Covering Thomson Reuters Corp for almost two years has taught me that people like to cast my company in a recurring role in media deal parlor games. Now that the company’s arch-rival Bloomberg LP will buy BusinessWeek magazine from McGraw-Hill, lots of my pals in the media world are wondering: Will Thomson Reuters buy a mainstream news or business news magazine? Or newspaper? Why not Forbes? Why not the Financial Times?

Keep in mind that Thomson Reuters likes to remind people when they ask these questions that Thomson Corp, before buying Reuters, got out of its Canadian newspaper empire for a reason. (See below)

I asked our chief executive, Tom Glocer, a question along these lines on a Thursday phone call he had with reporters to discuss the company’s third-quarter financial results.

Here is what he said:

Thomson did a remarkable job, far earlier than any other company I know, of seeing what was coming and transitioning their business out of print for the most part… I don’t see any particular time or reason at this juncture why we should go the other way.

Later on Thursday, when I interviewed Glocer, we returned to this theme. (I can’t help it, I’m a print guy.) I used the Financial Times, owned by Pearson Plc and beloved of its CEO, Dame Marjorie Scardino, as a sample target:

Here is Glocer’s reply:

When I came to London, Marjorie was famous for saying she would never sell the FT, or it would go “over my dead body.” There were many years in which the FT had fallen on harder times when people held that up as well: Marjorie has to go before the FT.

That sounds like a “no” on the FT. What about other properties?

Is it impossible that somewhere in the world that we’d take a print property and move it electronic? No, but we’re not looking to go out and buy consumer print publications. That’s not what we think our business is.

That sounds like a “no” on print. At that point, Chief Financial Officer Bob Daleo took over, saying that Thomson Reuters is a company where “what we shy away from are advertising-based models. We charge for content, we charge for information and news.”

What about Reuters.com, an ad-supported site that runs our news? Glocer said:

I would argue that the overwhelming amount of our news is behind the firewall in the sense that you only get it as part of a product that you pay for. It’s great that we have it. I’m very proud of reuters.com. I use it on weekends and evenings when I’m not in front of my bigger service, my subscription service.

I asked one more question on print: Why did Thomson Reuters get involved in any way at all with ZelnickMedia’s losing bid for BusinessWeek? What was that about?

We had no ownership interest or economics in the deal… We have done very similar things already. I would point you to the deal with the International Herald Tribune where Reuters supplies a couple pages’ worth of business news. So the way I’d think of it is, we have a news agency providing television, text, photos, etc…. There is no particular magic about BusinessWeek. We stand ready to do sensible, commercial deals to help deliver value to media customers, and it’s not a sort of, ‘Well the TR play is BusinessWeek.’ It never was. For a while it got reported like that because it was amusing to people.”

And that’s the last word on print…today.

The Wall Street Journal, ever on the hunt for new ways to please its readers and new ways to make money (and what, we ask, is wrong with that?), will launch a new, pricier version this November. Called “The Wall Street Journal Professional Edition,” it is designed for business readers who want more than what the daily newspaper and website provide on their own.

Essentially, it is the Journal’s daily offering, with reports from Dow Jones Newswires and a reservoir of news and information from Factiva, the news archive that Dow Jones owns — and a bunch more stuff:

• Information from more than 17,000 global sources, some of which are not available to the public.
• A one-year archive of Factiva’s global business sources and a two-year archive of wsj.com content.
• More than 30 industry pages, managed by Dow Jones editors
• Six industry sections managed by Journal editors who select news and information for readers on pharmaceuticals, healthcare, energy, media and marketing, telecommunications and technology.
• Personalized homepages and news alerts for when things break.

Dow Jones plans to sell the edition to businesses, which would make it available to employees through “site licenses” (ie, your business buys a license that makes the professional edition available to X number of people for a price to be determined). In January, it will be available to people for $49 a month, or just under $600 a year, said Clare Hart, head of Dow Jones’s Enterprise Media Group, which oversees Dow Jones Newswires, Factiva and Dow Jones Indexes.

So why have a professional edition for a paper that is arguably already for professionals? According to Hart, it is an attempt to recognize the middle ground between “regular” readers (like my mom) and financial clients who use the super-charged “terminals” from Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg that provide news along with sophisticated and deep financial information.

