David Cay Johnston
Reuters aims to become best in the world – Stephen Adler
Friday 16 September 2011
“Indeed, to be fully effective as a global organisation, we have to be as influential and as well known in the US – the world’s largest economy – as we are elsewhere in the world,” editor-in-chief Stephen Adler, pictured, said in an interview published on Friday. “Our mandate at Reuters is to become the best journalism organisation in the world,” he said.
Reuters’ recent hiring spree, including a handful of Pulitzer Prize-winners, has quickly attracted the media world’s attention, the US news website and blog Huffington Post reported. At the same time, it said, Reuters has relaunched its ● website to better showcase its vast reporting in a more consumer-friendly way, stepped up social media efforts and increased analysis, opinion and enterprise reporting.
Reuters is not giving up on breaking financial news that paying subscribers want or reporting international wire stories that cash-strapped newspapers, lacking foreign budgets, increasingly need, The Huffington Post said. However, deputy editor-in-chief Paul Ingrassia says the company wants to go beyond breaking news. “I think what we’re making a bigger effort to do is not only be first with events,” Ingrassia said, “but very quickly and analytically ... report the meaning and impact of those events.”
By giving Adler a mandate to make big moves, Reuters may hope to avoid being lapped by the Bloomberg behemoth, the website said. When asked whether Bloomberg is Reuters’ main competitor, Adler rattled off the many subscription platforms that Reuters offers its users, including traders, investment bankers, lawyers, tax specialists and pharmaceutical researchers. Reuters, he said, also reaches one billion people a day through the agency business used by newspapers, magazines and websites.
“Our audience base is thus quite different from anyone else’s, as is our revenue model,” Adler said. “The better we are, the more our journalism is worth to all of our customers. And we aim to be the best. And, yes, Bloomberg is certainly a leading competitor.”
As part of Reuters’ hiring spree, The Huffington Post noted that last week alone the agency hired former Slate media critic Jack Shafer, Pulitzer-winning Wall Street Journal veteran editor Alix Freedman, and Bay Citizen editor-in-chief and Industry Standard founding editor Jonathan Weber.
The website said that a year ago, media watchers wouldn’t have imagined such a slew of hires coming back-to-back. But Adler – a former deputy managing editor at the Wall Street Journal and Businessweek editor-in-chief just before Bloomberg’s acquisition of the magazine – started making big moves shortly after becoming Reuters editor-in-chief earlier this year.
Adler’s new editorial leadership team was looking like the Wall Street Journal in exile, it said. Ingrassia spent over three decades at the Journal and Dow Jones, where he won a Pulitzer for his coverage of the auto industry and later ran Dow Jones Newswires. Three other former Journal staffers are on board, too: former chief operating officer Stuart Karle, data editor Reginald Chua, and enterprise editor Michael Williams.
“Adler’s leadership team isn’t all Journal ex-pats,” The Huffington Post said. Adler hired Jim Gaines, a former Time Inc. executive most recently at News International’s iPad application The Daily and Harold Evans joined as an editor-at-large. “And some members of the team are old Reuters hands. Chrystia Freeland, who joined Reuters last year, became editor of Thomson Reuters Digital. In May, James Ledbetter moved from ● Reuters.com to become Reuters inaugural op-ed editor…
“When my position was created, there became a much stronger mandate from above to go out and get big names and put the full weight of Reuters behind it,” Ledbetter said. Since he took over, Reuters has hired not only Shafer but two former New York Times reporters with Pulitzers on their resumés: David Rohde and David Cay Johnston. “It’s getting to be quite a stable,” Ledbetter said.
While recent buzz may help raise Reuters’ profile outside, The Huffington Post said there has been some grumbling inside the company. Staffers say there are concerns that too much emphasis is being placed on big-name outside hires at the expense of cultivating talent within. Managers also worry about holding onto their positions in the newsroom amid editorial reshuffling and executives' shifting priorities.”
Staffers say other management changes have gone over well, including an emphasis on getting out of the office more to build deeper source relationships and the dismantling of the long-running beat system that only rewarded stories impacting stock prices. One staffer said it seems clear management wants to build a news organisation that creates a lot more buzz and prestige.
Some staffers believe that management expects to win Pulitzers in the coming years, following Reuters’ greater investment in enterprise and investigative reporting.
Both Adler and Ingrassia, however, balk at any suggestion that there’s a Pulitzer mandate. “Prize-hunting, per se, is not the objective here,” Ingrassia said.
“As I’ve said to the staff, we want to do work that is so memorable and so distinguished that it is recognised by our peers,” Adler said. “Winning awards is one measure of excellence but not an end in itself. We also want people talking about our journalism, sharing it with each other, and using it to make smart decisions and achieve fresh insights.”
