Paul Ingrassia
Reuters executives deny ‘Pulitzer pursuit’ report
Wednesday 04 April 2012
Reuters executives have denied a report that the agency was adopting a new editorial approach aimed at winning Pulitzer Prizes.
The 23 February ● report on The Baron said European chief correspondents had been told about the new approach and other editorial matters at a briefing in London. It said: “Reuters is adopting a new editorial approach aimed at winning Pulitzer Prizes: long, in-depth, investigative special reports from all bureaux.” The report was based on accounts of the briefing by participants.
The Newspaper Guild of New York, a union which represents 430 Thomson Reuters employees, picked up the report on 7 March in its online publication Common Sense under the heading “Pulitzer Prize Pursuit”.
The denial was made to the Guild by Stuart Karle, chief operating officer for Reuters news, and Paul Ingrassia, deputy editor-in-chief. Both vigorously denied the report, the Guild said on Tuesday. “Karle and Ingrassia called the idea ‘stupid,’ with Ingrassia adding that it would be foolish to make Pulitzer Prizes a goal, given the slight chance of winning one,” it said. The Guild quoted Karle as saying the report was factually incorrect and based on a flawed premise. He said managers had gone through the list of journalism prizes to weed out those with a “corporate mission”. “You do this stuff (quality journalism) because it’s a good in itself,” he said. “It’s explicitly not a goal to win prizes.”
The Guild said neither Karle nor Ingrassia categorically denied what it called a more troubling aspect of The Baron report: the notion that the pace of staff turnover is too slow “for new and better people to be brought in quickly enough.” When asked about that, both said they had received reports of journalists “underperforming” and “not pulling their weight,” but said their main objective is to improve performance.
“Separately, the Guild has heard from numerous sources since last year that the Adler administration wants to use the performance management system to ‘manage out’ veteran journalists to make way for ‘stars’ picked by the new team,” it said. “This is a serious concern, given the parlous nature of the performance management system and the new contract language that performance management cannot be used in discipline. The Guild has already filed two grievances on issues related to this, including one that is scheduled for an arbitration hearing, and we’re continuing to monitor management’s actions closely.”
The Baron stands by its story.
● SOURCE The Newspaper Guild of New York
The 23 February ● report on The Baron said European chief correspondents had been told about the new approach and other editorial matters at a briefing in London. It said: “Reuters is adopting a new editorial approach aimed at winning Pulitzer Prizes: long, in-depth, investigative special reports from all bureaux.” The report was based on accounts of the briefing by participants.
The Newspaper Guild of New York, a union which represents 430 Thomson Reuters employees, picked up the report on 7 March in its online publication Common Sense under the heading “Pulitzer Prize Pursuit”.
The denial was made to the Guild by Stuart Karle, chief operating officer for Reuters news, and Paul Ingrassia, deputy editor-in-chief. Both vigorously denied the report, the Guild said on Tuesday. “Karle and Ingrassia called the idea ‘stupid,’ with Ingrassia adding that it would be foolish to make Pulitzer Prizes a goal, given the slight chance of winning one,” it said. The Guild quoted Karle as saying the report was factually incorrect and based on a flawed premise. He said managers had gone through the list of journalism prizes to weed out those with a “corporate mission”. “You do this stuff (quality journalism) because it’s a good in itself,” he said. “It’s explicitly not a goal to win prizes.”
The Guild said neither Karle nor Ingrassia categorically denied what it called a more troubling aspect of The Baron report: the notion that the pace of staff turnover is too slow “for new and better people to be brought in quickly enough.” When asked about that, both said they had received reports of journalists “underperforming” and “not pulling their weight,” but said their main objective is to improve performance.
“Separately, the Guild has heard from numerous sources since last year that the Adler administration wants to use the performance management system to ‘manage out’ veteran journalists to make way for ‘stars’ picked by the new team,” it said. “This is a serious concern, given the parlous nature of the performance management system and the new contract language that performance management cannot be used in discipline. The Guild has already filed two grievances on issues related to this, including one that is scheduled for an arbitration hearing, and we’re continuing to monitor management’s actions closely.”