“It’s a response to what customers are driving us toward. Customers want the simplicity of a consumer application with the sophistication of an enterprise application,” Hart said.

Robert Thomson, who edits the Journal and oversees Dow Jones’s editorial operations, offered a hypothetical example of an oil service company employee in Boise who might not be in the market for a Bloomberg or Thomson Reuters computer, but needs more information than he or she would get in the paper.

“You’re interested in oil import prices, you’re interested in currencies,” Thomson said. “To be honest, it would be hard to find you as a client on the professional end.” With WSJ’s professional edition, he said, that employee could customize a feed that would send an alert when something happens in China that affects oil prices.

On another level, the Journal is trying to capture readers for whom paper is not enough, while financial professional-grade data feeds offer too much at too high a price, and don’t look all that pleasing to the eye. The information that readers get would be more sophisticated, but presented in an easy-to-view way, just like the Journal or the Times or most other news outlets present it to readers on their Web pages now.

It sounds like a promising introduction and an effective way to give readers a more comprehensive look at Dow Jones’s information offerings than they might have gotten before. But how will it play? Company officials won’t share projections.

It might be that Dow Jones, now part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, already has a bunch of happy customers who don’t need to be made happier. It’s hard to say how many untapped readers there might be for this new service, either through business licenses or through individual subscriptions. If nothing else, it’s an experiment done at a time when news outlets need to experiment even more than they are.

(Photo: Reuters)

It always makes me happy when one of the companies on my beat reminds me that I study Turkish for at least one practical reason. In this case, it’s our rival wire service Bloomberg, which will start broadcasting news in Turkey through local partner Ciner Media. Pronounced, more or less, “Jiner Media,” the company also publishes magazines in Turkey that include Marie Claire, Newsweek Turkey, OK! and GEO.

The service will be called BloombergHT for “Haber Turk,” which translates to, “Turkish News.” The service will be a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week Turkish language financial news and business channel that will broadcast on cable and satellite in Turkey and “Turkish Republics.” I have to find out what that means, but I’m guessing it means parts of Central Asia where Turkic languages are spoken.

The launch will come later this year, Bloomberg said in a statement on Tuesday. It also said that Bloomberg will retain editorial control over the channel’s business content and will provide Ciner Media with access to the Bloomberg news service and that a website will follow.

This news comes months after Bloomberg held a rare round of layoffs and laid out plans to shut down some of its non-English-language TV operations around the world. Bloomberg, as we and others have reported, has been working to broaden its worldwide reach. The company, I have heard from people familiar with its thinking and also from employees, wants to raise its profile outside its hardcore financial industry subscribers and is trying to offer more news to a bigger audience to do it. Pursuing BusinessWeek is one way to do it. Another would be forging more deals like the one in Turkey — let someone else handle the distribution, and you just focus on the news. We might see more of these deals soon.

UPDATE: While I’ve been obsessing over whether I’ll get to play Peter Ustinov’s part in a remake of Topkapi, Business Insider noticed some substantial changes on Bloomberg TV’s presentation for the rest of the world. In the world of financial journalism, less really is more, apparently.

PS: Efendi = “lord” or “master” or a general “sir” might even do these days. “Efendim” = “My lord,” etc. and is a common form of address. For example, you might call me “Robert efendim.” Someone please correct me if I’m wrong.

(Reuters Photo: Istanbul)

“Even Reuters’ Ralph Jennings — of whom I’ve been extremely critical for getting the story very wrong when it comes to Taiwan — tells us that ‘half a million’ attended the protest,” a blogger wrote in October after seeing the Reuters’s write-up of an opposition-led demonstration in Taipei against President Ma Ying-jeou.

China claims sovereignty over self-ruled Taiwan. Ma, Taiwan’s president, likes China. The opposition and the blogger don’t like either.

I poured a beer to celebrate because I had it right, up from a score of “lies” that the same blogger gave me on a story earlier that year.

Not all of us get off so easy. The blogger would write up a former Taipei-based BBC correspondent for “vague and inaccurate descriptions,” one of the friendlier grades given to the British TV network’s Taiwan coverage. The same commentator gave the China Post, a local English-language paper, a score of “Nazism.”

