutional protections for independence and integrity and their injunctions against bias and factional interest.   We also have our Handbook, which exhorts us in specific ways to honor its &ldquo;absolutes&rdquo; of accuracy, transparency, rigorous sourcing and freedom from conflicts of interest.   The Trust Principles and the Handbook have proven their uses in a thousand ways.


&nbsp;


But they alone do not protect us.   Every one of us has an obligation to push back when something seems wrong, even in the happy event that it may turn out to be right after all.&nbsp;  When the fairness, balance or integrity of our journalism is in question, we simply must &ldquo;pipe up&rdquo; &ndash; to a colleague, a manager, or, if that doesn&rsquo;t work, to one of us.


&nbsp;


In a profession that requires us to pursue the truth wherever it leads us &ndash; whether into the teeth of controversy or cross-wise with authority and conventional wisdom &ndash; &ldquo;this doesn&rsquo;t seem ethical to me&rdquo; may be the most important thing a journalist can say.   We&rsquo;re both happy to report that the evidence of our brief time here suggests this is widely understood at Reuters, but in the present circumstance it seemed to bear repeating.


&nbsp;&nbsp;


Best regards,


&nbsp;


Steve Adler and Jim Gaines


● SOURCE Reuters


● Trust Principles


● Handbook of Journalism


● Special Report - Inside Rebekah Brooks&rsquo; News of the World


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Reuters kills high-flyer&#x27;s debut column</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>David Cay Johnston</category><category>Jim Impoco</category><dc:date>2011-07-13T23:07:36+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/cef5d92a45d9104e5eaa0e5c5dc4f274-549.php#unique-entry-id-549</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/cef5d92a45d9104e5eaa0e5c5dc4f274-549.php#unique-entry-id-549</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Reuters has retracted the first article by a new Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist who wrote &ldquo;a whopper of a mistake&rdquo; about the tax affairs of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.


&ldquo;David Cay Johnston is having a rough day at work,&rdquo; The Atlantic Wire reported.   The veteran business reporter, pictured, who won his Pulitzer at The New York Times, filed his first piece as a Reuters columnist about News Corp making money on income taxes.   He said News Corp received more in tax refunds over the past four years than it paid in taxes.&nbsp;  The company had an effective tax rate of -43 per cent and collected over $10 billion in tax refunds over the past four years, Johnston wrote.


That&nbsp;turned out to be incorrect.   &ldquo;Not just an embarrassing typo or a little bit off, but totally, absolutely wrong,&rdquo; The Atlantic Wire said.   &ldquo;A full correction is coming soon, and it will detail how, exactly, Johnston misread a News Corp. financial statement but for now there&rsquo;s this posting on Reuters&rsquo; Mediafile blog: &lsquo;Please be advised that the David Cay Johnston column published on Tuesday stating that Rupert Murdoch&rsquo;s U.S.-based News Corp. made money on income taxes is wrong and has been withdrawn.&rsquo;   Which to any journalist reads as one big ouch.&rdquo;


&ldquo;This is particularly painful,&rdquo; Johnston told The Atlantic Wire.   &ldquo;I have been at this for 45 years.   I have never, until now, had to do anything like this.   I am assiduous about correcting the record.&rdquo;


Jim Impoco, executive editor for Thomson Reuters Digital, tweeted: "Can&rsquo;t withdraw my tweets but will post DCJ&rsquo;s mea culpa soon: David Cay Johnston column on News Corp taxes withdrawn.&rdquo;


In a replacement column, Johnston wrote: &ldquo;Readers, I apologize.   The premise of my debut column for Reuters, on News Corp's taxes, was wrong, 100 percent dead wrong.&rdquo;   He made no excuses for what he called &ldquo;a bonehead error&rdquo;.


&ldquo;Tax is my beat, and I was simply looking for what the record showed since Mr.   Murdoch is much in the news these days.   Some of his British journalists hacked into voicemails, paid off cops and interfered in a murder investigation.   Having a long career writing not just about tax, but also about journalistic misconduct, I wondered if there was anything of interest in News Corp's annual disclosure reports...


