Reuters Editors

from Africa News blog:

Australia worse than Africa for mining? Yikes!: Clyde

By Clyde Russell The idea that Australia is a more dangerous place for mining investment than Mali might seem strange to most observers, but that's exactly the view of the boss of the world's third-biggest gold producer. Mark Cutifani, the chief executive officer of AngloGold Ashanti, said last week he was more concerned about government policies toward mining in Australia than about nationalism in Africa. On the face of it, this is an extraordinary comment that has gone largely unreported by both the Australian and international media. How can it possibly be that Australia, a stable Western democracy with rule of law, independent courts and a culture of vigorous debate, is a more risky place than countries like Mali, which had a military coup last month and is battling an insurgency by Tuareg separatists? Of course, it may be that Cutifani, an Australian-born mining engineer who has headed the Johannesburg-based company since October 2007, was ramping up the rhetoric to make a point when he talked to reporters on March 27 in Perth, capital of the resource-rich state of Western Australia. But this would appear to be at odds with his previous record of speaking sensibly about the gold-mining industry while remaining an advocate of the interests of his global company. The point Cutifani was probably trying to drive home is that the debate in Australia over its vast mineral resources appears to have veered off-track and descended into political point-scoring. "The politicians and we as industry leaders are missing each other," the Australian Associated Press quoted him as saying. "Somehow, we've got to land this discussion and stop the class warfare-type conversations and turn the conversations into constructive dialogue about the future of the country and the industry." To be fair, Cutifani has also lobbied against proposals for a resource rent tax in South Africa and moves to raise taxes in other African countries where AngloGold operates, such as Ghana and Mali. But for Australia, the background to his comments is an intensifying war of words between Wayne Swan, the treasurer in the Labor Party-led minority government, and mining magnates over the new Mineral Resource Rent Tax (MRRT) and the carbon tax. Both these taxes are due to start on July 1 and have raised the ire of many industries and the opposition Liberal Party.

The MRRT will impose a 30 percent levy on so-called super profits of large coal and iron ore, and doesn't yet include other producers such as gold miners. The carbon tax will impose a price of A$23 on the emissions of the top 500 polluters, to be phased in, while reducing income taxes for poorer households in order to offset the expected increase in energy costs. The Labor Party, which has slumped in opinion polls partly over public disquiet over the new taxes and a broken promise not to introduce a carbon tax by Prime Minister Julia Gillard, appears to be following the tactic of stoking the politics of envy as a distraction method. Since the financial crisis that sparked the global recession in 2008 it has been easy for politicians to attack the rich and blame untrammeled greed for the economic carnage. In Australia, the target is billionaire mining barons and Swan attacked iron ore magnates Gina Rinehart and Andrew Forrest as well as coal developer Clive Palmer in an essay published last month. Interestingly enough, Swan didn't attack BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto, the two global miners that led initial opposition to a stiffer resource tax that was watered down after Gillard deposed former prime minister Kevin Rudd in a party-room coup. Swan accused the billionaires of trying to use their wealth to "distort public policy," apparently without any sense of irony, given that he was using his position as the second-most powerful politician in Australia to do the same. It seems to me that Australia would benefit from a more sensible debate on how to ensure the mineral wealth is developed in a way that rewards the owners of capital that take the risks of developing projects as well the overall economy and citizens in general. Debate in Australia appears to be driven by short-term political cycles, with federal elections every three years leading politicians to focus more on spin than sound policies. Is the MRRT the best design that could have been implemented? Will it raise sufficient revenue without leading to less investment, and will it help ensure the long-term viability of mining? Should the revenue it raises be used to fund a one percentage point cut in the company tax rate, as Labor proposes, or would it be better put toward building a sovereign wealth fund? These are all valid points for debate, but aren't getting a hearing in Australia currently. Instead, as AngloGold's Cutifani pointed out, there is an unedifying mud-slinging match that does little to enhance the reputations of either Swan or his targets.

The global century with Jack Welch and Stephen Adler

On Tuesday Editor-in-Chief of Reuters News Stephen J. Adler interviewed Jack Welch, CEO of Jack Welch, LLC at the 92nd Street Y. The topic of their conversation was “The Global Century.” To hear what they had to say please watch the video below.

Welch was named CEO of General Electric in 1981 and held the position for more than 20 years. During his tenure there the company’s market capitalization rose from $13 billion to $400 billion. In 2000, he was named “Manager of the Century” by Fortune magazine. In 2001, he wrote his number one New York Times and international best-selling autobiography, Jack: Straight from the Gut. Recently, he launched the Jack Welch Management Institute, a unique online MBA program.

Journalists of the year

Last night we honored our 2010 Journalists of the Year.  What a moving ceremony it was, and I am so proud of the achievements of our winners.

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!

Reuters in 2010 and a look ahead to 2011

By David A. Schlesinger

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.