“The facts that are always ignored when AP sells its mendacious stories about Taiwan,” the blogger added. And a one-time Taipei bureau chief with Bloomberg was labeled “China-centric,” with the word “China” in red type.

Getting blog-flogged is as much a part of being a 21st-century reporter as interviewing and writing. But none of the numerous transparency-wary reporters I know here can name the blogger who names us. Maybe it is one of us, someone quipped at a foreign correspondents club meeting. Maybe it’s you, I said. Maybe it’s you, he replied. Another correspondent said she once got into a debate with the blogger about her low grades, but still never learned the other party’s identity.

The blogs that offer Taiwan-based reporters this free publicity identify our sniper only as Tim Maddog, a member of the “education industry” in the central Taiwan city of Taichung. One website lists Michael Turton, a fellow Taiwan blogger, who some correspondents know personally, as a collaborator. But Turton says he doesn’t know who’s mad-dogging us.

On June 14 Taiwan’s Liberty Times newspaper ran a guest editorial bylined “Jason Cox,” and the blogger claims it’s his. The editorial text identifies Cox as an American-born, one-time student of Mandarin Chinese who gives advice to Taiwan’s main opposition party. The editorial tagline says Cox works in the iron and steel industry. Paid to give reporters a grilling? Nice work if you can get it!

Here’s something funny that I found at the bottom of a Google News search results page the other day:

The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program. The time or date displayed reflects when an article was added to Google News.

That sounds like another way of saying that the time and date the story showed up there do not necessarily match the time and date that the story was first published.

So why is that interesting? I don’t know for sure if this is why they did it, but it could have something to do with the recent flap between Google and Tribune Co over a story about UAL Corp going bankrupt — six years ago. The 2002 Chicago Tribune story wound up being displayed as a seemingly fresh looking story on Google News search results after the article somehow went live inside the website of the Tribune-owned South Florida Sun-Sentinel paper in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

The article wound up being picked up by an investor-run information service distributed by Bloomberg News, and prompted investors to nearly destroy United’s stock price before everyone figured out that the story was old. This caused a war of words between Google and Tribune, with the Chicago-based newspaper publisher saying that it was Google’s fault that the story showed up, especially with a time stamp that made it look new. Google naturally blames Tribune.

Is this Google modifying its terms to clarify the true nature of time on its website? Is this a response to the UAL brouhaha? We don’t know yet, as we’re still waiting to hear back from Google’s press team.

(Photo: Reuters)

Is Bloomberg chilling out? The news and financial data provider (and our competitor) looks like it’s trying to make life at the hard-driving news and information provider a little less crazy.

“Starting August 1, employees can request schedules better suited to their personal lives — including flexible hours, a shorter work week and working from home,” writes Reuters reporter Robert MacMillan, who obtained a copy of the plans. “The new work schedule system may be Bloomberg’s first public acknowledgment of the need to accommodate an employee’s personal life — and that the changes would help the business.”

It’s not clear whether there’s a connection, but the new policy comes as Bloomberg is getting ready to defend itself against a lawsuit filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) charging discrimination against pregnant women and new mothers.

It’s an interesting cultural shift for Bloomberg, whose staffers work in what many people describe as a very intense workplace. And it raises a lot of questions. Will the move help Bloomberg with employee retention? Will the company actually get more out of staffers, because they will be presumably be happier in the workplace? Could it take away the edge, but in a bad way? Is it even realistic to think that Bloomberg can make such changes to its culture?

For the article, Bloomberg employees contacted by MacMillan declined to comment. We understand (do we ever!) , but our comments section on this blog never said you had to include your name along with your sharp observations. We’re eager to hear from you, Bloomberg folks.

Keep an eye on:

• A start-up led by former star Google engineers unveiled a new Web search service that aims to outdo the Internet search leader in size (Reuters)
• Yahoo director Robert Kotick’s resignation will take effect after the company’s annual meeting this week, where he will stand for reelection, to comply with a settlement with investor Carl Icahn (Reuters)
• Sirius Satellite Radio’s second-quarter adjusted quarterly loss narrowed as it increased subscribers to its pay radio service (Reuters)
• Publishing group Pearson Plc, owner of the Financial Times, posted stronger than expected results and an upbeat outlook in a display of resilience in an otherwise depressed media sector (Reuters)

We’re once again wondering who will blink first in Hollywood.

