No tears, just an outstanding file by brilliant journalists

Oh please. I've been with Reuters now since 1998, and in every single one of those 18 years I've heard chicken little moans that the company, as its proud old timers once knew it, is dead. Hell, I moan myself. But as someone just about half way to winning my own official "old sod" badge, let me reassure you. If you think Reuters is dead, you haven't been reading the file. Take a look at, say, the images and words our colleagues have been providing for the last month from the frontline in the battle for Mosul. Michael Georgy, Ahmed Rasheed, Goran Tomasevic, Mehdi Talat, Zohra Bensemra, Stephen Kalin and Isabel Coles, to name just a few of the brilliant Reuters journalists on that particular story right now, don't need your tears in your lousy beer. They are too busy working.

At a time when the news business around the globe is in crisis, revenue has gone up in smoke, newsrooms have been decimated and all but a handful of the big American papers have shuttered their foreign desks forever, Reuters still has 3,000 journalists around the globe, working every bit as hard as ever to produce a file. Is everything perfect? When was it? Do managers make bone-headed decisions? When didn't they? Is the future in doubt? When wasn't it?

Meanwhile, your present generation of Reuters journalists is still seeing far too little of their families and occasionally risking their lives to make the world a less ignorant place. And the actual file, the only thing that matters at the end of the day, is outstanding. If you don't believe me, put down your beer, type in www.reuters.com and look for yourself. ■