This point was driven home to me at 5 a.m. one recent morning — before my first espresso — as I discussed abstruse sections of the tax code with my auditor.

Now, to be clear, the early hour was not a new form of torture — “pay up or we’ll never let you sleep again” — it was, in fact, my idea as the best time to let global time zones get my Tacoma, Washington-based auditor, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-based accountant and Hong Kong-based me together.

I’m only at the early stages of the process (and I’m sure there will be a happy ending with a life-altering refund at the conclusion), but here are some of the things that I’ve learned about dealing with the Internal Revenue Service from the other side of the globe:

1. Even filing the change of address form (Form 8822) doesn’t always work. I filed mine as soon as I moved from London to Hong Kong six months ago, but that didn’t stop my audit from getting off on the wrong foot, as the notice went to my old address and arrived in front of me long after the “You Must Reply By” date.

2. Don’t be surprised by an audit — many of the things that are simply a fact of life for expatriates (like filing for foreign tax credits) raise eyebrows and flags just because they are so out of the ordinary for the overwhelming majority of domestic taxpayers.

3. Be prepared for frustration and irritation. Though I am a bit of a pack rat by nature, I must admit that the files of backup documentation for my 2008 return didn’t make the move. I was smart enough not to shred them, but they are in a box somewhere else in the world and not by my side.

When you lead a working life that has meandered over the years from Hong Kong to Taiwan to Beijing to Hong Kong to New York to London and back to Hong Kong, you get pretty good at prioritizing the things you want with you and the things you don’t: Wife — yes. Espresso machine — yes. Jazz collection — yes. Old pay stubs and brokerage receipts — no.

4. The IRS is actually surprisingly helpful to overseas taxpayers. There is a special number for people outside the United States (+1-267-941-1000) which is answered quickly by agents who can access your file and provide sensible, intelligent answers. Once I’d finally connected with my examiner, he, too, was willing to be flexible about time zones and was very helpful with information (although he has yet to make the process simply go away!)

5. Having an accountant is worth it. Until my employer required I use an accountant, I was always a do-it-myself taxpayer. I actually enjoyed plugging the numbers into software and seeing the result, and I took a perverse pride in being self-sufficient. But you know what? There’s a certain point when the complexity is just too overwhelming. And being able to sign a power-of-attorney to let my accountant deal with the questions is a real pleasure.

I’m optimistic that this process will all work out in the end – and all while I’m sleeping. Now I just have to hope the refund check I’m expecting gets sent to the right address.

—

The author is chairman, Thomson Reuters China. The opinions expressed are his own.

(Editing by Beth Gladstone and Jonathan Oatis)

Obviously the crux of the question is defining terms — starting with what is China, and who among its 1.3 billion people are you talking about.

The answer to how much is enough is one thing if you’re an outspoken artist like Ai Weiwei, recently released from detention after reportedly confessing to economic irregularities. The answer is different if you’re an urban intellectual or if you’re an urban entrepreneur. And it starts to be really different if you’re a frustrated migrant worker or an impoverished farmer.

What you mean by freedom and what you want from your state really depends on who you are and what your circumstances are.

I first visited China around 1980. I reported from Beijing from 1991-4. And boy, with the perspective of 20 or 30 years, the amount of freedom now in China is extraordinary.

Of course, it is easy to focus on what’s not free.  You can’t challenge the Communist Party. You can’t call for democratic change or promote the Dalai Lama or issue a charter for reform without inviting serious trouble.

But in a country that has 500 million people on the internet, creating vast communities and inventing a torrent of content every hour of every day, there’s unprecedented freedom of expression for huge numbers of people.

There used to be no freedom of fashion – it was regulated and rationed. Now there is.

There used to be no freedom of housing. Now there is.

There used to be no freedom of where you worked. Now there is.

There used to be no freedom of travel. Now it’s visa restrictions from the U.S. and UK governments that provide the biggest obstacle, not restrictions from China itself.

One measure of freedom is a country’s creativity and innovation, and in this China is a country of superlatives.