The Screen Actors Guild and the major firm and television studios are having another pow-wow today, and the subject is an ominous sounding “final offer” that management has presented to the union.

As we have seen, the talks so far haven’t gotten around the same sticky issues that prompted a strike this winter by the Writers Guild of America strike. So a take-it-or-leave-it offer by the studios doesn’t sound too promising if the entertainment biz is to avoid another strike.

But wait! SAG executive director and chief negotiator, Doug Allen, suggested on the eve of his union’s formal response that the door to further deal-making remained open. He had this to say in an interview with Reuters:

“I don’t know that those categorical statements are always to be taken at face value,” he told Reuters. “In fact, somebody from the WGA told me they got a total of 10 final offers from the AMPTP (during their talks). So we’ll see.”

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that the studios may be looking at a slight change in strategy. It reports:

“The studios, fearing SAG leadership might drag negotiations on through the union’s elections in September, are considering adopting a more aggressive strategy. The producers have discussed the possibility of publicly asking SAG leadership to allow its members to vote on the current deal or declaring an impasse in the talks, which would allow them to implement parts of the current offer.”

Keep an eye on:

• In a CNBC television interview, Sumner Redstone says his daughter is no longer the company’s heir apparent and that she will leave the Viacom board as part of an agreement he had reached with her (NY Times)
• Financial news and data company Bloomberg LP is creating several new units as part of a reorganization that includes a shuffling of top management (Reuters)
• Interpublic Group, the advertising services company, named Matt Seiler as global chief executive of its Universal McCann media buying agency as part of a broader shake-up (Reuters)
• Yahoo will let customers, academics and even rivals build customized Web search services on top of its own technology, introducing a resale model into a major Internet market where it ranks a distant No. 2 to Google (Reuters)

(Photo: Reuters)

Here we go…

Two days before the iPhone’s launch, fans around Asia are queuing up to buy Apple’s latest offering. They don’t seem to care that it’s raining or freezing cold or if lining up early means missing work or school.

The July 11 launch will be the first chance, after all,  for Asian consumers to own an iPhone.

“I’ve told my professor I was going to go buy an iPhone, and he gave me permission,” said Hiroyuki Sano, a 24-year-old graduate student who early on Tuesday arrived in rainy Tokyo from Nagoya to be first in line. Sano, speaking to Reuters, and incidentally wearing a T-shirt with an Apple logo, described his professor as an equally big Apple fan. “He sent me off cheerfully.”

The United States has already been through this, when the iPhone first went on sale a year ago. As the New York Times recalls, “TV news coverage was relentless. Hard-core fans camped out to be the first in line. Bloggers referred to Apple’s new product as the ‘Jesus phone’.”

The paper adds, “This time, though, when the iPhone 3G goes on sale in AT&T and Apple stores, iPhone Mania will be considerably more muted. That’s partly because the mystery is gone, partly because the AT&T service costs more and partly because there aren’t many new features in what Apple is calling the iPhone 3G. ”

But let’s be clear: There’s still a boatload of interest in this phone and plenty of people will be talking about it this week, offering their two cents on what they like and dislike about the iPhone.

One big name, the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg, is already weighing in, with a mixed review, knocking the battery life but applauding the phone’s introduction of third party software. 

“I’ve been testing the iPhone 3G for a couple of weeks, and have found that it mostly keeps its promises. In particular, I found that doing email and surfing the Internet typically was between three and five times as fast using AT&T’s 3G network as it was with the older AT&T network to which the first iPhone was limited.”

“Bottom line: If you’ve been waiting to buy an iPhone until it dropped in price, or ran on faster cell networks, you might want to take the plunge, if you can live with the higher service costs and the weaker battery life. The same goes for those with existing iPhones who love the device but crave faster cellular data speeds. But if you already own an iPhone, and can usually use Wi-Fi for data, you probably should hold off and get the free software upgrade before deciding whether it’s worth getting the new hardware.”

But is it worth a two-day wait in line, in the rain, wearing a silly T-shirt?