&ldquo;I often write tart notes at the Romenesko blog for journalists, the Columbia Journalism Review, Nieman Reports and elsewhere about what I consider flawed reporting by others.   I lecture to young reporters around the world on the duty of care they need to take with facts and teach how to check and cross check.   Until now I have never made a big mistake, but this is a painful reminder that we all put our pants on one leg at a time.   The measure of character, I say in my posts and lectures, is whether when an error is found you forthrightly and promptly correct.


&ldquo;So I hope readers will trust that while I made a whopper of a mistake, it has been corrected forthrightly and promptly.&rdquo;


● SOURCE The Atlantic Wire | NPR | ABC News | Reuters


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Improving the signal-to-noise ratio&#x2c; by Tom Glocer</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Tom Glocer</category><dc:date>2011-07-13T23:11:17+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/79ba4954387703b56053f854ee774787-548.php#unique-entry-id-548</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/79ba4954387703b56053f854ee774787-548.php#unique-entry-id-548</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[In a world awash with data, the challenge for Thomson Reuters and other providers is to create an efficient path to information that helps businesses to do commerce, says CEO Tom Glocer.


A huge trove of information is now free and this has disrupted the media landscape like nothing else in the industry&rsquo;s history, he writes in Brunswick Review published by international corporate communications group Brunswick. 


The primary competitive advantage media companies had long held was their iron-clad grip over both the content they created and its means of distribution, Glocer says.   That, coupled with the huge cost of entry into the business for would-be competitors, ensured a very powerful business model for newspaper publishers, TV networks, record labels, and movie studios.


&ldquo;But information alone isn&rsquo;t enough, especially given how much of it there is these days,&rdquo; Glocer writes.   &ldquo;Equally important is ensuring that the information we provide is valuable in terms of giving our customers the ability to find the information they require in a sea of data.&rdquo;


Describing the Reuters news wire as one of the oldest media outlets in the world, Glocer says: &ldquo;I firmly believe that this flood of information plays to Thomson Reuters singular competitive advantage as an information provider.   Our entire business model and strategy for growth rests on a basic assumption that relevant, actionable information and the tools to analyze and act upon it have value.   We have found that professionals all over the world are willing to pay for information that they absolutely require to do their jobs and they want exactly that information, not more.&rdquo;


He adds: &ldquo;In a world awash with data, the problem that professionals face is not, therefore, an overabundance of information, it is the lack of good filters.   In an increasingly noisy world, Thomson Reuters improves the signal-to-noise ratio for professionals around the globe.   We enable our customers to detect the often faint signals hidden in big noisy data sets that help them fulfill their goals.   That is information worth paying for.&rdquo;


● SOURCE Brunswick Review


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>US union staff at Thomson Reuters approve new contract</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Thomson Reuters</category><dc:date>2011-07-08T20:27:26+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/7540b073bd6a7e551825a2df980a6fde-547.php#unique-entry-id-547</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/7540b073bd6a7e551825a2df980a6fde-547.php#unique-entry-id-547</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Journalists, technicians and other news staff represented by the Newspaper Guild of New York have ratified a three-year contract with Thomson Reuters, ending an often acrimonious two-and-a-half-year dispute.


The union said on Friday that the compromise agreement was approved by 252 members while 68 opposed it and six abstained.   More than 75 per cent of the 430 Guild members voted at meetings held between 29 June and 7 July in New York, Washington, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, Miami, Atlanta and Hauppauge.


The new contract, which is already in effect, replaces work rules that had been in place for 18 months and were at the centre of litigation.   It includes a guaranteed 1.5 per cent pay increase in each of its three years.   The company had previously insisted that most or all raises be awarded solely at its discretion.


Yet to be resolved is a charge by the National Labor Relations Board that Thomson Reuters&rsquo; social media policy violated federal labour law by restricting employees&rsquo; rights to openly discuss working conditions, and that it was unlawfully applied in connection with a tweet sent by a Guild-represented journalist.   Talks on that matter continue.