Research and development spending is growing at 19% year on year, and has done so for more than 15 years.  China is the third largest patent office in the world. It is the largest internet community, the largest mobile phone population. It is wired and connected and that connectivity is growing.

You can focus on the freedoms that don’t exist, and that’s a long list. You can focus on the restrictions that exist, and that’s a long list too.

Or you can focus on the changes that have occurred in a very short time and on the vibrancy in society.

It is no longer a question of whether China has freedoms or not.

It is simply a question of how much freedom it has, in what areas.

It is a question of what restrictions chafe and chafe for whom.

It is a question of what happens to individuals, to be sure. But it is also a question of what has happened and is happening to a society.

As I look back on 2010, my final full year as Reuters Editor-in-Chief, I’m struck by how journalists and news organizations have been challenged with a steady stream of high-impact, global stories. The 3,000 men and women of Reuters answered those challenges.

A devastating earthquake killed thousands in luckless Haiti, which has not yet completely risen from the rubble; an oil-rig explosion sent 200 million gallons of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, roiling politics and markets for months; a debt-driven economic storm swept over Europe, threatening to sink markets and topple governments; a volcanic eruption sparked a transportation crisis; businesses and governments continued to recover from the 2008 financial crisis with new investments – and new regulations.

Through all of this, Reuters journalists told the world’s stories with speed and insight, making sense of an increasingly confusing and dangerous world.

I invite all of you to check out the winner’s profiles.

My heartiest congratulations to our winners!

Global PR group Edelman told the World Economic Forum about its Trust Barometer and said that “Trust” in general had stabilised.

But that’s where the good news for me ended.

My industry, media, had a Trust tumble in the US and UK to small levels of trust never seen before – “How much do you trust media to do what is right?” The US is down to 27% and the UK 22%. Maybe I should try my hand at fiction instead!

There was a big Trust rise for media in China and Brazil but India had a big decline. Fascinating data but having spent many years pouring over Chinese newspapers a bit of a surprise to me.

As if my ego didn’t take enough of a hit from the media data, the authority data gave me (us?) another blow. The category “person like yourself” tumbled to the seventh most credible category, down from third in 2009. Why? Maybe in the world of hundreds of Facebook “friends” and thousands of Twitter followers, we’re no longer really sure who someone like our self really is. (Apologies to all my friends and followers)

Or maybe it is the modern twist on the old joke about not wanting to belong to a club that would have me as a member.

I think I need to look in the mirror and smile.

The most obvious was that 48 percent said they were “very confident” of growth in the next 12 months – up from 31 percent last year. Pre-crash confidence again!

But I have to say, I wondered a bit about their crystal ball when 37 percent said they planned to shift sourcing to China — with cost being the most cited reason. With inflation looming and currency moves almost certain, that isn’t necessarily a bet I’d make. There are plenty of reasons to go to China — and I’ve staked my career on it since 1979 — but cost isn’t top of my list in 2011.

The other thing that caught my eye was that managing talent was top of the CEO agenda — higher even than managing risk, investment decisions, reputation or capital structure. But alas, for those hoping for a pay rise out of it — strategy number one was “use more non-financial rewards to motivate staff”. I’ll be sure to ask my CEO Tom Glocer for a pat on the head while we’re here together in Davos!

Another year has sped by with more change and economic uncertainty throughout the global markets. From a journalist’s viewpoint, 2010 has been filled with some of the most dynamic and complex stories to cover — the euro zone debt crisis, the U.S. midterm elections, currency wars, heart-warming heroism such as the Chile miners rescue and heart-breaking tragedies like that of the Haiti earthquake.

As a news organization during these turbulent times, Reuters has invested aggressively in transforming our news priorities and coverage tactics to ensure we are meeting the needs of the 21st century professional audience. Our aim is to best understand your workflow — what news you use, when you use it and how we can package and present our stories to best suit your needs.

We have placed significant focus around the rapidly developing economies (RDEs) news coverage and the implications these markets have on your business. My senior editors and I held two invigorating RDE summits, one in China and one in Brazil, to hear from market specialists and our customers on how we can further improve our news coverage in these important markets.

