Selling the news: Reuters, the AP and Tribune
We and others reported Monday night that our parent company Thomson Reuters Corp is starting a U.S. general news service for U.S. publishers and broadcasters. Though my employer, Reuters News, has been providing general and business/financial/economic news for more than a century, we didn’t have a service before that would rely on a big group of hired journalists and stringers to get busy covering U.S. news in a large way.
You can see our story here, as well as the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal and paidContent.org stories, for more information. One of the interesting aspects that we didn’t get into in our story is one of the reasons that Tribune Co, Reuters America’s first client, decided to work with our parent company.
Here’s Russell Adams’s explanation, taken from The Wall Street Journal:
In a cost-cutting move this past spring, Tribune began producing modules, or ready-made pages, that are filled with news from wires services and its various properties, and printed in multiple papers. Gerould Kern, editor of the Chicago Tribune, said Tribune expects to begin selling the pages to other publishing companies—something Reuters was open to.
“Clients want to be a syndicator of our content,” said Chris Ahearn, president of media for Thomson Reuters.
The AP doesn’t let papers repackage its content for sale. In a statement, the AP said, “The Tribune newspapers remain valued members of the AP.” The cooperative added: “Our members have rights to use our content in various ways. However, there are ancillary uses of AP content that we cannot allow because they wouldn’t be fair to other members,” the AP said.
I’m curious to hear from our media readers how creative a move they think this is for news outlets like Reuters as well as the customers that my company is trying to enlist. We don’t know the size of the investment in this news service, other than that it’s part of a “multimillion dollar” commitment. We also don’t know the eventual size of the reporting staff (including the freelancers). Still, it’s an interesting move on a number of levels.
Audience and the media: a shaky marriage
How can mainstream news organizations retain (or regain) their audience’s trust in skeptical world where almost anyone with an Internet connection can be a publisher? That’s the topic a panel of industry experts will address tonight at the Thomson Reuters heaquarters in Times Square. We’ll be live blogging the event here from 7pm ET.
The panel comprises: Andrew Alexander, ombudsman, The Washington Post; Michael Oreskes, senior managing editor, The Associated Press; Lisa Shepard, ombudsman, National Public Radio; and Dean Wright, global editor of ethics, innovation & news standards, Reuters. Jack Shafer, editor-at-large for Slate, is the moderator.
If you’d like to put a question to the panel, leave it in the comments box below and we’ll ask a selection on your behalf.
A media source called “Editor & Publisher” points out that all the American media fell for a politically correct lie and propagated it to the country. They reported “Second Cop — Not Kimberly Munley — Brought Down Fort Hood Killer.” It just sounded so much better to credit a woman instead of a black man for the deed. There was no checking internet sources for accuracy.
Talking with Thomson Reuters chief about print
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:
SC NJ: Thanks for reading – and commenting. I did not include a quote from Glocer where he referred to PDR and similar properties. That said, I asked him about mainstream news and business newspapers and magazines, so that’s the context in which he answered the question. I don’t think you caught him out.
Robert
Media, tech moguls meet in New York (You are NOT invited)
Media and technology executives are meeting Wednesday and Thursday in New York City at a conference hosted by private equity firm Quadrangle. Note the word private.
When they meet at the Plaza, they will talk about a ton of different things that their customers, their investors and other readers want to know. I have to apologize for them because they’re not letting in any riff-raff. And that includes reporters who get paid to spend all day figuring out how these people decide what kind of entertainment you want, what kind of technology you pay them for and what deals they pursue with the money that you give them when you buy their stock. This event always excludes press, but that’s no reason not to highlight what you probably are missing because of this. After all, who wants to wait for the 8-K filing?
Some press will be allowed, but it will be an assortment of celebrity journalists who will moderate panels and, according to Peter Kafka, author of “MediaMemo” at News Corp’s AllThingsD blog, will not write about the event (I’m talking about Maria Bartiromo and David Faber of CNBC, The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta, etc).