&ldquo;It&rsquo;s been a long battle and we&rsquo;re happy that it is behind us,&rdquo; said Guild president Bill O&rsquo;Meara.   &ldquo;We have a new contract that rewards Guild employees for the critical work they do to make Thomson Reuters successful.   I truly hope that this new contract sets the stage for a productive and positive relationship with the new Thomson Reuters management team.&rdquo;


● SOURCE Poynter | The Newspaper Guild of New York


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Reuters revamps website &#x2013; again</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Stephen Adler</category><category>Chrystia Freeland</category><category>Keith McAllister</category><dc:date>2011-07-07T16:40:01+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/e1d8259ff789c791fc9ae09993aaf4de-546.php#unique-entry-id-546</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/e1d8259ff789c791fc9ae09993aaf4de-546.php#unique-entry-id-546</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Reuters unveiled another new look for its main website on Thursday, a year and a half after the last overhaul, to make it more &ldquo;consumer facing&rdquo;.   The revamp reflects recent changes put in place by Stephen Adler, editor-in-chief, and Chrystia Freeland, editor of Thomson Reuters Digital.


The bold red and white Reuters logo introduced in December 2009 is replaced by a more sober black, grey and white with gold touches, pictured.   The facelift brings ● Reuters.com more closely into the Thomson Reuters family by adopting the group&rsquo;s primary corporate palette across its online and mobile platforms.


A joint memo to staff from Freeland and Keith McAllister, editor and publisher for Reuters&rsquo; Consumer Media, said only the home page would sport the new look as it would take a few weeks to move the rest of the site from the old system.


The new look showcases numerous high profile hires and internal moves Adler has made since taking over in February.


&ldquo;The refresh is just the beginning of Steve&rsquo;s pledge to develop a powerful consumer-facing digital presence for Reuters News,&rdquo; Freeland told staff.   &ldquo;In recent weeks, we&rsquo;ve added some brilliant new journalists to our already terrific team.&rdquo;


PaidContent website, which tracks the economics of digital content, said the stylistic update was part of Reuters&rsquo; keeping up with its rival Bloomberg, which unveiled a significant redirection for ● Bloomberg.com &mdash; &ldquo;though it&rsquo;s fair to say that Bloomberg had much farther to go in remaking its website than Reuters had to this time out&rdquo;.


Bloomberg, Reuters and Dow Jones have been working diligently on becoming more &ldquo;consumer facing,&rdquo; that is, appealing to wider professional audience than the financial markets professionals who subscribe to their respective services, paidContent said.   &ldquo;The feeling is that as the business of news is flattened on the web, where traditional print brands are effectively rendered equal in terms of distribution and reach, these financial information companies can expand their presence to both readers and advertisers, thereby enhancing their core services.


&ldquo;That&rsquo;s why Reuters has gone on such a hiring binge and has been aiming for prestigious journalism prizes with its long-form &lsquo;enterprise reporting&rsquo; and hiring star reporters&hellip;


&ldquo;These efforts are extremely expensive and at a time when traditional news outlets continue to shrink, it&rsquo;s heartening to see any company expanding its news efforts.   While all these companies have shown significant patience with building these operations, the measures for success appear vague &mdash; clearly, it will rest on some combination of traffic gains, brand awareness and, lastly ad revenue.   But in terms of building up the core financial data products that these companies have been founded on, that will probably be more difficult to determine.&rdquo;


Freeland said the chief goal of the refresh was to display more of Reuters&rsquo; content and to provide a clearer hierarchy of news stories across its English language websites (US, UK and India).&nbsp;  She added: &ldquo;Sprucing up the homepage should help make the work of our new and old stars &mdash; and everything we do at Reuters &mdash; more visible, but it is just a small step in our broader effort to make ● Reuters.com and all of our digital platforms a fitting showcase for Reuters News and all of Thomson Reuters.&rdquo;


● SOURCE paidContent


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Reuters extends move into social media</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Jim Impoco</category><category>Anthony De Rosa</category><category>Paul Smalera</category><dc:date>2011-07-07T00:00:24+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/eca57e8a6769a37047b2e11b39509bc7-545.php#unique-entry-id-545</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/eca57e8a6769a37047b2e11b39509bc7-545.php#unique-entry-id-545</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Reuters has appointed a new social media editor with the aim of extending the brand, bringing more people to the ●  Reuters.com website, and making Reuters the most recognisable name in news.


