For the Record

Check out the new Reuters Financial Glossary

It starts with “A/S” (abbreviation for Aktieselskab, Danish company title) and ends with “zero coupon yield curve” (a yield curve of zero coupon bonds. Market practice is often to derive this curve theoretically from the par yield curve. Also known as a spot yield curve).

Between those two entries in the Reuters Financial Glossary are more than 2,000 other terms used in the financial industry and in the reports that journalists write about it.

As we did with the Handbook of Journalism, we’re making the financial glossary available on the Web. As with the handbook, I believe it’s important that Reuters readers and customers see the guidelines our journalists live by and some of the tools we use to do our work.

The glossary is the result of hard work by Ian Jones, who retired from the Reuters London Treasury desk and did a total rewrite of the glossary; Tomasz Janowski, of our Singapore Treasury desk, who reviewed the work; and interactive developer Mia Walczak, who led the development effort.

The glossary can shed a little light on the sometimes murky world of finance. As we’ve seen from the fallout of the recession, it’s a world everyone should be more familiar with.

The glossary also makes for good reading.

Some of the terms will be familiar to readers who follow the debate on Wall Street pay–“golden hello,” “golden handcuffs” and “golden parachute.”

Social media: Some principles and guidelines

The rise of social media has brought journalists some powerful new storytelling and information-gathering tools. However, with these new opportunities have come some new risks.

At Reuters, we have just published some social media guidelines that lay out some basic principles and offer recommendations that should prove useful as journalists navigate what can sometimes seem a chaotic landscape.

In building the new guidelines, we’ve embraced some basic principles:

• We encourage the use of social media approaches in Reuters journalism.
• Accuracy, freedom from bias and independence are fundamental to our reputation. These values and the Trust Principles apply to journalism produced using social media just as they have to all other journalism produced by Reuters.
• A distinguishing feature of Reuters is the trust invested in its journalists to rise above personal biases in their work and to apply common sense in dealing with the challenges offered by social media.

This last point is particularly important to me.

I’ve written in the past about how we depend on our journalists to rise above their biases to cover stories in an independent way, whether they’re in Gaza or Washington–or anywhere else.

As comments have shown–and will no doubt show again–there are those who will never believe this is possible. And there are those who would actually prefer to read, listen to or view only those information sources that confirm their own worldview.