2010 marked the launch of Reuters Insider, the innovative video platform delivering news, insight and commentary straight to Thomson Reuters desktops — recently hitting more than one million views. Now with Thomson Reuters Eikon, our customers have single sign-on access to Reuters Insider, making watching video news an integrated part of their daily workflow. If you haven’t done so already, I hope you’ll check it out.

We have taken a leap into enterprise reporting, examining the issues, themes and undercurrents that are shaping markets, ranging from the potential perils of high-frequency trading to drone warfare.  I am thrilled that the team has already won its first investigative reporting award from Bartlett and Steele.

Our core news file remains strong and I was also pleased when our IFR team won the FX Week Award for its exceptional coverage of the foreign exchange market through a year of turmoil.

We have just hit our one-year anniversary since the acquisition of Breakingviews. Since day one of the combined commentary service, we have offered agenda-setting financial views around the world on the topics that are on the minds our customers.

And we are putting more emphasis on the top stories. We have restructured our coverage to allow dedicated editing teams to look at the top stories across asset classes and package them in a way that provides our readers with better forethought and insight.

The Reuters iPad app, launched in April, has been a huge success, drawing great reviews for its design and execution, and providing our audience with another way to spend time with our content and brand.  Furthermore we have redesigned the reuters.com web sites, providing exceptional enhancements to the user experience.

As the media industry continues to face restructuring and reordering, Reuters is seeking to transform our position in the U.S. market to allow us to best support our customers. A team of reporters and editors will publish U.S. political and general news of national interest to complement our existing international coverage and allow us to offer a competitive and client-driven product to domestic media groups and those outside the U.S. as well. This offering will be supported by partnerships to offer more U.S. sports pictures and data.

Behind the scenes, Reuters is working aggressively to implement new cutting-edge editing tools and technology to ensure our news gets to you faster and in the most readable format.

I am truly excited about the position Reuters holds in the journalism market. We are poised to deliver the news our customer need in the manner in which they need in today’s changing media environment.

I wish you all the best in the remainder of 2010 and as you kick off 2011.

Death came screaming out of the sky on July 12, 2007.

Two Apache helicopter gunships operating more than 500 metres away from a group of men fired their 30 mm cannon and that was it.

Vast distances; destructive weaponry; nervous young soldiers intent on protecting themselves and their colleagues.
Death came screaming out of the sky.

And who was killed?

“Hostile forces?”  “Insurgents?” “Anti-Iraqi elements?”

At those distances, who really knew?

But we know. We know that two of those killed were not insurgents and were not hostile to anything. Two of those killed were just doing their jobs: Reuters journalists Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh.

They were not carrying guns but cameras.

They were not carrying Rocket Propelled Grenade launchers but long lenses.

They were not preparing to kill but to record.

They were not trying to create a story but to tell the story.

They had no intention of dying for the story, but die they did.

My organisation has a long and proud history of covering conflicts. And unfortunately my organisation has a long and sad history of its distinguished journalists being killed in those conflicts.

The first one died of typhoid fever. The next one died from shell shrapnel.

In Reuters headquarters in London, New York and in our key offices around the world, two large books of remembrance hold pride of place, commemorating those brave journalists who have died while covering stories during our more than a century and a half of history.

The first page commemorates a man who died in 1885.

Francis John Lamplow Roberts, first in that long, distinguished and sad line, was just 25 when he succumbed to disease covering the British campaign in the Sudan.

The first died in 1885, and the second, Ernest Richard ‘Dick’ Sheepshanks, died along with a colleague from the AP in Spain in 1937 when a Republican shell exploded next to their car as they were covering the Nationalist side of the civil war.

So the first died 15 years before the end of the 19th century. The second died nearly four decades into the 20th.
Here we are in the 21st century, and as I flip through the final sad pages of the books, pages that we add to with depressing regularity, I  see that in the first decade of this century, Reuters has already lost 12 employees. That is a rate of more than one a year, tragedy striking down without regard for age or experience or nationality.
Usually journalists die well out of sight of the public or of their editors.