Jim Impoco, executive editor of Thomson Reuters Digital, said the new editor, Anthony De Rosa, was &ldquo;a product manager and technologist&rdquo; who had turned a side project into one of the most potent social media platforms around.


&ldquo;Called&nbsp;&lsquo;The undisputed King of Tumblr&rsquo;&nbsp;by the New York Times, De Rosa is creator of&nbsp;● soupsoup.tumblr.com, which is&nbsp;among&nbsp;the top 25 of&nbsp;the over 2.3 million tumblogs tracked by Compete.&nbsp;  NBC New York&nbsp;has chosen him as one of the top 20 people to follow on Twitter,&rdquo; Impoco said in an internal announcement on Wednesday.   Tumblr is a micro-blogging platform that allows users to post text, images, videos, links, quotes and audio to a short-form blog.


De Rosa &ldquo;will integrate what he calls the &lsquo;ambient&nbsp;wire&rsquo; that exists on social networks, where news now breaks before anywhere else, into Reuters platforms,&rdquo; Impoco said.   &ldquo;As part of his mission, he will&nbsp;help our journalists and editors use social media tools to monitor news, report news, and find leads.&rdquo;


Under his direction,&nbsp;social media&nbsp;&ldquo;will&nbsp;extend our brand, bring more people to ● Reuters.com, and make Reuters the most recognizable name in news&rdquo;.


 


Impoco also announced the appointment of Paul Smalera as deputy&nbsp;op-ed editor.   He has joined Reuters from ● Fortune.com, where he was a senior editor responsible for technology coverage and special projects including the online presentation of the Fortune 500.   He will commission and edit opinion and commentary pieces.


● SOURCE Reuters


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Obituary: Clare McDermott</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Obituary</category><category>Clare McDermott</category><dc:date>2011-07-05T13:00:48+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/8cb36ac6caaf9cbdb9536cd8a94d21b7-544.php#unique-entry-id-544</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/8cb36ac6caaf9cbdb9536cd8a94d21b7-544.php#unique-entry-id-544</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Clare McDermott, correspondent and editor during a 36-year career with Reuters, died overnight.   He was 82.


McDermott grew up in Edmonton, Canada, playing basketball, watching ice hockey and dreaming that one day he would be a sports writer.


&ldquo;That boyhood dream survived an apprenticeship on the night shift of the Ottawa Journal and it came true for me at Reuters,&rdquo; he recalled long after retirement in 1990.   &ldquo;It turned to ashes when, as the sports editor, I reported the 1980 &lsquo;joyless Olympiad&rsquo; in Moscow, where America led a boycott by 40 countries in protest against the Russian invasion of Afghanistan.   In the half century since I became a journalist, politics gnawed at the Olympic ideal like a hungry rat and, when the politicians stayed away from world sport, it was the turn of money and drugs.&rdquo;


Born in 1928, McDermott graduated from Carleton University and joined Reuters in 1954 on summer holiday relief during a hitchhiking tour of Europe.   He served in London and Paris before being assigned to Beijing in 1960, later reporting from Indonesia, Vietnam, Australia, Cyprus and Guyana and the United States before becoming editor in Asia, based in Singapore,  in 1969.   He was sports editor from 1973 until 1980, when he became editor, general news.   After retirement as a corporate marketing communications executive in 1990 he taught journalism.


&ldquo;I wasn&rsquo;t hired as a sports reporter, but I grabbed many chances to write about sport and early on in my time as a foreign correspondent: and &ndash; no &ndash; looking back, I know that there really was no excuse for being so sadly surprised at the way that politics intruded on those 1980 Olympics that I&rsquo;d eventually cover as an editor under a sunny blue sky in Cold War Moscow,&rdquo; McDermott recalled in Reuters&rsquo; 2001 book ● Frontlines: Snapshots of history.


&ldquo;In the early 1960s I was based in Beijing, when we had a foretaste of what would later be called &lsquo;ping-pong diplomacy&rsquo;.   Mao's China built a magnificent new arena to stage the twenty-sixth World Table Tennis Championships.   Britain and Australia competed, but the United States and many others boycotted the event.