Peter wrote two posts about this, here and here. He also issued me a challenge to sneak into the conference, but horror of horrors, I’m on a deadline that I can’t shirk any longer. So consider this an invitation from me to you to go to the Plaza and catch these guys on the way in and out of the building. It’s a fun way to spend the day, and maybe you’ll learn something interesting.
Here is the agenda, courtesy of Peter Kafka. Below that is a list of speakers. Outrage breeds corrections: I have to amend the record: The list I had posted here of topics is last year’s agenda. My mistake. The list of speakers appearing THIS year still appears below.
2009 SPEAKERS EMILIO AZCÁRRAGA President, Board of Directors and CEO, Grupo Televisa DENNIS CROWLEY Co-Founder, foursquare BARRY DILLER Chairman and CEO, IAC; Chairman, Expedia, Inc. and Ticketmaster Entertainment, Inc. BRIAN DUNN CEO, Best Buy CHARLES FORMAN Founder, OMGPOP REED HASTINGS Founder, Chairman and CEO, Netflix REID HOFFMAN Executive Chairman and Founder, LinkedIn Corporation CHAD HURLEY CEO and Co-Founder, YouTube JEFF IMMELT Chairman and CEO, GE PAUL JACOBS Chairman and CEO, Qualcomm Incorporated OLLI-PEKKA KALLASVUO President and CEO, Nokia JASON KILAR CEO, Hulu LESLIE MOONVES President and CEO, CBS Corporation ANNE MULCAHY Chairman, Xerox Corporation JAMES MURDOCH Chairman and Chief Executive, Europe & Asia, News Corporation BRIAN PHILLIPS CEO and Co-Founder, Thread DAN PORTER CEO, OMGPOP BRIAN ROBERTS Chairman and CEO, Comcast Corporation PAUL SAGAN President and CEO, Akamai ERIC SCHMIDT Chairman and CEO, Google IVAN SEIDENBERG Chairman and CEO, Verizon Communications BIZ STONE Co-Founder, Twitter HOWARD STRINGER Chairman, CEO and President, Sony Corporation BEN VERWAAYEN CEO, Alcatel-Lucent DAVID ZASLAV President and CEO, Discovery Communications
MODERATORS MARC ANDREESSEN General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz KEN AULETTA Author and Writer, “Annals of Communications”, The New Yorker MARIA BARTIROMO Anchor, Closing Bell; Host & Managing Editor, Wall Street Journal Report, CNBC JAMES CITRIN Co-Leader, Board & CEO Practice, North America, Spencer Stuart DAVID FABER Anchor, Reporter, CNBC MICHAEL HUBER Co-President and Managing Principal, Quadrangle Group BECKY QUICK Co-Anchor, Squawk Box, CNBC GEOFFREY SANDS Director & Leader, Global Media, Entertainment & Information Practice, McKinsey & Co. JOSHUA L. STEINER Co-President and Managing Principal, Quadrangle Group GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS Anchor, This Week; Chief Washington Correspondent, ABC News
Haha. I absolutely loved the tone and tenor of this write-up. Says a lot! (And oh, why did Reuters have to allow blogs and columns after I left–conspiracy!)Also loved the Michael Moore comment. Last journo left standing?;-)
The Wall Street Journal — now for ‘professionals’
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.
content is king… always has been … always will be…. #johngaltwashere
Is your newsroom ready for the future?
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
Some 30-40 years ago I attend a newspaper conference in Houston, and among other things, we listened to a presentation from a consulting firm on reader desires. Then several minutes later two editors told the audience what the readers wanted.Maybe you’re asking the wrong people for a solution.
Les Moonves: No price cuts here!
CBS’s stock may be in the tank (now under $4 a share), but Chief Executive Les Moonves is still pretty darn optimistic. That may be because his network — home to the “CSI” franchise, “Survivor,” and “The Mentalist” — is the only one of the big four that’s been pulling in more prime-time viewers. For months it has been crushing ABC, NBC, and Fox in the ratings game.
