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.

I stumbled across this headline on Wednesday morning:

FT Bosses Launch PR Offensive For Paid-Content Model

I thought: “Launch? Don’t you mean ‘Launched’?” The Financial Times brass has been arguing for months that the only newspapers that will survive the tough times they have been through lately are those that stop giving away the news online, and can do it without sacrificing the advertising money they earn on the Web.

Here’s an excerpt from the blog that produced that headline, courtesy of digitalarmm:

Editor Lionel Barber tells Channel 4 in an interview that there is now “an inexorable momentum behind charging for content” and he urges other national papers only considering introducing paywalls — essentially all of them — to act now (See the video link inside the digtalarmm blog post)

Here’s more:

Meanwhile Barber’s boss, FT CEO John Ridding, was busy telling Guardian.co.uk’s resident press blogger Roy Greenslade that the FT now makes one fifth of its profits from its website, compared to 17 percent in 2007.

None of this is too surprising, but here’s the third prong in the strategy: the equivalent of a house ad supporting the FT’s doctrine on paid content, not published as a real ad, but as the thrust of a commentary in the FT’s Lex column:

The challenge is to restore growth. Those titles most likely to benefit from any eventual rebound will be the top brands or specialist publications that held the line on advertising prices and can credibly charge for content. Weaker publications, having ceded pricing power in their desperation to win business, are unlikely to get it back.

It’s a good thing that the Lex team feels this way because it saves the FT from having to take out ad space in its own paper. That’s synergy!

The Media Standards Trust has begun a lecture series on 'Why Journalism Matters'. It is disconcerting that it feels we have to ask the question. The argument put forward by the British group's director Martin Moore is that news organisations are so preoccupied with business survival that discussion of the broader social, political and cultural function of journalism gets forgotten. It is a pertinent review then, given the icy economic blasts hitting most Anglo-Saxon media groups, and notwithstanding the recent examples of self-evidently broader journalistic 'value' produced by London's Daily Telegraph in its politican-shaming investigations into parliamentarians' expenses.

First up in the series was Lionel Barber, editor of the Financial Times, who cantered through the justifications for a vibrant, independent press. Watchdog, informer, explainer, campaigner, community builder and debater - those are the roles that journalism plays. The value that it brings is most evident by comparison with the unhealthiness of states where the press is not free, noted Barber, citing the struggles of the citizenry in China and Russia to hold their leaders to account.

The FT's USP as a media group, according to Barber, is as an explainer and analyser of complicated events that play out across a global stage. But analytical reporting of global stories costs serious cash, he noted, in a question-begging aside. That you get the quality of journalism you are prepared to pay for, ultimately, is his response to the challenge posed to mainstream media by Internet-enabled communicators. For free you can have the rawness of a blog. For crafted journalism that is properly sourced, reviewed for taste and style and checked for accuracy, you must find ways to charge. At your peril do you blur the edges between the crafted and the raw world of easy comment, hasty opinion and rumour billed as fact, argues the FT editor.  (There was a hat tip, however, to the bloggers that have broken news, such as Guido Fawkes who forced the resignation of an advisor to Gordon Brown by revealing his plans for a smear email campaign.)

So a sharp distinction was drawn between the value proposition of professional journalism and its unruly blogging and twittering cousin. No such clarity yet, though, on the funding model for the former when the Internet has made audiences expect to read most general interest news and a lot of specialised niche content for free.  No secret that each and every news group is daunted by this obstacle, even the FT, which has not been immune to the downturn in advertising revenue.

We were left with a couple of clues on the way forward.  Barber predicted that within a year all news organisations will be charging for online content in some way. (The FT's model is to allow readers access to a few articles for free and then charge for further use.)  Will Google ever pay for content - unlikely says Barber. But at least they might be prepared to talk about linking via searches to articles requiring subscription, which they do not do currently.

And his flippant response to the demographic challenge posed to a print-based news organisation by the emergence of a generation of youngsters who get all their information from screens? People are living longer - they will still buy newspapers.