● SOURCE The Huffington Post
Reuters picks up retrenched media columnist
Tuesday 06 September 2011
Jack Shafer, pictured, based in Washington, will cover media and politics for Reuters. Prior to working at The Washington Post Company’s ● Slate website Shafer spent 11 years editing two alternative weeklies – San Francisco Weekly and Washington City Paper.
Editor-in-chief Stephen Adler said in an internal announcement on Tuesday: “Jack’s arrival at Reuters adds to a rapidly strengthening opinion and analysis bench. Award-winning writers David Cay Johnston and David Rohde have recently joined Reuters as columnists, Felix Salmon continues to set the pace among financial bloggers, and the Reuters column line-up includes regular contributions from Larry Summers and Mohamed El-Erian.”
New York magazine reported: “The deep-pocketed news service, which under the digital leadership of Chrystia Freeland has been on a hiring spree, began talking to Shafer in June, well before the surprise Slate layoff. No wonder Shafer's post-layoff interviews were so jovial.”
Shafer, who was dropped by Slate only last month, said on Twitter that Reuters editors “interrupted my plans to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, and criticize after dinner with an offer — which I’ve accepted — to write about media and politics for Reuters. I’m damn happy. Thanks, oh, my tweeps.”
● SOURCE New York Magazine | Poynter | Adweek
Reuters changes kill rule after embarrassing error
Monday 01 August 2011
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.
“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,” the Florida-based journalism school the Poynter Institute said on its website.
“The correction/kill policy that is followed at Reuters is long-established by the wire service,” Ledbetter said. “There isn’t a procedure for taking down something that is wrong because for the vast majority of Reuters’ existence, there was nothing to take down.”
Under the new policy, erroneous posts will remain online even after Reuters publishes a follow-up.
“I think it stands as a transparent record of what occurred,” Ledbetter said. “I think to take it down – while I can see some argument for that – it’s not being fully transparent with our readers about the process, and it could be subject to abuse.”
Poynter said one advantage of the new approach is that it retains reader comments, which disappear when a post is deleted.
“In this case, user comments could have helped Reuters and Johnston identify a critical error within a few hours of publishing the original story,” 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’s documents.
By the time that the writer had tracked his error and an editor made the call to issue a “kill order,” 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
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.
“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,” the Florida-based journalism school the Poynter Institute said on its website.
“The correction/kill policy that is followed at Reuters is long-established by the wire service,” Ledbetter said. “There isn’t a procedure for taking down something that is wrong because for the vast majority of Reuters’ existence, there was nothing to take down.”
Under the new policy, erroneous posts will remain online even after Reuters publishes a follow-up.
“I think it stands as a transparent record of what occurred,” Ledbetter said. “I think to take it down – while I can see some argument for that – it’s not being fully transparent with our readers about the process, and it could be subject to abuse.”
Poynter said one advantage of the new approach is that it retains reader comments, which disappear when a post is deleted.
“In this case, user comments could have helped Reuters and Johnston identify a critical error within a few hours of publishing the original story,” 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’s documents.
By the time that the writer had tracked his error and an editor made the call to issue a “kill order,” 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
Reuters kills high-flyer's debut column
Wednesday 13 July 2011
“David Cay Johnston is having a rough day at work,” 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. 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 turned out to be incorrect. “Not just an embarrassing typo or a little bit off, but totally, absolutely wrong,” The Atlantic Wire said. “A full correction is coming soon, and it will detail how, exactly, Johnston misread a News Corp. financial statement but for now there’s this posting on Reuters’ Mediafile blog: ‘Please be advised that the David Cay Johnston column published on Tuesday stating that Rupert Murdoch’s U.S.-based News Corp. made money on income taxes is wrong and has been withdrawn.’ Which to any journalist reads as one big ouch.”
“This is particularly painful,” Johnston told The Atlantic Wire. “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.”
Jim Impoco, executive editor for Thomson Reuters Digital, tweeted: "Can’t withdraw my tweets but will post DCJ’s mea culpa soon: David Cay Johnston column on News Corp taxes withdrawn.”
In a replacement column, Johnston wrote: “Readers, I apologize. The premise of my debut column for Reuters, on News Corp's taxes, was wrong, 100 percent dead wrong.” He made no excuses for what he called “a bonehead error”.
“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...
“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.
“So I hope readers will trust that while I made a whopper of a mistake, it has been corrected forthrightly and promptly.”
● SOURCE The Atlantic Wire | NPR | ABC News | Reuters