The Baron stands by its story.
● SOURCE The Newspaper Guild of New York
‘Nasty nocturnal shifts’ go as Reuters merges regional desks
Sunday 01 April 2012
Reuters unifies its regional editing desks on Monday with the aim of raising the quality of its journalism and reinforcing the checks and balances of the ● Trust Principles. As part of the consolidation, overnight staffing in London and Washington is abolished for all but the biggest stories.
“Note: we aren’t eliminating jobs, just most of the nasty nocturnal shifts,” Paul Ingrassia, deputy editor-in-chief, said in a message to staff ahead of the change. The London desk will open at 6:00 am London time year-round.
The London and New York desks will handle each other’s overnight copy from the Americas and Europe, the Middle East & Africa and monitor broadcast and online media across the Atlantic for breaking news.
Reporting lines are reorganised to bring all desk staff under three newly-appointed heads of desk – Matthew Tostevin in London, Ciro Scotti in New York and Jean Yoon in Singapore. A new desk has been launched in Sydney. The heads of desk will coordinate teams of specialist chief desk editors. Reporters will file copy to just two baskets – Money, Politics & General News, and Companies & Commodities – but these will not be in place from day one.
“Our goals are to raise the bar for copy editing, rewrite and headlines and become the most vibrant desk operation in the business. We want the desk to offer a career path rich in opportunity,” Ingrassia said. “One of the most exciting changes is the creation of multimedia ‘hubs’ in each region – a cluster of desks where the regional text editor and her/his deputies will sit with journalists from our pictures, video, online and graphics operations. The aim is to foster greater collaboration across the teams and generate richer multimedia packages for our professional and consumer products. You’ll soon see these hubs start to take shape in London, Singapore and New York.
“Together, these moves will create a strong, independent desk that elevates the quality of our journalism and reinforces the checks and balances of the Trust Principles.”
● SOURCE Reuters
“Note: we aren’t eliminating jobs, just most of the nasty nocturnal shifts,” Paul Ingrassia, deputy editor-in-chief, said in a message to staff ahead of the change. The London desk will open at 6:00 am London time year-round.
The London and New York desks will handle each other’s overnight copy from the Americas and Europe, the Middle East & Africa and monitor broadcast and online media across the Atlantic for breaking news.
Reporting lines are reorganised to bring all desk staff under three newly-appointed heads of desk – Matthew Tostevin in London, Ciro Scotti in New York and Jean Yoon in Singapore. A new desk has been launched in Sydney. The heads of desk will coordinate teams of specialist chief desk editors. Reporters will file copy to just two baskets – Money, Politics & General News, and Companies & Commodities – but these will not be in place from day one.
“Our goals are to raise the bar for copy editing, rewrite and headlines and become the most vibrant desk operation in the business. We want the desk to offer a career path rich in opportunity,” Ingrassia said. “One of the most exciting changes is the creation of multimedia ‘hubs’ in each region – a cluster of desks where the regional text editor and her/his deputies will sit with journalists from our pictures, video, online and graphics operations. The aim is to foster greater collaboration across the teams and generate richer multimedia packages for our professional and consumer products. You’ll soon see these hubs start to take shape in London, Singapore and New York.
“Together, these moves will create a strong, independent desk that elevates the quality of our journalism and reinforces the checks and balances of the Trust Principles.”
● SOURCE Reuters
Reuters changes editorial priorities in quest for Pulitzers
Thursday 23 February 2012
This was the essence of a briefing for European chief correspondents given at a recent meeting in London called by editor-in-chief Stephen Adler, his deputy Paul Ingrassia and Stuart Karle, chief operating officer for Reuters news agency, according to various accounts of the session by people present.