Here are some of the day’s top stories in the media industry:

TV Networks Fight Drug-Ad Measure (WSJ)
“Advertising costs are deductible to any company as a business expense. The plan being considered by Rep. Rangel’s Ways and Means committee would eliminate the deduction with respect to prescription drug advertising,” writes Martin Vaughan.

Big media seek 21st century business models (Reuters)
“Media moguls at this week’s Sun Valley conference have spent as much time discussing how to reconfigure business models disrupted by the Web as they have worrying about the weak economy,” reports Yinka Adegoke.

Zucker Says Marketplace Has Reached Bottom (B&C)
Ben Grossman writes: “NBC Universal chief Jeff Zucker said Thursday that while the overall marketplace is still challenged, he thinks it may have bottomed out. ‘It’s still quite uncertain and we don’t really see the full recovery we are all hoping for,’ he said.  ’It’s still tough out there, but I think we have seen a bottom.’”

The Financial Times and New York Times make further syndication deals (Editors Weblog)
“Both the Financial Times and the New York Times have announced their international syndications will include additional countries. The FT has confirmed content sharing arrangements with publications based in Turkey, France, and South Korea,” writes Christie Silk.

NBC Reveals Displeasure as U.S.O.C. Unveils Plan (NYT)
Richard Sandomir writes: “The head of NBC Sports said Thursday that he broke off talks in April about combining the Olympic channel that it partly owns with the one being planned by the United States Olympic Committee.”

AP Works Toward Universal Online News Format (Mediapost)
Gavin O’Malley writes: “The Associated Press, along with fellow non-profit The Media Standards Trust, on Friday unveiled a digital news “microformat” to effectively encapsulate the content and key meta-data of every news story online.”

In other news:

• Detroit Free Press exempt from latest round of Gannett layoffs (Crain’s)
• AOL: More Layoffs Inevitable (Business Insider)

On Tuesday, a panel hosted by Reuters and the Society of American Business Editors and Writers discussed the state of the media industry and the challenges it faces from consumers demanding information in new and different ways.

How could the industry transform its newsrooms to thrive in this culture?

Chrystia Freeland of the Financial Times said the key discipline was to constantly ask what the reader actually wants and not what is technologically possible. “This is going to be different for everyone,” Freeland told the crowd, which included Thomson Reuters Editor-in-Chief David Schlesinger.

For the full discussion, watch the video below.

The panel included
Chrystia Freeland, US managing editor, Financial Times

Larry Ingrassia, business editor, The New York Times

Sree Sreenivasan, dean of student affairs & new media professor, Columbia Journalism School

Laurel Touby, founder & CEO, Mediabistro.com

Moderated by
Betty Wong, global managing editor, Reuters

It’s refreshing to read some reasoned thinking about the future of newspapers that does not come from

• Newspaper executives whose cheerleading about how they will survive — somehow — gets undercut by reporting a 30 percent drop in profits one quarter later, or
• Internet Cassandras who want newspapers to burn and die because they hate editors who get precious about how the calling of journalism trumps the rules of free markets and (more typically) because they hold dear the tradition of thinking that newspapers only print lies.

The Financial Times is the bearer of these encouraging if cautionary words in an editorial that it ran on Tuesday:

There are legitimate concerns about the disappearance of general papers. The best dig up stories and provide coverage of local, national and foreign news that enlightens readers and citizens. It is easy to undervalue such news when it has been plentiful for decades, but society would feel its absence.

Perhaps some of the reporting done up to now by for-profit papers will in future be funded by foundations or trusts. But the industry should not lose faith in the free market. When people really want or need something, they will pay for it, one way or another. If today’s publishers cannot convince their readers to do so, they will be overtaken by others that can.

The FT is not saying that all newspapers have a future; it’s saying that the ones that don’t waste your time will survive because you will pay for them. To be sure, there is news that we want to know and news that we need to know (whether he want to or not). The question is: how many of our papers provide that? We would enjoy getting your response.