&ldquo;It was a bizarre moment.   I was out there writing about ping-pong, yet at the same time &ndash; forbidden to travel beyond Beijing and facing a wall of silence from Chinese communist officialdom &ndash; frantically trying to piece together scraps of information about the horrors of drought, famine and the chaos of Mao&rsquo;s Great Leap Forward, when perhaps as many as 20 million people perished.&rdquo;


McDermott lived in Shropshire, England.   Cremation will be on Friday 15 July.


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Reuters switches sources for Hollywood news to include criticism</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Reuters</category><dc:date>2011-07-01T12:38:28+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/6211accc738c77ea989774303ffe6536-543.php#unique-entry-id-543</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/6211accc738c77ea989774303ffe6536-543.php#unique-entry-id-543</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Reuters has dropped The Hollywood Reporter and Billboard as its lead providers of US entertainment news.   Effective today,


● TheWrap.com takes over and the Hollywood website is expanding to meet Reuters&rsquo; needs.


TheWrap, set up in 2009, began its relationship with Reuters last year with aggregation through Reuters America, a new wire that delivers breaking news, analysis, features and sidebars tailored to the needs of US publishers and broadcasters.   The service includes national, regional and state-by-state reports.


&ldquo;This runs deeper,&rdquo; PaidContent website reported.   &ldquo;TheWrap will provide reviews, along with coverage of movie, television, music and media news.&rdquo;


&ldquo;Reuters clients need and expect reviews, so we needed to expand to meet that demand,&rdquo; said Wrap founder Sharon Waxman, who began her career in journalism as a Reuters reporter in Israel in the 1980s.   She has hired a lead movie critic and a lead music reviewer and reporter.


● SOURCE PaidContent


]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Gilbert Sedbon laid to rest in Paris</title><dc:creator>editor@thebaron.info</dc:creator><category>Gilbert Sedbon</category><category>Bernard Edinger</category><dc:date>2011-06-30T22:46:10+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/3c96d58a534c0a813f527ccf945396fc-542.php#unique-entry-id-542</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.thebaron.info/news_files/3c96d58a534c0a813f527ccf945396fc-542.php#unique-entry-id-542</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Former correspondent Gilbert Sedbon, who served Reuters for 48 years, was buried near Paris on Thursday in the presence of former colleagues who together represented an aggregate of several centuries&rsquo; service to Reuters.   Some had been managers for entire continents; others had stayed in the Paris bureau throughout their careers as invaluable office assistants, Bernard Edinger writes.   All were linked equally by their affection for their former colleague, who died on Saturday aged 94.


His widow Yolande, sons Eric and Thierry and their families were joined by Reuterians who had worked with Gilbert:  Jack Altman, Nguyen Khac Dung, David Lawday, Julian Nundy, Stephen Somerville, John Stephens, Paul Taylor, Ngo Thao, Pierre Tran and yours truly.   Taylor attended both as a friend and as Thomson Reuters' representative.   Also present were other journalists like Jonathan Randall of The Washington Post who had been close friends of Gilbert as well as of other Reuters correspondents in Paris and elsewhere.


The funeral service, at the Cimeti&egrave;re Parisien de Pantin, was conducted by Rabbi Michael Williams, British head of one of the best known Jewish Reform congregations in Paris.


This reporter, entrusted by the family with speaking on behalf of Gilbert&rsquo;s former colleagues, recalled some of his legendary exploits such as the time he held up the Vietnam peace talks in Paris in the early 1970s.   Ultra-conscientious as he was, Gilbert had entered the conference hall before the start of one day&rsquo;s proceedings to check seating arrangements because changes sometimes indicated important diplomatic developments.


Spotting a text on an empty table, he scooped it up and discovered it was an important statement scheduled to be made that day.   Assuming it was an extra copy, he took it away and dictated a story to the Paris office for release once the statement was delivered.   Meanwhile, delegates searched frantically for the document which turned out to have been the only existing copy of the statement.


Photo, left to right: John Stephens, Nguyen Khac Dung, Ngo Thao, Stephen Somerville, Paul Taylor, Yolande Sedbon and Suzanne Edinger shortly before the start of the service.