Under the new dispensation correspondents will have to set themselves a minimum target for long-form investigative takeouts and keep to it.
During a recent visit to European bureaux Ingrassia contrasted what he termed “adrenaline journalism” – the traditional wire service story flow – with “aspiration journalism” – the new investigative writing at length that is now being pushed for editorial operations.
Spot news is still wanted but the benchmark should be set higher, chief correspondents were told. It is up to bureau chiefs to decide where that level will be and what stories can be ignored.
Asked about the business case for such a radical switch in journalistic priorities, the editorial chiefs said the chairman and majority owner David Thomson wants Pulitzers, and this is the only way Thomson Reuters can get them. He is a very rich man – the world’s 17th wealthiest billionaire according to the most recent Forbes magazine reckoning – and that is what he wants, chief correspondents were told.
Thomson admired what Sir Harold Evans, appointed Reuters editor-at-large last June, did with The Sunday Times and its Insight team of investigative journalists when he was the British broadsheet’s editor three decades ago. That is what he wants from Thomson Reuters journalists and that is how it has got to be, the new editorial leaders said.
Adler, appointed editor-in-chief a year ago, said Reuters often wins the newsbreaks and follow-up stories in the weeks and even months after an event but it is not very good at keeping after a story over the long term.
Not everyone can be an investigative reporter at the same time. Bureaux will have to cover day-to-day beats when a specialist reporter is busy on his special report.
Adler said the ● reuters.com website – re-designed in December 2009 and again last July to make it more “consumer-facing” – will be thoroughly revamped over coming months. It is intended to make the site a window attracting a much wider audience for the organisation’s paying services, partly with special reports. The aim is to make Thomson Reuters a better Financial Times – a “free newspaper on the site” in the words of one of the executives.
Reuters has been on an editorial hiring spree over the past year, attracting high-profile American editors and writers with a pedigree of Pulitzers and other US journalism prizes in their resumés. But the pace of staff turnover is too slow for new and better people to be brought in quickly enough. “We need to be much more strict on performance,” the chief correspondents were told. The new editorial leadership favours longer postings – five or six years and more – if staffers are performing.
The new leadership wants experts on their beats. Travel and entertainment costs linked to special reporting will not be cut. “Our specialists will need to cultivate their sources.”
International assignment packages, of which there are about 300, will be eliminated.
Reuters launches new safeguards for initiative journalism
Friday 03 February 2012
Reuters is instituting a new system of story proposals for initiative journalism. Reporters must tell editors in advance of writing what kinds of sources and statistics or data will be used and whether the story will need to be read for legal reasons or potential risk to the organisation’s reputation.
The new system comes just a week after Reuters was embarrassed by a story that required complex corrections to put right multiple factual errors. The episode became a journalistic talking point and dismayed old editorial hands.
No connection with what was described in-house as a fiasco and a disgrace was made by Paul Ingrassia, deputy editor-in-chief, in a note on Friday announcing the new system. The reason, he said, was to better focus journalists’ time and talent. “It will help the editors ensure that the time you are devoting to enterprising journalism is well spent,” he told staff.
“Reuters is the best real-time news organization in the world – and we intend to solidify our dominance as such,” he said. “Let me reinforce that crucial point: Our commitment to being the world’s best real-time news service isn’t changing. But the world is evolving. Our customers demand more of us than ever before – not only fast, accurate and fair real-time news, but also deep and proprietary insight into the companies, markets, governments, people, trends and ideas shaping our world. That means we need to do more initiative journalism – stories with original findings that wouldn’t see the light of day if we didn’t undertake them for our readers.”
Items that need to be proposed are any story tagged Analysis, Feature and Insight. Brief proposals are to be filed by a reporter’s manager, via e-mail, to regional special top-news distribution lists. The e-mail must explain what the story will say and why it matters.