This year, however, the organization Wikileaks released the video from the lead Apache helicopter that stalked and killed in Iraq three years ago, video that Reuters had sought unsuccessfully with Freedom of Information Act requests.
That video shocked and angered many both inside and outside journalism.

That video also showed how dangerous trying to get the story really is.

It is clear from the video and audio transcript of the battlefield chatter that neither the men authorising the airstrike nor the men pulling the trigger considered the possibility that their targets could include journalists.

There’s no question that better training for the military is important. There’s no question that the military and journalists need to communicate more. There’s no question in my mind, too, that journalists should have the right to be where the action is.

But having that right and always using it may be two different things.

I am asking you today whether we, the journalistic community, need to reassess our need to be in the midst of danger.
As journalists we have an instinctual compulsion to be where the action is.

Photographers and cameramen, in particular, need to get the shot to record reality for history.

That’s a dictum that is fundamental to our craft.

But is it fit for purpose?

Is it fit for today?

In an age when a gunship in the air can fire from up to 4 kilometres away, must the journalist be on the ground?

In an age when a deadly drone can be piloted from half a world away, can the journalist justify the risks of being right in the midst of things?

Of course there are no black and white answers.

Sometimes, of course, the benefits to transparency and understanding are such that we indeed must be right there. And always covering violence in the same long-distance way as it can be prosecuted today would simply be abrogating the responsibilities of our craft.

But let’s be honest.

Sometimes those benefits are not there and the reasons for being in harm’s way are less noble: competitive pressure, personal ambition, adrenaline’s urging.

As professionals, we must be much more ruthless in prioritising the exposure of our staff to danger.

At Reuters we have already learned lessons; there are certainly many more to be learned.

That day when Namir and Saeed were killed, they were walking with men, some of whom were armed. There was a time, and not too long ago mind you, when the tools of the trade that would have indicated that a journalist was doing his or her job afforded that individual some protection.

As Namir and Saeed were identifiable as journalists carrying professional-grade camera equipment, they may have felt they were taking no additional risk standing next to that group of men, some of whom had weapons, since it is not uncommon for Iraqis to own weapons.

Yet it is clear from the video that the mere fact that there were armed men present meant that to the US military everyone travelling in that group could be and would be considered hostile and could be considered a legitimate target.

Some in the military have subsequently argued, as well, that since insurgents often memorialise their acts with pictures or video, soldiers have no way to presume that the presence of journalistic equipment in and of itself denotes the presence of a journalist.

Whatever our personal feelings about whether these orders or views are reasonable, we have no choice but to react to them.

Since this tragedy, we have made it Reuters policy to prohibit our journalists from standing next to non-uniformed individuals carrying weapons.

Is that policy enough? I fear not.

I come back again to the question of when must we be on the scene, and when can we give a story a pass.

When does the image capture the essence of the situation, and when is it just one more fleeting mark on the wire?

If we as editors take our responsibilities seriously, I believe we should be opting to pass on stories more often.

But even posing this option raises the spectre that in so doing we’ll be trading the safety of the professional for the danger to the amateur.

With the great democratisation of technology, there have never been so many people in every country on earth who have both the ambition and now the means to publish their views, thoughts and images without the structure of a large institution around them.

This has many wonderful implications for journalism.

It has many frightening implications for safety.

Where international news organisations have embraced safety training, equipment and an ethos of caution, individuals are unlikely to have either the means or the experience to realise what they’re missing.

And if professionals opt not to cover certain events, I fear that vacuum may be too tempting for amateurs to avoid as well.

As a profession we have made great strides in safety awareness in recent years.

First we gave training and equipment to staff. Then we extended the care to the stringers who work for us. Then organisations like INSI began needed outreach to local news organisations who suffered grievously when their own regions became centres of violence and tension.

Now is the time for us to accept the newly broadened definition of our craft and ensure that we give opportunities for training and safety consciousness raising to the legions of self-declared journalists who, emboldened by their blog’s popularity or their scores of Twitter followers, might rush in to the very danger spots we should be avoiding.