Keep an eye on

• Speaking of getting people to pay for news, The Associated Press devotes some space to analyzing that. Is it salvation or suicide? (The Associated Press)

• David Geffen still wants The New York Times, a state of play that continues to fascinate everyone in media. See the references in this massive profile of Carlos Slim, the Mexican billionaire who is helping keep the Times afloat. (The New Yorker)

• Mark Cuban’s lawyers will try to convince a judge to dismiss the Securities and Exchange Commission’s insider trading charges against the Dallas Mavericks owner and noted blogger/tech guy. (The Associated Press)

(Photo: Reuters)

The Financial Times is not the first place that anyone thinks of to search for things, at least in the Internet sense. That’s not to say that the FT isn’t interested in changing a few perceptions. The Pearson-owned paper, or more specifically, its Web operation Rather: The Pearson-owned FT Group is launching a business news search engine designed to get past the idea of relying on keywords to search for important infomation. The idea, boiled down, is that a business search engine is more likely to give you the results that you want than a massive search engine that yields results for people in every walk of life.

Here is a quick excerpt from the press release. It explains in pretty plain English what the search engine does, though it veers into press-speak territory — that twilight zone of marketing that assigns biblical proportions to earthly things:

The Financial Times Group is announcing the BETA launch of Newssift.com - a next generation search tool that, for the first time will allow business professionals the opportunity to execute a “qualitative” business news search - think a more sophisticated business search equivalent to Google. This one of a kind search tool will provide comprehensive results that contextualize the trends, opinions, and qualitative events that shape business decisions and impact corporate reputations. The groundbreaking semantic technology, aims to create a user-friendly and meaning-based platform that easily locates and compares business news in a qualitative not quantitative fashion. Think of a traditional search as delivering results in buckets, while Newssift.com offers results that passed through a magnifying glass or prism; moving search beyond traditional results and towards refinement.

Here’s TechCrunch, which wrote at length about Newssift:

A search for “Sun Microsystems” brings up further suggestions for refinement, including “IBM,” “Jonathan Schwartz,” and “market share.” You sort of graze around, adding new keywords as they are presented to you. Each keyword you select is added to your string, and corresponding article results appear below. A sentiment pie chart indicates what percentage of the stories are positive, negative, or neutral. Another one breaks the results down by source (Online News, Magazines, Newspapers, Blogs, Research). Clicking on any shaded area filters the results further. …

… I am not sure I would use Newssift every day to stay on top of the latest news, but I can see it as a useful research tool when I have to really dig deep into a topic. It does better with business news than technology. Still, it is worth checking out in that it employs several subtle navigational techniques that make it more of a discovery engine than a search engine.

This sounds like the kind of thing that you will hear about from the FT’s rivals once they’re ready to launch.

(Photo: Reuters)

Thomson Reuters Corp, the company that employs me and runs this blog, posted fourth-quarter financial results on Tuesday. My colleague and I wrote them up for the wire, and you can see them here. Meanwhile, here’s something that didn’t make it in to the story that we wanted to share.

During a conference call with reporters, I asked Chief Executive Tom Glocer, who ran Reuters before Thomson Corp bought it, what the company plans to do regarding investing in news. I also asked if the company could ever be in the market for another print newspaper. Remember that Thomson Reuters likes to tout the fact that Thomson Corp long ago got out of the newspaper business, thinking there was more of a future in electronic information that you make people pay a lot of money for.

On news spending:

We’ve continued to invest in news and we think 2009 is a very good year in investment for us both in terms of having brought in some of the journalists who have joined from Thomson Financial, but also investments we’re making in new editorial systems, in the video, multimedia presentation of news. So I think one of the good things about the strength of our financial performance is that we can continue to invest when a lot of pure media companies aren’t.

On getting “back” into the newspaper business (I asked whether the Financial Times or The New York Times-owned International Herald Tribune would be good fits, specifically. But why not The New York Times? Everyone with more than a few pennies to rub together is a candidate to buy it these days.)

[Thomson was] so early in getting out of newspapers that now to go back in when our business model is so focused on professionals and so overwhemingly electronic doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. … If there were a fantastic information product that was 95 percent electronic and 5 percent a print output device, we would do it — maybe — if it otherwise made sense. I’m not convinced that we know how to run a newspaper any better than the ones running them today.