“Very briefly describe the kinds of sources and stats or data that will be tapped. If the story will need to be read for legal or reputational-risk reasons, briefly flag that in the proposal. Run the idea by your manager. Your manager will vet and file the proposal.” Editors will reply to the e-mail quickly giving the idea a thumbs up or thumbs down and assign an editor who will work with the reporter to deliver the story in good condition, Ingrassia added.
● SOURCE Reuters
The new system comes just a week after Reuters was embarrassed by a story that required complex corrections to put right multiple factual errors. The episode became a journalistic talking point and dismayed old editorial hands.
No connection with what was described in-house as a fiasco and a disgrace was made by Paul Ingrassia, deputy editor-in-chief, in a note on Friday announcing the new system. The reason, he said, was to better focus journalists’ time and talent. “It will help the editors ensure that the time you are devoting to enterprising journalism is well spent,” he told staff.
“Reuters is the best real-time news organization in the world – and we intend to solidify our dominance as such,” he said. “Let me reinforce that crucial point: Our commitment to being the world’s best real-time news service isn’t changing. But the world is evolving. Our customers demand more of us than ever before – not only fast, accurate and fair real-time news, but also deep and proprietary insight into the companies, markets, governments, people, trends and ideas shaping our world. That means we need to do more initiative journalism – stories with original findings that wouldn’t see the light of day if we didn’t undertake them for our readers.”
Items that need to be proposed are any story tagged Analysis, Feature and Insight. Brief proposals are to be filed by a reporter’s manager, via e-mail, to regional special top-news distribution lists. The e-mail must explain what the story will say and why it matters.
“Very briefly describe the kinds of sources and stats or data that will be tapped. If the story will need to be read for legal or reputational-risk reasons, briefly flag that in the proposal. Run the idea by your manager. Your manager will vet and file the proposal.” Editors will reply to the e-mail quickly giving the idea a thumbs up or thumbs down and assign an editor who will work with the reporter to deliver the story in good condition, Ingrassia added.
● SOURCE Reuters
Reuters shakes up global desk operations
Thursday 01 December 2011
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’s three regions – 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’ standards and quality, “and it’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”.
After a review by Reginald Chua, former editor of the Asian Wall Street Journal now Reuters data editor, they said the specialist “tracks” within each desk will remain, but they will report to a single strong desk head, who in turn reports to the regional editor. “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. It should also provide better career opportunities for desk editors, who can move across specialist areas more easily.
“And critically, it will ensure that desk operations have strong advocates in the new chiefs, who will also play key roles in upholding Reuters’ standards.”
The new desk chiefs are
● Asia - Jean Yoon, based in Singapore. 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. 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. After leaving Bloomberg Businessweek in October 2010, he helped manage the merger of Newsweek and the online publication The Daily Beast. Since April he has been executive editor of The Fiscal Times, a website devoted to analysis of and commentary on the major issues confronting America and the global economy.
“Ciro will start next Monday, and we expect that Jean and Matthew will transition into their new roles by the end of the year,” Adler and Ingrassia said. “They’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. We’ll announce more details once the desk heads have settled into their new roles.”
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. “We need to ensure that those stories – which cross asset classes and regions and are of interest to the broadest range of our readers – are among the most insightful, sharpest and best-written on the file.
“So we’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. This will ensure more continuity of editing and more attention to those stories. We’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. We’ll announce more details about these changes in the coming weeks and months.”
● SOURCE Reuters
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’ standards and quality, “and it’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”.
After a review by Reginald Chua, former editor of the Asian Wall Street Journal now Reuters data editor, they said the specialist “tracks” within each desk will remain, but they will report to a single strong desk head, who in turn reports to the regional editor. “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. It should also provide better career opportunities for desk editors, who can move across specialist areas more easily.
“And critically, it will ensure that desk operations have strong advocates in the new chiefs, who will also play key roles in upholding Reuters’ standards.”