The very traps of competitive pressure, personal ambition, adrenaline’s urging that can ensnare the professional journalist are even more alluring to the self-declared one, looking to garner page views or fame.

We in the profession have an obligation to ensure that all who seek to practice journalism do it safely and know how to balance the risks and the rewards.

As a profession we have a great chance to make sure that all practitioners start making the right decisions.

And we have a great responsibility to make sure that all involved really wrestle with whether every exposure to danger, every decision to “be there” is truly important and worth it.

I don’t know – I can’t know – which different decisions would have kept Hiro Muramoto, Reuters video journalist, from being killed in Bangkok in April this year.

I don’t know – I can’t know – which different decisions would have kept Fadel Shana, Reuters cameraman, from being killed in Gaza in 2008.

I don’t know – I can’t know – how I could have prevented any of these deaths or those of Namir and Saeed or any of the others that occurred even before I became editor-in-chief.

But I do know that we as a profession must think about doing things differently.
We have to say “no” more often.

We have to be prepared to miss the image more often.

We have to be ready to lose the shot to avoid being shot.

We must be ready to lose some stories to avoid losing yet more lives.

The city-state of five million people is one of the most open economies in the world. It is heavily reliant on trade and its position as a financial centre driven by Asia’s rapidly growing economies.

“First of all it depends on the U.S.-China relationship,” Lee Hsien Loong said in an interview about the risks facing his nation. “If that turns sour, a lot of things can go wrong.”

The world’s two largest economies are at odds over issues from trade and currency levels to human rights. The U.S. mid-term elections on Tuesday have seen the subject of China relations leap from think tanks to mainstream political debate.

Singapore, with one of the highest per capita incomes in Asia, has interlinked trade and financial relations with both powers, and feels the tensions keenly.

“The key, of course, is America-Chinese relations and that’s very difficult because on the ground in America the mood is quite sour,” the 58-year-old prime minister said.

“And not just among the unions and the Democratic (Party) left wing, but even the corporates, the businessmen.”

Lee said he worried that short-term thinking could lead to bad decisions.

“Nobody is speaking up to say ‘please manage this with a long-term perspective’,” he said.

The prime minister, dressed informally in open shirt and wind-breaker jacket, said he had a basic optimism about the eventual health and development of both the U.S. and the Chinese economies, even though in both cases many years of transformation would be needed.

Beijing required fundamental structural change to drive more domestic demand and investment.

“I believe the Chinese understand this and I believe they are going to do something about it,” said Lee, a frequent visitor to China. “It’s not going to happen overnight but over 10 years I see change.”

The United States needed to transcend the difficulties of domestic partisan politics to take tough decisions on fiscal policy.

“If you look at it on a five-year time frame, you can’t help being worried but if you look at it in a 20-year time frame you say of all the economies in the world, the Americans are the ones most capable of re-inventing themselves,” Lee said.

LESS REACTIVE APPROACH

He said Singapore could define itself as one of the world’s most attractive global financial centres with a less reactive approach to currently emotional issues like regulation.

“We want to maintain a system where there are adequate safeguards, but at the same time the basic principle is free market and caveat emptor,” he said, drawing a contrast with the swift legislative responses to the financial crisis in countries like the United States and Britain.

“We are trying to be stable. I don’t say that we are consciously less volatile than others but I think it is good for us if we can maintain a stable long-term perspective and rise above the immediate pressures of the crisis at the moment.”

One significant worry, however, for the city state was asset class bubbles, particularly in real estate and he vowed to keep a close eye on the situation and continue to take action if necessary.

“Our property market has been taking off, which is causing some consternation,” he said. “We have had a series of measures to squelch the property market but liquidity is awash, sloshing around the whole region.

“We are watching carefully. The last set of measures were announced at the end of August, they seem to have dampened sentiment some, but we will have to watch and see.”

