Exciting times ahead for Reuters, says Stephen Adler

It is in the Trust Principles that Reuters is supposed to be the world’s best news organisation, and in the present environment, with other businesses weakening and with Reuters’ journalistic organisation strengthening, it is uniquely placed to be really powerful and really strong, Adler said.

Visiting London before returning to New York after a trip to Tokyo, Singapore and Beijing, he said Reuters was the best news organisation in the world in terms of being fast, accurate and fair. But for deep, “inciseful” storytelling, “we’re not nearly the best in the world”. 

He cited the Financial Times and The Economist in Britain and The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal in the United States as news organisations people would typically say were the best.

“People, when they say that, are thinking about memorability, about the big stories, about the things that really change people’s thinking. So there’s enormous praise for fast, accurate and fair but I think we’re living in a world that needs both.”

Adler, a former Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek editor appointed Reuters editor-in-chief in February, said Reuters’ editorial has a good, strong budget, though funding was not unlimited. “But our budget is so substantially bigger than anything any other news organisation I’ve ever seen that, when I came in and I saw the budget I said, you know, this is something I can work with…

“The signal I get from the top of the company is they want to own the best news organisation in the world and they want to invest in it. They think it’s important to business generally and they think it’s important to the company’s place in the world.”

The aim is to reach a high-end audience in terms of people interested in ideas, decision makers thinking about what’s going on in the world in a serious way. “That’s the tier we want to reach.”

Adler said Reuters was heading towards having a very strong digital placement across pretty much any device whether it be an iPhone, iPad or none-Apple device, the web or mobile. “We don’t want anybody else to be better. Where we are is we’re in an interim period. We’ve done a little bit to refresh the website, it’s a little better than it was before, but some time next year I think you’re going to see a dramatic improvement in delivery of Reuters news pretty much across every platform ... whether you end up having to pay for it or not is kind of a business model question but we’re going to dramatically improve it.”

Adler acknowledged concern that Reuters was being seen as a New York-based organisation that looks out on the world from the United States. He said: “We need to be strong in the United States because it’s the world’s largest economy and because the political system is really important and because it’s a regulatory environment affecting the entire world and the fact we’re truly committed to being global we have to be a whole lot better in the US than we are. I think that’s the first principle.”

Several questions put to Adler reflected a perception that his recent senior appointments were either overwhelmingly American or did not seem to value international or wire service experience. In response he mentioned hires from Dow Jones news wires, from Asia, and from Europe. “So I think the premise is wrong. The fact is I have hired a lot of senior people who I’ve worked with in the past, I think they’re some of the best journalists in the world, I think it’s the best leadership team in any news organisation in the world, but it is significantly more diverse than it was characterised.”

He dismissed talk about Reuters being “The Wall Street Journal in exile”. Hiring two successive page-one editors from that newspaper should be viewed as a good thing and not a bad thing.

Adler said he found Reuters had got a little lax on training, which had been an enormous virtue of the company. At some point there came to be no general training budget and training, which was basically given to the bureaus. 

“So what we’ve done is we’ve re-created a centralised training budget and requiring the ethics course to be taken every two years to stay fresh while re-introducing a boot camp that everybody has to go to … basically, when you join the organisation you have to have mandatory training.”

Does this also apply to the new hires or columnists?

Adler said anybody who comes in on staff has to go through the mandatory training and a lot of the new columnists were on staff. He could not say whether such training would also apply to columnists who were not on staff and would look into it.

“What I really don’t like is the merging of opinion and news in a news story and we do watch out for that,” he said.

“We want to be relevant in a contemporary media world and we want to do it in a way that’s respectful of and consistent with the Reuters tradition but not one that makes us irrelevant going forward.”

Referring to talk about current Reuters journalists being up in arms about the agency’s direction, Adler said he did not see that at all. “I see an enormous amount of excitement and receptivity to a desire to do frankly stronger and more ambitious journalism. I think the staff is on fire; they’re really excited, and everywhere I go there is a sense that we’re going to a world of extraordinarily ambitious journalism and we’re going to raise the level of journalism and there’s tremendous energy and excitement around that.”

PHOTO: Corrie Parsonson

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