What’s the payoff? CBS won’t have to make wholesale changes to its 2009-10 schedule and should be able to hang on to more advertising dollars than its rivals, Moonves told an audience at the Deutsche bank Deutsche Bank Annual Media & Telecommunications Conference.
Moonves figures CBS will need to shoot six fewer pilots than it did a year ago, and bring only 2 or 3 new shows to air next season. He also says that with known hits — like “The Mentalist” — and few question marks about its schedule the network should fare well in this spring’s upfront market.
What’s more, if advertisers get too skittish, CBS will simply hold back inventory during negotiations, Moonves said. “”We’ve never been afraid to play the scatter game,” he said. “My guess is there will be a little less volume going into the upfront.”
Of course, CBS has also been burned by holding back inventory and betting on stronger prices later in the year for the scatter, or spot, market. Remember 2001′s upfront? CBS cut its inventory, bet on the scatter market, and was hurt when advertising fell apart that fall after the attacks of Sept 11.
Still, Moonves sounded confident. “We will not reduce our prices,” he declared.
Thomson Reuters CEO: No paper, please
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.
I guess print newspapers touch a lot of people, however the next boom which is picking up is information through mobile devices. It helps one to access any amount of news/information on the go. May be TR should be looking at investing in improving the content delivery through mobile devices.
The (TV ratings) race for the White House
As far as TV ratings go, last week’s presidential debate was a loser, drawing the one of the smaller audiences in modern history. It should be a different story for tonight’s vice-presidential debate.
For one thing, the presidential debate between John McCain and Barack Obama, which drew just 52 million people, took place on a Friday night, never a great night for TV viewing. By contrast, the match-up between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden comes on a Thursday night, usually a big TV viewing night.
Besides, even though Katie Couric’s interviews with Palin only had a modest impact on CBS News ratings, as the New York Times points out, there is nonetheless a great deal of interest in the Republican vice presidential candidate.
“This is going to be a hugely rated debate,” said Chuck Todd, political director of NBC News, told the Hollywood Reporter. ”Whether you’re a fan of hers or you’re not a fan, it’s a white-knuckle affair.”
The Associated Press tells us: “The most-watched vice presidential debate ever was in 1984, when 56.7 million people watched Vice President Bush take on Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman on a major party ticket.”
We’ll soon see how tonight’s numbers stack up.
Keep an eye on:
Staged “debate” dance now ready for 24/7 consumption.
Bailout Barack Obama w/partner Bailout John McCain.
Full-spectrum media suppression/distortion
target Ralph Nader and Ron Paul.
Your vote is your power,
they fear it, use it.
Real estate ‘synergies’ begin at Thomson Reuters
One of the ways that Thomson Reuters hopes to save money after the merger closed is through real estate sales. In that spirit, it looks like change begins at home, in the city where Thomson Reuters’s world headquarters is located.
Here’s the top of a press release from real estate brokerage Cushman & Wakefield:
NEW YORK, May 6, 2008 – In one of the largest and most complex transactions completed in Manhattan this year, Cushman & Wakefield announced today that Newsweek has signed a long-term lease for approximately 163,000 square feet at 395 Hudson Street, owned by the New York City District of Carpenters Pension Fund.
The lease involved three separate parties and the swap of two floors by tenant Thomson Reuters, allowing Newsweek to lease the contiguous third and partial fourth floors of the 10-story office building in Hudson Square.
And
“This transaction allowed Thomson Reuters to consolidate and reduce office space redundancies created by the recent merger of the two companies,” said [Cushman & Wakefield Executive Vice President] Joseph Cabrera.
This is the kind of news that employees at the new company probably don’t mind hearing, even though Thomson Reuters does plan to cut an undetermined number of staff. After all, office space doesn’t mind being told they’re redundant.
(Photo: Reuters)