Lee, whose father is the founder of Singapore and current Minister Mentor 87-year-old Lee Kuan Yew, said a key goal for the next elections, due by 2012, was to identify the next generation of leaders for the island and to see its political system continue to evolve.

“It’s a very important theme, a very important concern, in this election, that we bring in new candidates and new potential office-holders so that there will be a theme for Singapore to take the next step forward,” Lee said.

“I am 58, and Singapore should not have a prime minister who is 70 years old or more than 70 years old,” he said, adding: “You have to be in sync with the new generation of people. You may be in touch but you are not of that generation.”

(Additional reporting by Raju Gopalakrishnan; Editing by Jonathan Thatcher)

Just think that the first airmail flight between Britain and Hong Kong did not land until 1936. And yet today at my home in London I get a rich and vibrant stream of  news, photographs, stories and gossip from Asia into my home  via Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader and then all the more long-established methods of journalism.  It is a cornucopia.

But the problem with any over-flowing horn is that it is really only scarcity that creates the awareness of value.

And in fact, the profession of journalism is losing both value and respect.

The latest Gallup poll showed a record-high 57% of Americans saying they had little or no trust in the mass media to do what the media has always proclaimed to be its primary mission – to report fully, accurately and fairly.

Instead people look to the friends – their community – for information, for validation, for argument and for illumination.

What is great about 2010 is that technology has created a completely new concept of community. And it has given that community new powers to inform and connect.

Facebook status updates become a newsfeed created by people I know and even often like.

A Twitter feed is a news service of facts, opinions and referrals from an ever-vigilant army of people with similar interests and proclivities.

They alert me to news and articles that are almost guaranteed to fit my interests because we are a group that has formed around each other.

And it is a self-correcting group, where each of us has the ability to fire, replace and refine the membership at will.

No reader selected me to be editor-in-chief of Reuters – I was selected by the corporation to lead the news service in its interest.

Conversely, no corporation selected the people whom I follow on Twitter, no board set my blogroll, no executive committee befriended my Facebook pals. I did those things.

What technology has done is it has upended the power equation to give control to the end consumer.

The beauty of that is obvious – control is always satisfying.

The danger is that without care it becomes an information universe that is too hermetically sealed.

The days of the all-powerful paternalistic editor may be dead, but what can’t replace them is the era of people only having their preconceived ideas reinforced.

What’s needed is a new model, one that combines push and pull.

What’s needed is a publishing model that embraces both the professionalism of the journalist and the power of the community.

The great press critic A. J. Liebling wrote that freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one. Today’s technology means that the means of production and the means of distribution actually belong to anyone with access to an Internet onramp.

If you ask the public, “What will you pay for?” The answer is certainly a yes for tools (ipad, iphone, blackberry, android). The answer is certainly a yes for broadband and access.

But what about the content? And what about those who create that content?

Far too often the answer is “no”.

I know even when I last lived in Hong Kong 15 years ago this was an issue the FCC itself had to wrestle with – what was the ideal ratio of full-time correspondent members to journalist members to associate members to corporate members.

I guess from seeing the special promotional offer the club has been running for new correspondent and journalist members that this is still an issue, both because there are fewer people who fit the bill, and also because those who do can’t necessarily PAY the bill.

I’m lucky to be leading a journalistic organization 3,000 professionals strong – that’s an extraordinary figure at a time when other organizations have been shedding staff.

By comparison, in 1987, the year I joined Reuters in Hong Kong and the year I first became a member of this club, I was one of 1,581 journalists in the company.

We’ve survived and thrived by changing.

We aren’t the agency we once were; tomorrow we will be even more different from today.

My job is to ensure that survival and to ensure that the journalistic tradition of yesterday melds with the social media ethos.

Let’s start by thinking back two years.

The photographs of distraught, confused and angry bankers leaving their offices jobless helped symbolize the seismic shifts in the financial system 24 months ago.

During the same period, thousands of journalists lost their livelihood too as the profession and craft changed almost beyond recognition.

If we have learned anything from these past two years, it has been that pure facts are not enough.

Pure facts don’t tell enough of the story; pure facts won’t earn their way.

