How much longer until Bloomberg airs the dirty laundry that the new F & R (Blackstone) is monetizing and circumventing the old Reuter’s need ethics clauses? One of the most trusted unbiased sources of news will collapse. PE firms don’t sign 30 year contracts. Seconds matter in terms of descimination of publicly free information ...... they are doing what Thomson could not but at least they are paying $300 Million a year.
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At the end of the day you can't cover everything and anything with less resources. If Reuters still wants to compete as a financial newswire, then act like it.
Don't supply financial terminals and then miss 90% of the news that matter to terminal clients. Make up your freaking mind.
I can say with confidence that Reuters equity news is of diminishing to zero value for fundies, bankers, traders or any other type of serious market participant. In fact the rule of thumb is if it'sh-- Reuters it's probably already too late to sell.
There are a million bots/crawlers out there that are designed specifically to trawl through stock exchange announcements, online documents etc. The only way for journalists to add value for sophisticated investors is to help make sense of data or break news. This is where Reuters has fallen behind its competitors to the point where it might have become irreversible.
Reuters journalists either miss the point or display a fundamental lack of understanding of what makes the market tick. The truth is there aren't that many journalists who are smarter than the market, but dumb AND sanctimonious journalists are the pits.
@xyh totally agree with u. trust principles shouldn't be a convenient excuse for subpar reporting that refinitiv is stuck paying $325 million a year for. $325 million!
imagine being the biggest customer of a news supplier that always acts like they know best of what u need to read, and when u ask them why are they not providing market-moving news that other providers seem to be doing, they say oh no you can't tell us what to do! trust principles yo!
do think of the ridiculousness of that situation. the concept of being gatekeepers of news is obsolete anyway when you can get the same news anywhere else, and for free to boot.
OP, what is wrong with asking Reuters to be more in tune with what the market wants?
I find that these editors have a God complex. They think they know everything despite being hopelessly out of their depth, particularly for financial news. Case in point: slapping 'exclusive' tags on stuff that nobody cares about, and not covering/doing a hackjob out of the stuff that matters.
Enough is enough, really. I think Blackstone/Refin has every right to kick some sense into them.
i can confirm that many top editors there can't even read a financial statement. how do you expect them to produce agenda setting financial news?
Spot on.
https://www.thebaron.info/columns/a-cash-mountain-job-cuts-and-the-silent-trustees
"If you were naïve, you might suppose that at least some of such a vast war chest could be used to boost Reuters journalism and reverse a decade of losses to Bloomberg. Instead, a few days after the deal was concluded, the start of the latest in a long series of staff cuts was announced, this one particularly brutal.
I say naïve, because such a logical move would suggest a commitment to competitive news coverage and go against the Thomson organisation’s record since it took over Reuters in 2008. Its only big idea is to cut costs and win journalistic prizes, not find ways to be faster with the kind of agenda-setting breaking news that sells terminals to financial customers who pay the bills.
The editorial management brought in by Thomson has too often dissipated Reuters strengths by pushing an ever-decreasing number of journalists to write glossy magazine style articles while still trying to win timings against Bloomberg and others. The results are easy to see. In the decade since the Thomson takeover, Reuters former dominance in financial markets coverage has disappeared and its market share is more than 10 points behind Bloomberg. Such long-form journalism also involves trying to compete in an overcrowded marketplace with providers who don’t have to worry about breaking news."
How did Reuters fall from being a premier financial newswire to a mediocre, even inferior one?
They need to do some soul-searching.
Refin is not gonna throw $325m a year for nothing, I can assure you.
Here's a newsflash for you.
This is how the media are stacked at the moment.
US politics: NYT, Washington Post, WSJ, New Yorker
Financial news: Bloomberg, FT, WSJ, Economist, trade/specialist publications
Tech news: The Information, TechCrunch, PCWorld, Gizmodo etc
General affairs, disasters etc: AP, AFP
Not to mention a bazillion online sites & social media out there, that are FREE.
Can you let me know where Reuters stands?
Assuming that Reuters goes into the subscription model, would YOU pay for it?
Pretty sure there are loopholes in that contract. In any case the gameplan for BS is to exit in a couple of years.
PE firms will be PE firms. There's no way they'll pay top dollar for a mediocre product.
Penny for thought: In the event of a sale of Reuters, can the new buyer change the terms of the news purchase contract?
I know of once case where details were redacted from a story involving a client, where the client had explicitly threatened to pull all business from TR. It wasn't very controversial, and the omission didn't have a material impact on the story, but outside influence is outside influence.
So no, Reuters wasn't unbiased before, and they aren't now. Blackstone has nothing to do with it, and if anything, they should feel silly for signing such a long term contract for news they could get almost anywhere else and a bureau they can't govern.
No one thinks TR is unbiased anymore. What glue are you sniffing?
@18I I don't understand much of your English but in what way is Blackstone destroying the Reuters brand when Reuters is already destroying themselves as a financial news wire? Remind me when was the last time Reuters produced agenda setting financial news?