Our need to be in the midst of danger

Below is the keynote speech Editor-in-Chief David Schlesinger delivered today to the International News Safety Institute

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?

How to report politics for an international audience

This is the text of a talk I gave to a seminar hosted by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in Oxford on October 22nd.

Challenges of reporting politics for an international audience

I am not here to talk about what I don’t know so I will largely reflect on my work at Reuters, although I hope to offer insights that might apply to other news organisations that distribute across borders, in particular other international news service such as Dow Jones and Bloomberg, but perhaps also the Financial Times, the Economist, or even the BBC World Service.

We cover lots of themes at Reuters, including geo-politics and major world affairs such as nuclear proliferation, climate change or the rise of the BRIC states, but today I am focusing on our coverage of national politics.

First – we need to abandon any hoary preconceptions about the Reuters news file being dully utilitarian, about us serving as an ‘agency of record’ and simply being a tip sheet for newspapers and broadcaster.

We also need to abandon any lingering notion that we are the voice of Britain – Reuters is now the news brand of a multinational professional information firm majority owned by a Canadian family, headquartered in New York and listed on the New York and Toronto stock exchanges.

Another notion – that we are the avid stenographers of the finance industry, handkerchiefing capitalism’s every sneeze and underwriting corporate folly by taking the self-serving platitudes of industry titans at face value. Well that’s another stereotype.

Less foreign news in UK papers – should we care?

The UK’s Media Standards Trust asks if it matters that there is less foreign reporting being done by British reporters and printed in the British press. Yes, according to David Loyn, the BBC’s International Development correspondent and author of a foreword to an MST report entitled ‘Shrinking World’. Ignorance encourages insular values, aka prejudices, and the British voter will be discouraged from developing the understanding needed to cope in a fast-changing world, argues Loyn.

US journalism academics have long lamented that US newspapers can no longer afford the large networks of foreign correspondents they once deployed and have speculated on the cost to society of poor decision-making driven by the  ignorance of the electorate. The MST’s report tries to quantify the extent of the decline of foreign stories  in the UK print media (40 percent over three decades) but does not venture similar gloomy political analysis. Apart from Loyn’s concerns, the MST’s Martin Moore suggests just that extensive awareness of foreign issues will become the preserve of elites who read the likes of the Financial Times and the Economist, which have made a selling point of maintaining international coverage. Perhaps the difference between the US and Britain is the continued public service mission of the BBC that requires it to provide independent and impartial foreign reporting, which still has a large domestic audience on radio and television. There is no equivalent in the US, where mainstream television offers a selective and incomplete view of foreign news and NPR’s strong reporting has limited reach.

If you accept the argument that television cannot deliver the detail, argument and nuance of the printed word, is there a riposte to the concerns of the MST and doomsters elsewhere lamenting the decline of newspapers in the developed world?  The internet, of course, makes it easy to find copious amounts of news about everything, pulled together by aggregation services and offering perspectives on international issues palatable to just about every political and ideological taste. That’s both solution and problem, argues Moore, suggesting that trusted guides are needed for all but the most committed of news junkies to navigate the torrents of info streams. Nor does your average UK internet user hunt for news online. They are largely passive, armchair news consumers (or strap-hanging news consumers if they mostly read on their daily commute) who take the international news as it is served.

News lovers can go direct to the big international services like Reuters, which runs both UK and US breaking, financial and business news sites and has grown in size and reach as its newspaper clients have retrenched. For core reporting of international events UK newspapers still lean heavily on Reuters and agencies like the Associated Press and AFP.  A subtext of the MST report is that there is a distinctive British perspective on foreign news that has a unique value to a British audience and is threatened by reliance on international agencies. I don’t know if this British sensibility goes much beyond simply appealing to your reader. Reporters for Scottish newspapers covering foreign issues are notoriously told by their editors to ‘put a kilt on it’ when pitching a story, meaning they had to find the parochial angle.

There are other ways for British news organisations (or news firms of any nationality for that matter) to source foreign news besides relying on agencies and expensive full-time correspondents – stringers, citizen journalists, 24 hour news stations sponsored by various governments, and Twitter and Facebook searches. Each is problematic in its own way, argues Moore. (On the other hand there are downsides to the professional reporter model that the report does not dwell on, but which are often posited by believers in the democratising and empowering effect of the Internet). News feeds from non-governmental organisations or state bodies who have stepped into the information gap left by the decline of traditional models of reporting offer another option. Is it wise for newspapers to rely on foreign reporting done by NGOs whose purpose is to advocate a cause, or for television stations to use images of combat supplied by defence ministries that are necessarily one-sided? Noble intentions to be transparent by citing the source of such information often get forgotten.