The arguments about whether the factual seeds of the financial crisis had been adequately reported are ultimately meaningless. The facts were there. But they weren’t put together in a way that was compelling enough or powerful enough to change the course of events.

We’ve been drowning in facts, and that deluge continues to threaten.

How different from October 1851 when Julius Reuter set up his pigeon and telegraph shop, sending out facts to a world starved for them.

Today, it’s context, connectedness and community that matter.

That’s why the traditional agency or “wire” pouring out a never-ending stream of “more” can’t be the answer.

That’s why we must be a service to our customers and to our readers.

That’s why this is the age of the publisher.

Journalists who understand this will survive. Those that don’t will become irrelevant.

A publishing ethos is not defined by the number of stories we deliver. It is defined by our ability to keep our clients tuned in and returning. We will do that with a heightened knowledge of what they need, and with focused breaking news and insight that is fast, relevant, actionable and engaging. Deploying all our multimedia assets allows us to tell stories compellingly via packages of interlinked news and information. And we will enable clients to connect to each other, and to us.

I’m as excited about content that gets created in a chatroom by journalists and readers interacting together as I am about a good story being pushed out. Sometimes I’m even more excited because the intelligent interaction between people who all know something about a topic can create a much smarter product than any one writer struggling at the computer alone.

Is it journalism?

Sometimes it is pure journalism. Sometimes it’s commentary. Sometimes it’s just a sharing of ideas or the annotating of a graphic.

But whatever you call it, it is an intelligent service between the journalist and the customer and that’s something we should be aiming for.

Why? Because like the “pure” journalism of old, it helps makes sense of the world.

Why? Because it is news, data, content and information that is actionable because it adds insight to transparency.

It’s the community that interacts with information and in that interaction creates yet more and better content.

It’s the context and analysis around the news that helps people make better decisions, helps them do their jobs better, and gives them an edge in making sense out of the confusion around us.

It is also the humility to know that the old one-way relationship between editor and audience has no place in the world any more.

There’s huge learning to be had from the audience.

Some of it comes from listening to its expertise. Some of it comes from watching its behavior. Much of it comes from enabling the conversation you get when you combine facts, data, journalism, analysis and fact-based opinion in a really smart way.

The rules of today’s journalistic world are these:

Knowing the story is not enough.

Telling the story is only the beginning.

The conversation about the story is as important as the story itself.

The more you try to be paternalistic and authoritative, the less people will believe you.

The more you cede control to your audience, the more people will respect you

The more you embrace new technology as a platform, the more your ideas will compete.

The more you abandon the faceless and characterless, the more you can set the agenda

The more you look beyond the story for connections, the more value you will have.

And if you have value and no one else does, you will get paid.

Simple? No.

But it is exciting and transforming.

For in.reuters.com, the future is now.

This is our redesign, over a year in the making. That’s over a year of extensive discussions with people like you, our elite audience of business professionals, about what would make the site better and faster and easier to use for you as you drive business activity around the world.

We want this to be the world’s best website covering business and finance news, analysis, and opinion. Full stop.

We want you to be able to come for a quick glance at the top headlines, or a longer deep dive into a topic that’s important to you. We want you to scan the output of the 2,800 men and women or hone in on a favourite writer or photographer.

This site is for you; we want it to be your ticket to a wealth of news, information, and analysis presented in a cutting-edge format, including text, video, pictures, graphics, user interaction, and personalisation features (try the new toolbar at the bottom of every page).

Remember, too, that this is the front door of Thomson Reuters. In addition to the news you see here, Thomson Reuters is also the world’s leader in providing news, information, services, and technology to healthcare, legal, business, and financial professionals. What that means is that our journalism is professional grade, giving our users the inside edge needed to make important decisions.

We’re proud of our new home, and hope you like it. And this is just the beginning. In the coming months, we will continue to roll out new features and functionality.

Please give us your feedback. Write to csmedia@thomsonreuters.com. And come back often. There’s a world of news we’ve got for you.

David Schlesinger
Editor-in-chief, Reuters