The new desk chiefs are
● Asia - Jean Yoon, based in Singapore. 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. 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. After leaving Bloomberg Businessweek in October 2010, he helped manage the merger of Newsweek and the online publication The Daily Beast. Since April he has been executive editor of The Fiscal Times, a website devoted to analysis of and commentary on the major issues confronting America and the global economy.
“Ciro will start next Monday, and we expect that Jean and Matthew will transition into their new roles by the end of the year,” Adler and Ingrassia said. “They’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. We’ll announce more details once the desk heads have settled into their new roles.”
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. “We need to ensure that those stories – which cross asset classes and regions and are of interest to the broadest range of our readers – are among the most insightful, sharpest and best-written on the file.
“So we’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. This will ensure more continuity of editing and more attention to those stories. We’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. We’ll announce more details about these changes in the coming weeks and months.”
● SOURCE Reuters
Reuters aims to become best in the world – Stephen Adler
Friday 16 September 2011
“Indeed, to be fully effective as a global organisation, we have to be as influential and as well known in the US – the world’s largest economy – as we are elsewhere in the world,” editor-in-chief Stephen Adler, pictured, said in an interview published on Friday. “Our mandate at Reuters is to become the best journalism organisation in the world,” he said.
Reuters’ recent hiring spree, including a handful of Pulitzer Prize-winners, has quickly attracted the media world’s attention, the US news website and blog Huffington Post reported. At the same time, it said, Reuters has relaunched its ● website to better showcase its vast reporting in a more consumer-friendly way, stepped up social media efforts and increased analysis, opinion and enterprise reporting.
Reuters is not giving up on breaking financial news that paying subscribers want or reporting international wire stories that cash-strapped newspapers, lacking foreign budgets, increasingly need, The Huffington Post said. However, deputy editor-in-chief Paul Ingrassia says the company wants to go beyond breaking news. “I think what we’re making a bigger effort to do is not only be first with events,” Ingrassia said, “but very quickly and analytically ... report the meaning and impact of those events.”
By giving Adler a mandate to make big moves, Reuters may hope to avoid being lapped by the Bloomberg behemoth, the website said. When asked whether Bloomberg is Reuters’ main competitor, Adler rattled off the many subscription platforms that Reuters offers its users, including traders, investment bankers, lawyers, tax specialists and pharmaceutical researchers. Reuters, he said, also reaches one billion people a day through the agency business used by newspapers, magazines and websites.
“Our audience base is thus quite different from anyone else’s, as is our revenue model,” Adler said. “The better we are, the more our journalism is worth to all of our customers. And we aim to be the best. And, yes, Bloomberg is certainly a leading competitor.”
As part of Reuters’ hiring spree, The Huffington Post noted that last week alone the agency hired former Slate media critic Jack Shafer, Pulitzer-winning Wall Street Journal veteran editor Alix Freedman, and Bay Citizen editor-in-chief and Industry Standard founding editor Jonathan Weber.
The website said that a year ago, media watchers wouldn’t have imagined such a slew of hires coming back-to-back. But Adler – a former deputy managing editor at the Wall Street Journal and Businessweek editor-in-chief just before Bloomberg’s acquisition of the magazine – started making big moves shortly after becoming Reuters editor-in-chief earlier this year.
Adler’s new editorial leadership team was looking like the Wall Street Journal in exile, it said. Ingrassia spent over three decades at the Journal and Dow Jones, where he won a Pulitzer for his coverage of the auto industry and later ran Dow Jones Newswires. Three other former Journal staffers are on board, too: former chief operating officer Stuart Karle, data editor Reginald Chua, and enterprise editor Michael Williams.
