Reuters revamps website - again

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’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’ 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.

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

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

Bloomberg, Reuters and Dow Jones have been working diligently on becoming more “consumer facing,” that is, appealing to wider professional audience than the financial markets professionals who subscribe to their respective services, PaidContent said. “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.

“That’s why Reuters has gone on such a hiring binge and has been aiming for prestigious journalism prizes with its long-form ‘enterprise reporting’ and hiring star reporters…

“These efforts are extremely expensive and at a time when traditional news outlets continue to shrink, it’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 — 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.”

Freeland said the chief goal of the refresh was to display more of Reuters’ content and to provide a clearer hierarchy of news stories across its English language websites (US, UK and India). She added: “Sprucing up the homepage should help make the work of our new and old stars — and everything we do at Reuters — 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.” ■