You can't be all high and mighty when the truth is that Thomson saved your company. If there wasn't for us, there wouldn't have been Reuters. I thought this was common knowledge and we have moved on from it, but some posts I read here have disillusioned me from that.
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Reuters is a very biased news organization, and Thomson completely overpaid for it. When I heard that Thomson was thinking about buying Reuters, I knew that things would be changed forever and sure enough within a couple of years they started with their massive layoffs, which was so predictable.
You're mostly right. Reuters got a life extension after 2008 and the Eikon fiasco nearly did it in, but I'd argue that Reuters in its current manifestation(s) is now dead anyway.
The financial division -- the true core of the old Reuters business -- is in half a dozen pieces now, each nearly dead, being picked over by PE carrion-feeders. Bad strategy, badly executed for decades, resulted in a sprawling, decaying silo farm of underinvested, dying products, now being wielded by predatory American PE outfits to gouge locked-in customers, with maintenance and support being done at the absolute lowest possible cost by the cheapest, most cowed and beaten-down labour they can find.
Reuters News is a hugely loss-making white elephant. A historical artefact that was collected like yet another addition to David Thomson's tacky art collection. A vanity plaything for a weird old man with far too much time and money on his hands.
Thomson wanted to acquire just the financial services product offerings of Reuters had to beef up Eikon. Reuters had the same problem on the news side as all other news providers and was bleeding cash. The news business could not remain viable alone, thus the negotiated full acquisition of Reuters. There’s an annual required payment of several hundred million $ in to TR annually which now shores up the news operation…
Thomson couldn't save itself when it got rid of its financial division
Thomson is just so charitable they wanted to save a news outlet from the goodness of their heart and were not in the least bit interested in making a profit.