Reuters America cuts more staff amid editorial reorganisation

Those leaving include Climate and Environment Editor Katy Daigle, raising concerns that Reuters may be throttling back on coverage because of the hostile atmosphere created by Donald Trump’s aggressive denial of climate change, which he says is a hoax.

Although Reuters total journalist numbers have apparently not decreased over the last year, the latest cuts follow a long-term trend towards replacing experienced deskers and correspondents  with more junior and cheaper staff, many hired locally. 

Those who have left include some of the longest serving veterans on the Americas editing desk in New York and Washington.

Sources gave The Baron the names of four deskers who had taken voluntary buyouts and the same number of management editors who had been let go recently.

Another veteran journalist, Los Angeles bureau chief Mary Milliken, left in October and one other New York-based senior editor is retiring. Colleagues have recently received a series of farewell messages from journalists who are leaving after decades at the agency.

One source said it was feared the further reduction in the Americas Desk would put even more pressure on the London World Desk, which already carries an increasing burden from having to heavily edit and rewrite for inexperienced teams in the field, often crafting trunk stories from scratch.  

In October, Reuters Editor-in-Chief Alessandra Galloni announced a restructuring called One Newsroom, which she said would bring together text, video and photojournalists covering politics, economics and general news into a single unit called World News. She said this reorganisation would begin in North America.

“We are modernising how we work so we can deliver more impactful, coordinated journalism in the formats our clients most want and eliminate the silos that create duplication.

“We will also distinguish more clearly between teams delivering fast news and information at speed and scale and those focused on specialized reporting and storytelling. The changes are aimed at strengthening our ability to cover breaking news and land agenda-setting beat coverage,” Galloni told staff.

Some Reuters journalists believe these changes will lead to a reduction of staff over the next year and a substantial reshuffling of senior roles, with some visuals journalists being promoted to run combined teams.

Some previous reorganisations at Reuters, seen as reinventing the wheel by sceptics, have ended up making little change at the coalface. Some journalists say they already coordinate with visuals teams as a matter of course, and guidance issued to promote the new structure does not seem to envisage radical change in the way news is covered.

Other journalists hope that the changes may represent a rebalancing of news gathering, boosting more speedy coverage and coordination of breaking news, which they say has long suffered as a poor cousin of long form and investigative journalism.  

The latter has been given heavy priority since Canada’s Thomson Corporation bought Reuters in 2008 and has resulted in the agency winning many awards for exclusives and special reports, including Pulitzers. But it does not serve as well the financial screen clients who pay most for Reuters services and is seen by many correspondents as having enjoyed the lion’s share of limited resources.

Previous attempts to blend diverse teams have had mixed success. One source said it had made no sense for specialist sports reporters, for example, to try to edit arcane financial news and vice versa and that the experiment of having all-purpose desk editors  has been quietly shelved.

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