“Adler’s leadership team isn’t all Journal ex-pats,” The Huffington Post said. Adler hired Jim Gaines, a former Time Inc. executive most recently at News International’s iPad application The Daily and Harold Evans joined as an editor-at-large. “And some members of the team are old Reuters hands. Chrystia Freeland, who joined Reuters last year, became editor of Thomson Reuters Digital. In May, James Ledbetter moved from ● Reuters.com to become Reuters inaugural op-ed editor…
“When my position was created, there became a much stronger mandate from above to go out and get big names and put the full weight of Reuters behind it,” Ledbetter said. Since he took over, Reuters has hired not only Shafer but two former New York Times reporters with Pulitzers on their resumés: David Rohde and David Cay Johnston. “It’s getting to be quite a stable,” Ledbetter said.
While recent buzz may help raise Reuters’ profile outside, The Huffington Post said there has been some grumbling inside the company. Staffers say there are concerns that too much emphasis is being placed on big-name outside hires at the expense of cultivating talent within. Managers also worry about holding onto their positions in the newsroom amid editorial reshuffling and executives' shifting priorities.”
Staffers say other management changes have gone over well, including an emphasis on getting out of the office more to build deeper source relationships and the dismantling of the long-running beat system that only rewarded stories impacting stock prices. One staffer said it seems clear management wants to build a news organisation that creates a lot more buzz and prestige.
Some staffers believe that management expects to win Pulitzers in the coming years, following Reuters’ greater investment in enterprise and investigative reporting.
Both Adler and Ingrassia, however, balk at any suggestion that there’s a Pulitzer mandate. “Prize-hunting, per se, is not the objective here,” Ingrassia said.
“As I’ve said to the staff, we want to do work that is so memorable and so distinguished that it is recognised by our peers,” Adler said. “Winning awards is one measure of excellence but not an end in itself. We also want people talking about our journalism, sharing it with each other, and using it to make smart decisions and achieve fresh insights.”
● SOURCE The Huffington Post
Reuters names former magazine editor as Americas editor
Tuesday 06 September 2011
Editor-in-chief Stephen Adler and his deputy Paul Ingrassia said in an internal message to editorial staff: “We’re delighted to announce that our search for an Americas Editor has reached a most welcome conclusion. Jim Gaines, whom we’ve all come to know and respect in recent months, will be moving into the Americas role.”
Gaines, pictured, joined Reuters in April as editor for ethics, standards and innovation after a brief stint at News Corp’s The Daily, an iPad news application. He spent most of his career at Time Inc, where his last job was corporate editor. In his new role he will direct and coordinate coverage of major global stories when Ingrassia, who also joined in April, is absent. Gaines will continue to oversee, with Reinhard Krause in London, Reuters’ global photography department.
Previously Gaines worked for Newsweek, radio station WNET, a digital multimedia general interest magazine called FLYP, and his own multimedia publishing company in Washington where he lives.
● SOURCE Reuters
Reuters names new Washington bureau chief
Thursday 16 June 2011
Deputy editor-in-chief Paul Ingrassia told staff on Thursday that Milliken, who formerly covered emerging markets in South America and southern Europe, would take up her new assignment as Washington bureau chief after the US Labor Day holiday, 5 September. In Los Angeles since 2006, she has directed a team of 43 journalists in 17 states.
In the same announcement Ingrassia said Jack Reerink, North America managing editor for the past nine months, is looking at other opportunities following the recent editorial reorganisation that eliminated the regional managing editor roles and established the new position of regional news editor for the Americas. “Jack has generously agreed, at the request of [editor-in-chief] Steve Adler and me, to assist with our transition to a regional news editor under the new structure announced in April.”
Ingrassia also announced the appointment of Jed Horowitz, a 30-year veteran of Wall Street reporting and editing for Bloomberg, Dow Jones, and such publications as Securities Industry News and the American Banker, to the new post of financial companies editor.
● SOURCE Talking Biz News
Reuters editorial: back to the future
Sunday 22 May 2011
Rob Doherty, pictured, former Washington bureau chief, is returning to Reuters to head up the operation in the US capital. He left in 2008, since when he has been working for the Hatcher Group, a public affairs and communications firm that connects non-profit organisations and foundations to policymakers and the media.
