![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
Monitoring Reuters’ increasing use of the internet from the mid-1990s, the article focuses on in-house quality controls and issues facing news agencies. While set in a historical context, it highlights aspects of the news organisation’s competition with Bloomberg and news/editorial and management comments on financial and general news and their markets.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Interviewed in London in 1967.
2. There are entries for most days, but periods of hiatus occurred. Occasionally, the main controller or “quac”, “M.A.”, handed over to a colleague.
3. I partly anonymise the Reuters’ journalists who figure in the logs and elsewhere, merely using their initials.
4. On 8 February 2000, a few months after Reuters’ shares virtually halved in value, the company’s Chief Executive Peter Job went from “villain to hero overnight” after announcing that £500 million was to be spent on shifting the company’s focus to the internet. Cf. Jemimah Bailey, “Quiet Man of Reuters Causes Stir in the City”, Sunday Times, 13 February 2000.
5. Michael Bloomberg founded his company, specialising in financial information feeds and terminals, in 1981.
6. In October 1985, Macdowall noted: “I’ve been 27 years in Reuters and the thing that’s struck me the most are the changing ideologies at the top of the company”. Reuters’ journalists “were a difficult anti-management bunch—but had some cause for their views”. Macdowall was highly respected. At the time, Managing Director Glen Renfrew noted: “despite uninspiring growth in revenue from our traditional media markets, we have invested heavily in expanding and improving the quality of our news coverage since the beginning of 1980s, when our profits began to allow us room for manœuvre. We have opened some 30 new international bureaux since the beginning of 1982 and now have 100—far more than any competitor. We have also added many specialist journalists; particularly business journalists … Business subscribers rely heavily on Reuters’ news, both general and specialised”. In a note to Macdowall of 17 October 1985, it was argued that media, “the cinderalla” of the company (5 per cent revenue), suffered from outmoded distribution technology.
7. In French, in AFP, “quacs” are familiarly termed “allahs”—from analyse de qualité et de contrôle.
8. In December 2015, Reuters stated: “We provide more than 2.2 million news stories and 580,000 photos and images per year, delivered in 16 languages”. Quoted on the New York Stock Exchange, Thomson Reuters—“TRI.N”—was listed as US$38.26, 24 December 2015.
9. In AFP, the English-language version put out from Hong Kong differed from that put out in Paris.
10. Interviewed in 1987.
11. A conundrum: how to equate this with the perennial questions asked of the lead: “who, what, when, why, how” form the five basic questions to which a report must answer; “why” is the most contentious, the most subjective, the least factual. Some argue that these five basics were used already by the rhetorician, Quintilian, in first-century Rome.
12. Stephen Jukes, Reuters’ global head of news, decreed that the wire service’s 2500 reporters should not use the word “terrorist” unless in a direct quote.
13. Instinet was a Reuters subsidiary brokerage company, founded in 1967 and acquired by Reuters in 1987; it executed global equity liquidity for its professional client base in over 40 countries every day. Reuters sold it in 2005.
14. White House Press Secretary for US President George W. Bush, January 2001 to July 2003.
15. This figure was later revised downwards to around 2750.
16. From Latin America, in 1998, Reuters noted that Bloomberg was expanding fast, proposed satisfying all client needs—fixed income and forex (foreign exchange)—on one terminal, but remained weak in local news coverage.
17. For examples of offbeat items, see Six Drown Saving Chicken: And Other True Stories from the Reuters “Oddly Enough” File (Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1996).
18. Reuters Television News, APTN, WTN (Worldwide Television News sold by ABC to APTV in June 1998; in April, Reuters, valued it at £30 million and considered buying it). Reuters, like AFP, moved into photos in 1985; in the 1990s, it ventured into television more fully than AFP. Reuters’ involvement in the provision of television news film dated from the British Commonwealth International News Agency in the 1950s.
19. The NYT’s nickname.
20. “Said”—“probably the word most used in Reuters’ copy”, observed another journalist.
21. “Who?”, “what”, “where”, when”, “with whom” (with possibly “why”, and “how”) are the basic questions, possibly inherited from the “rhetoric of circumstances taught in first century Rome by Quintilian: “quis, quid, ubi, quando, quibus auxiliis, ...cur , quomodo”. These are seen as the “basics”, around which journalists should organise the lead of their copy. Cf. Palmer M., 2011, vol ii, p. 264. “Quacs” tend to add “so what?“:” how is such a news-item pertinent?”
22. The Catholic publisher of the new translation.
23. International Press Telecommunications Council.
24. Reuters became a limited company in 1984, with shares quoted on the stock market. Bloomberg remains a private company.
25. Glocer had been a mergers and acquisition lawyer in a previous job. From October 1999, Reuters considered whom to choose to replace Peter Job as Group Chief Executive. Glocer was thought to believe that “we’ve lost the focus to make our media activity really bite”.
26. “Eyetrack III”, for instance, monitored how people read websites.