Manfred Pagel - a profound impact on Reuters

Manfred Pagel helped transform Reuters from a small general news agency into a market-led financial information business.

He was highly principled, and bravely upheld Reuters editorial independence, but changing culture is never easy and

he managed to upset a lot of people.

Pagel, who was to have a profound impact on how Reuters developed as a news business in the next decade, visited me while I was correspondent in Peru in 1976.

He was a practitioner of economic news; he came from the stable that took a deep interest in the fate of the Peruvian anchovy.

In very Germanic fashion, he rationalised everything, but from the top down - a process that at times had unfortunate and unforeseen results.

He also had a knack of putting you off your ease. By the time I had spent five minutes with him at Lima’s Sheraton Hotel, I had changed my order for a coke to a Cuba Libre. I needed the rum.

But I then I gave him a very stiff dose of Peruvian poverty. I walked him round some of the poorest areas of Lima, on the other side of the Rimac River. Usually Reuters executive visits at that time were built around luxury and extravagance. This was something different, and to give Pagel credit he always looked back at his shanty town experience as both memorable and worthwhile.

I left him footsore but with his eyes opened. He was then Economics editor, heading the side of Reuters news business that made all the money but had none of the glamour. In a few years, he was to change all that when he took over the effective day-to-day editing of all of Reuters news services.

Pagel had London bureau chief John Organ in tears within days of taking over. We do not want these sort of stories anymore,” he told John when confronted with evidence that reports of sales from Sotheby’s and Christies were lapped up and published by newspapers all over the world. John, himself something of an amateur fiddler, had lovingly chronicled the rise and rise of Stradivarius prices.

The bottom line was that Pagel said he did not care what newspapers wanted to publish. Henceforth they would print only what he gave them and, incidentally, only what they were willing to pay for. Market news was one thing, free publicity for ‘yuppie’ auction houses was another.

He thereby drove a stake through the heart of many journalists who believed in pure news - whatever its value. He took an axe to the notion that a story should be reported just because it was a good story and began to measure news like a grocer weighing vegetables. The result was a violent swing away from general news. To achieve full Pagelian

legitimacy, henceforth every story had to have a strong economic angle or at the very least threaten to “move markets.” Moving night editors was no longer good enough.

There were few exceptions; the murder of John Lennon was all but spiked - but Poland, happily, became one, and as correspondent in Warsaw I managed to ride out the excesses of Pagel’s revolution, largely protected from his scalpel.

Debt-ridden and Solidarity-controlled Poland became major international news and the markets gobbled up every word on the country - whether or not it conformed to Pagel’s gargantuan appetite for dollar signs and trembling markets in the lead paragraph. ■