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.

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.

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!

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.

We have just hit our one-year anniversary since the acquisition of Breakingviews. Since day one of the combined commentary service, we have offered agenda-setting financial views around the world on the topics that are on the minds our customers.

And we are putting more emphasis on the top stories. We have restructured our coverage to allow dedicated editing teams to look at the top stories across asset classes and package them in a way that provides our readers with better forethought and insight.

The Reuters iPad app, launched in April, has been a huge success, drawing great reviews for its design and execution, and providing our audience with another way to spend time with our content and brand.  Furthermore we have redesigned the reuters.com web sites, providing exceptional enhancements to the user experience.

As the media industry continues to face restructuring and reordering, Reuters is seeking to transform our position in the U.S. market to allow us to best support our customers. A team of reporters and editors will publish U.S. political and general news of national interest to complement our existing international coverage and allow us to offer a competitive and client-driven product to domestic media groups and those outside the U.S. as well. This offering will be supported by partnerships to offer more U.S. sports pictures and data.

Behind the scenes, Reuters is working aggressively to implement new cutting-edge editing tools and technology to ensure our news gets to you faster and in the most readable format.

I am truly excited about the position Reuters holds in the journalism market. We are poised to deliver the news our customer need in the manner in which they need in today’s changing media environment.

I wish you all the best in the remainder of 2010 and as you kick off 2011.

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?

But we know. We know that two of those killed were not insurgents and were not hostile to anything. Two of those killed were just doing their jobs: Reuters journalists Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh.

They were not carrying guns but cameras.

They were not carrying Rocket Propelled Grenade launchers but long lenses.

They were not preparing to kill but to record.

They were not trying to create a story but to tell the story.

They had no intention of dying for the story, but die they did.

My organisation has a long and proud history of covering conflicts. And unfortunately my organisation has a long and sad history of its distinguished journalists being killed in those conflicts.

The first one died of typhoid fever. The next one died from shell shrapnel.

In Reuters headquarters in London, New York and in our key offices around the world, two large books of remembrance hold pride of place, commemorating those brave journalists who have died while covering stories during our more than a century and a half of history.

The first page commemorates a man who died in 1885.

Francis John Lamplow Roberts, first in that long, distinguished and sad line, was just 25 when he succumbed to disease covering the British campaign in the Sudan.

The first died in 1885, and the second, Ernest Richard ‘Dick’ Sheepshanks, died along with a colleague from the AP in Spain in 1937 when a Republican shell exploded next to their car as they were covering the Nationalist side of the civil war.

So the first died 15 years before the end of the 19th century. The second died nearly four decades into the 20th.
Here we are in the 21st century, and as I flip through the final sad pages of the books, pages that we add to with depressing regularity, I  see that in the first decade of this century, Reuters has already lost 12 employees. That is a rate of more than one a year, tragedy striking down without regard for age or experience or nationality.
Usually journalists die well out of sight of the public or of their editors.

This year, however, the organization Wikileaks released the video from the lead Apache helicopter that stalked and killed in Iraq three years ago, video that Reuters had sought unsuccessfully with Freedom of Information Act requests.
That video shocked and angered many both inside and outside journalism.

That video also showed how dangerous trying to get the story really is.

It is clear from the video and audio transcript of the battlefield chatter that neither the men authorising the airstrike nor the men pulling the trigger considered the possibility that their targets could include journalists.

There’s no question that better training for the military is important. There’s no question that the military and journalists need to communicate more. There’s no question in my mind, too, that journalists should have the right to be where the action is.

But having that right and always using it may be two different things.

I am asking you today whether we, the journalistic community, need to reassess our need to be in the midst of danger.
As journalists we have an instinctual compulsion to be where the action is.

Photographers and cameramen, in particular, need to get the shot to record reality for history.

That’s a dictum that is fundamental to our craft.

But is it fit for purpose?

Is it fit for today?

In an age when a gunship in the air can fire from up to 4 kilometres away, must the journalist be on the ground?

In an age when a deadly drone can be piloted from half a world away, can the journalist justify the risks of being right in the midst of things?

Of course there are no black and white answers.