Besides the economic pressures bearing down on newspapers that hinder them from reporting foreign affairs “properly” are there are other reasons for news organisations to turn inwards? Has obsession with celebrity and indulgence of the human need for diversion contributed to editorial unwillingness to tackle substantive but detailed foreign issues? The international scene is now just too complex, argues Moore. The straightforward black and white world of the Cold War has ended. It has given way to a thorny, multi-polar dynamic not reducible to the language of winners and losers that a reporter could once weave his story through. The global threat of terrorism, climate change’s ability to rewire our weather and the cost of the Western world’s banking systems being brought to its knees just do not grip like the peril of nuclear oblivion.

The MST suggests sensible and practical palliatives for the ailment it diagnoses and accepts cannot be cured. Among its recommendations – demand better sourcing so the use of third-party material is acknowledged, keep the quotas for international reporting for UK broadcasters and extend an expectation of reasonable journalistic standards to the reporting of NGOs and bloggers. And if we don’t, returning to the opening question, will it really matter? Unspecified dangers lurk in doing nothing to arrest the decline of professional foreign reporting, according to the report, including a muted ability to bear witness to the unknown abroad. Aren’t there stouter arguments for foreign reporting in our globalised, interconnected, mutally dependent world?

Changing journalism; changing Reuters

Think back a century and news needs and news methods were completely different.

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.

Link economy and journalism

The following is a guest column by Chris Ahearn, President, Media at Thomson Reuters.

Last summer, I published a blog post that laid out my feelings about the link economy and its positive contribution to the evolution of the business of journalism. One year later, Reuters.com continues to encourage linking to the rich content we offer and even pulling interesting excerpts for discussion in a different forum.   In exchange for that occasional use of our content, we ask others to respect the hard work our journalists put into their craft and in some cases risk their lives in doing so by offering prominent links and attribution.

We encourage bloggers and individuals to use a teaser and perhaps add their own perspective to enhance the online experience.  The RSS feeds on Reuters.com are designed to make this easy to do.

Recently, we engaged in a controlled experiment with Attributor to identify websites that republish complete or near complete versions of Reuters articles and have a commercial model, without a license or agreement. In many cases those websites utilize third party ad networks to monetize their audiences.  Some question why we object to websites posting full copies of our stories without a licensing agreement. The answer is simple – we believe it is neither fair nor legal nor ethical.

Our efforts to identify such environments are focused on opening up a conversation with these publishers to create a mutually beneficial relationship.  In the last few days, we received many emails about this experiment, varied in tone from humorous to helpful to downright nasty.  It seems, however, that some of the facts are being overlooked.

First, we absolutely respect and encourage people to discuss and debate breaking news, particularly when referencing our reporting.  We believe it makes societies stronger and are delighted when it happens.  Second, we expect websites and users to kindly respect how we wish our content is linked to and excerpted as opposed to copying and pasting (again, that is why we make our RSS feeds available and always welcome linking to the Reuters.com network).  Third, if websites are commercial in nature (i.e. take advertising) and want to post our full articles we should have a fair commercial relationship.

We have established commercial license agreements with some of the biggest brands in the world to utilize the work of our journalists, but we also have tailor made agreements for smaller publishers, bloggers and individuals to create a model that works well for all parties.

The challenges for media, 30 years after my hostage ordeal

Thirty years ago this Wednesday, I was sitting, chain smoking, in the basement of a children’s needlework school in Kensington, London. It was a few doors away from the Iranian Embassy, which for six days had been under siege as six Iranian dissidents held two dozen hostages captive. Five days earlier, on April 30th, I had been released from the embassy after suffering what the hostage-takers, and myself, thought was a heart attack, though it was probably self-induced through terror and self survival.

The needlework school had another function that day – it was the HQ for the police and  military preparing to break the siege. I had been summoned there to assist in the hostage negotiations, though as I arrived the Iranians dumped one dead hostage onto the street. They had shot him in the head and threatened to shoot another within the hour.

Within minutes members of Britain’s Special Air Services (SAS) were given orders to storm the embassy and break the siege. They did so in 43 minutes, rescuing all but one of the hostages and shooting dead five of the six dissidents. The sixth later stood trial at the Old Bailey and was jailed for life.

It was history in the making. The SAS’s finest hour. All covered live on television (though, remarkably, the interruption of regular programming – a John Wayne western on one channel, the final of a snooker contest on the other – was considered a bold move on the part of the programmers, subject to much criticism from viewers in the days after.)

Three weeks later, on June 1st, 1980, CNN was launched and a revolution in continuous news began. As a former hostage, and a newsman for more than 40 years, I am conflicted.

How would the modern-day media cover a siege such as the 1980 one?  How would the relentless, frequently breathless and opinionated media of 2010 report on the delicate, terrifying negotiations that went on 30 years ago this week?

There was at least one television set inside the Iranian embassy, though for some reason it was not working. There was a radio – and the hostages and their captors sat around it like attentive children, sobbing, laughing and occasionally arguing as broadcasts were made. The slightest error or nuanced report was a cause for distress.