Keep an eye on: 

• Carl Icahn would have more support in his proxy battle against Yahoo if he pledged not to sell the company for less than $33 a share, said Legg Mason portfolio manager Bill Miller (Reuters) 
• WPP Group, the world’s second-largest advertising company, made a hostile 1.08 billion pound ($2.13 billion) bid for Britain’s Taylor Nelson Sofres, challenging its agreed merger with GfK Holdings AG (Reuters)
• A blind trust run by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is willing to pay between $4.5 billion and $5 billion to buy Merrill Lynch & Co’s 20 percent stake in financial news and data provider Bloomberg LP (NY Post)
• The smaller of Hollywood’s two performers unions ratified a new prime-time TV contract on Tuesday, undermining a last-ditch bid by the larger, more militant Screen Actors Guild to secure a richer deal (Reuters)
• NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker is looking to spin off or sell some of the company’s assets when he attends a media conference (NY Post)

(Photo: Reuters)

.

 It wasn’t exactly an auspicious start to the week for entertainment companies.

Right out of the box, Lehman Brothers analyst Anthony DiClemente cut his rating on News Corp, Disney, CBS and Time Warner. Not one of them is now rated above “equal weight” by the broker.  And he stuck the whole entertainment sector with a negative rating.

What’s the deal, DiClemente? Well, he points out that television and film companies are barreling toward the same sort of problems that have created such headaches for the music business. Remember how the major music labels seemed so ill-prepared for that whole Internet thing?

“In reality, while there are many obvious differences between music/audio and movie/video media forms, the core properties of video distribution and consumption are not different enough from music content to continue to justify why movie/TV content will be spared fragmentation,” DiClemente wrote.

DiClemente tried to give the movie and TV business the benefit of doubt.

“In our research of the entertainment industry to date, we have been increasingly eager to study and learn the reasons why widespread digital distribution of films and TV shows is not likely to eventually cause massive disruption to traditional forms of entertainment delivery. We have been largely unsuccessful in building compelling logical arguments in support of the continued growth for the movie/ TV content owners
in a digital environment. To us, the dual concerns of 1) deteriorating economics to the content-owners of legal online distribution; and 2) rampant piracy concerns are together too significant to ignore.”

Not exactly what you want to read if you’re an media industry executive — or shareholder — first thing after a long holiday weekend.

Keep an eye on: 

• Microsoft Corp on Monday said it would be willing to reopen talks to buy all or part of Yahoo Inc, but only if a new Yahoo board is elected, a major boost for investor Carl Icahn’s board slate (Reuters)
• Merrill Lynch & Co. is moving closer to selling its stake in Bloomberg LP as it tries to raise cash to make up for $6 billion in coming write-downs (Wall Street Journal)
• NBC Universal and private equity firms Bain Capital and Blackstone Group agreed to buy The Weather Channel from Landmark Communications (Reuters)
• “Hancock,” a film about a petulant, perpetually drunken superhero, proved to be review-proof as well as bulletproof this weekend, overwhelming competitors and giving star Will Smith his fifth top-selling film on a Fourth of July weekend (LA Times)

(Picture: Reuters)

When we heard that Merrill Lynch wasn’t ruling out a sale of its stake in newswire and financial information service Bloomberg LP, we had to wonder who would want it. More to the point, we had to wonder who wouldn’t. As our story explained, Bloomberg probably (though we can’t say for sure) is a lucrative enterprise that any investor would want to profit from.

As it turns out, wanting something is fine, but just because you want something doesn’t mean you’re going to get it. Here’s the problem: at an estimated $6 billion, Merrill’s Bloomberg stake is way too expensive for most media companies. Not only that, the companies who could afford it — private equity and sovereign wealth funds — are unlikely to raise the cash to take a shot at it. The reason? They like the control that money brings, and with Bloomberg that’s not going to happen.

I spent some time with a high-level (and of course anonymous) source who knows how things work at Bloomberg, and here’s what that source had to say about it:

We’re talking about taking a minority position in a privately held country company that is completely controlled by the mayor of New York City who gets to do whatever he wants. You have less say than you would have if you were the owner of 10 shares of General Motors.

If Merrill wants to sell, the easiest deal is to call Mike and come to a deal, my guess is, he’d do the deal.

Well, Bloomberg did say he wasn’t interested in newspapers.