Michael Stott, global editor for the Top News Desk, is appointed regional editor for Europe-Mideast-Africa. He will oversee text journalists in the region with the exception of commodities and energy staff and the International Financing Review, which will continue to report to Richard Mably and to Dayan Candappa, respectively, on a global basis.
Announcing the moves, deputy editor-in-chief Paul Ingrassia said Stott would continue in his present role on an interim basis, pending moves to further integrate the Top News Desk into the regional news structure.
“The sum of these moves means that we are returning, in some respects, back toward the regional text news structure that Reuters had in years past,” Ingrassia said in a note to staff last week.
Region-specific general managers will report to Stuart Karle, chief operating officer and former Wall Street Journal general counsel, who joined Reuters last month in an editorial restructuring announced by new editor-in-chief Stephen Adler. They will focus on “the critical role of supporting editorial operations, unencumbered by the demands of the file”. They will supervise operations, logistics, and safety, and coordinate editorial’s partnership with teams from human resources, public relations, legal, real estate and facilities, finance and security. Their role will include budgets, technology, and representing Reuters.
The general managers are
● Sarah Edmonds – UK, Ireland and Nordic states
● Olaf Zapke – Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Balkans,
Russia/CIS and Turkey
● Michael Bergmeijer, a new hire – France and Benelux
● Barry Moody – Southern Europe
● Christina Pantin – Bangalore
● Duncan Pitcairn – South Asia
● Phil Smith – North Asia
● Jean Yoon – South East Asia and Pacific
● Caroline Drees – Middle East
● Matthew Tostevin – Africa
● Saul Hudson – Latin America
● Michael Christie – Northern Latin America and US states on the Mexican border other than California
● Richard Baum – New York and Canada
● Rob Doherty – Washington DC and bureaus not covered by Baum and Christie.
● SOURCE Reuters
This item has been corrected to make clear that the general managers report to Stuart Karle, chief operating officer, not Paul Ingrassia, deputy editor-in-chief – Editor.
Stay focused on business priorities, Stephen Adler tells staff
Wednesday 18 May 2011
“We are fortunate to work in an organization that recognizes that our work adds value only if it is accurate, unbiased, and impervious to external influence,” he said in a note to staff.
Relaying some of the questions he and his deputy, new hire Paul Ingrassia who visited London and Frankfurt, heard most often and how they responded, Adler said one question was “Do you care about global coverage, or are you primarily focused on North America?”
His answer: “There is no either/or here. Reuters global character is one of our biggest competitive advantages, and the huge financial and geopolitical stories of the past three months – from Japan to the Middle East, from insider trading to the royal wedding – illustrate the great value of our global capabilities in text and multimedia. But we can’t be truly global without increasing our presence and impact in the U.S.”
The same sort of answer applies to the question “What do you value more: enterprise stories or snaps and market-moving stories?”
“The short answer is: Both. We can’t be Reuters without the latter, and we can’t improve and grow without the former. Speed, accuracy, fairness, and relevance are our hallmarks, and must remain so. We need to be on the ground in Ivory Coast, witnessing the first shipments of cocoa leaving the port, and we need to be the first to report the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn or the latest developments in the commodities markets. But our customers don’t just seek information; they also seek context and insight, and an enterprise piece that surfaces diplomatic cables to reveal the likely future of the Chinese government adds unmistakable value, not only for customers looking for investment strategies but for readers everywhere seeking in-depth understanding of world affairs.”
Asked what he was going to do about bureaucracy, Adler said: “We heard this question everywhere! Several people told me that they had actually fled managerial roles because the procedures were so onerous. Our new structure, with its focus on separating operations from news, should help. But [chief operating officer] Stuart Karle, the new senior leadership team, and I are also aware that we have to simplify individual procedures and leave room for leaders at the local level to exercise judgment rather than merely follow rules.”
● SOURCE Reuters