If newspapers keep cutting their print editions, it might not be long before the “95-5″ ratio is normal in big U.S. cities.

(Photo: Thomson Reuters CEO Tom Glocer on left, with two people to the right who do plenty of things on paper. In the middle is FInancial Times Editor Lionel Barber. On the right is Fleishman-Hillard Chairman John Graham. Reuters)

Maybe the real headline should be, “Financial Times finds old way to save newspapers.” It’s called the lawsuit. As reported by Cityfile:

You know we’re in a deep recession when even billionaire financiers can’t afford to pay for subscriptions to the Financial Times. In what will go down as one of the more bizarre (and unintentionally hilarious) lawsuits we’ve seen in quite some time, the newspaper filed a lawsuit against Steve Schwarzman’s Blackstone Group on Wednesday for sharing an FT username and password instead of setting up separate accounts for its employees. Yes, an unknown “senior employee” at the colossal private equity firm “authorized the initiation and repeated renewal of an individual, personal subscription to FT.com” and then distributed the login details to company employees so they could all join in on the fun. (The court documents list the username as “theblackstonegroup” and the password as “blackstone,” although FT says it has since “disabled the credentials to mitigate damages.”)

The New York Post gives us the background on why the situation is absurd on its face:

Blackstone’s penny-pinching ways stand in stark contrast to the way Schwarzman lives. Two years ago, his wife threw a $3 million 60th-birthday party for the buyout king that featured 500 guests, and included a performance by Rod Stewart. A Wall Street Journal story chronicled Schwarzman’s fondness for $40 crab legs and for running up weekend food bills of $3,000.

For MediaFile’s part, we see another tool that U.S. newspapers can employ to enrich their depleted coffers. Newspaper publishers usually wait for one among them to step forward and take action before falling in en masse (cutting dividends, laying off workers, etc), and we wonder why the lawsuit route should be any different.

Yes, there are differences between the FT and most U.S. newspapers. The FT charges hefty subscriptions to read the paper in print and online. (Online subscriptions run $179 to $299 a year, as the FT’s complaint states). That means there is a monetary value to “sharing.” Most U.S. newspapers charge nothing, but require registration.

Think about it this way, newspaper websites depend upon the information they glean through registration — including how many people have registered — to set rates that they charge advertisers. If the entire municipal staff in Anytown, Kansas, is sharing access to the Kansas City Star, it’s presenting a distorted picture to the paper, which then presents a distorted picture to advertisers. With ad revenue in free fall and the possibility that some big-city papers might die within weeks, it seems fair to imagine that a trip to the courthouse could result.

And here’s one more thing to think about: The FT’s tone in its lawsuit might come off as priggish when you consider how much rampant username/password abuse goes on in the nation’s offices these days — but if the paper wins, imagine all the rest of the gold out there just waiting to be mined. Oh yeah, it might be a good time to get your own FT and Wall Street Journal subscriptions. You’re doing a good deed by paying for the news.

(Photo: Reuters)

Having a copy of the Financial Times poking out of your valise is one way of telling the world that you are a sophisticated business type. Another way is to show people the new FT mobile service on your BlackBerry.

Here’s the news from the press release:

The Financial Times today announces the launch of a new FT.com website optimised for mobile devices available at m.ft.com. The site is consistent with the new FT.com design unveiled in November 2008 and follows the news that FT.com has broken the one million registered user barrier for the first time.

The idea is to loop a younger generation into the FT, particularly young people who think that any newspaper showing up on any part of their person is like driving a chariot to work in the morning rush hour.

More from the release:

Phase one of the launch offers a new touch screen interface, faster access to content, improved search, the ability to customise and follow stock options and, although the site works on any phone, optimisation for the iPhone and BlackBerry which together account for over 60 per cent of FT.com mobile traffic.

And:

Phase two of the launch in the first quarter will include interactive mobile charting so users can quickly access company information and index data on the go. A dedicated iPhone application will follow, incorporating more sophisticated graphics and charts and the ability to quickly share FT content with the integration of the address book.

And now you know How to Spend It.