Sometimes, of course, the benefits to transparency and understanding are such that we indeed must be right there. And always covering violence in the same long-distance way as it can be prosecuted today would simply be abrogating the responsibilities of our craft.

But let’s be honest.

Sometimes those benefits are not there and the reasons for being in harm’s way are less noble: competitive pressure, personal ambition, adrenaline’s urging.

As professionals, we must be much more ruthless in prioritising the exposure of our staff to danger.

At Reuters we have already learned lessons; there are certainly many more to be learned.

That day when Namir and Saeed were killed, they were walking with men, some of whom were armed. There was a time, and not too long ago mind you, when the tools of the trade that would have indicated that a journalist was doing his or her job afforded that individual some protection.

As Namir and Saeed were identifiable as journalists carrying professional-grade camera equipment, they may have felt they were taking no additional risk standing next to that group of men, some of whom had weapons, since it is not uncommon for Iraqis to own weapons.

Yet it is clear from the video that the mere fact that there were armed men present meant that to the US military everyone travelling in that group could be and would be considered hostile and could be considered a legitimate target.

Some in the military have subsequently argued, as well, that since insurgents often memorialise their acts with pictures or video, soldiers have no way to presume that the presence of journalistic equipment in and of itself denotes the presence of a journalist.

Whatever our personal feelings about whether these orders or views are reasonable, we have no choice but to react to them.

Since this tragedy, we have made it Reuters policy to prohibit our journalists from standing next to non-uniformed individuals carrying weapons.

Is that policy enough? I fear not.

I come back again to the question of when must we be on the scene, and when can we give a story a pass.

When does the image capture the essence of the situation, and when is it just one more fleeting mark on the wire?

If we as editors take our responsibilities seriously, I believe we should be opting to pass on stories more often.

But even posing this option raises the spectre that in so doing we’ll be trading the safety of the professional for the danger to the amateur.

With the great democratisation of technology, there have never been so many people in every country on earth who have both the ambition and now the means to publish their views, thoughts and images without the structure of a large institution around them.

This has many wonderful implications for journalism.

It has many frightening implications for safety.

Where international news organisations have embraced safety training, equipment and an ethos of caution, individuals are unlikely to have either the means or the experience to realise what they’re missing.

And if professionals opt not to cover certain events, I fear that vacuum may be too tempting for amateurs to avoid as well.

As a profession we have made great strides in safety awareness in recent years.

First we gave training and equipment to staff. Then we extended the care to the stringers who work for us. Then organisations like INSI began needed outreach to local news organisations who suffered grievously when their own regions became centres of violence and tension.

Now is the time for us to accept the newly broadened definition of our craft and ensure that we give opportunities for training and safety consciousness raising to the legions of self-declared journalists who, emboldened by their blog’s popularity or their scores of Twitter followers, might rush in to the very danger spots we should be avoiding.

The very traps of competitive pressure, personal ambition, adrenaline’s urging that can ensnare the professional journalist are even more alluring to the self-declared one, looking to garner page views or fame.

We in the profession have an obligation to ensure that all who seek to practice journalism do it safely and know how to balance the risks and the rewards.

As a profession we have a great chance to make sure that all practitioners start making the right decisions.

And we have a great responsibility to make sure that all involved really wrestle with whether every exposure to danger, every decision to “be there” is truly important and worth it.

I don’t know – I can’t know – which different decisions would have kept Hiro Muramoto, Reuters video journalist, from being killed in Bangkok in April this year.

I don’t know – I can’t know – which different decisions would have kept Fadel Shana, Reuters cameraman, from being killed in Gaza in 2008.

I don’t know – I can’t know – how I could have prevented any of these deaths or those of Namir and Saeed or any of the others that occurred even before I became editor-in-chief.

But I do know that we as a profession must think about doing things differently.
We have to say “no” more often.

We have to be prepared to miss the image more often.

We have to be ready to lose the shot to avoid being shot.

We must be ready to lose some stories to avoid losing yet more lives.

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.

ThomsonReuters logo

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.

What we aim to be is an agenda-setting news service for a global audience of professionals, including media and finance professionals, delivering content rich in analysis and insight, with multiple “sections” (to use newspaper speak), including a financial commentary service, direct to consumer websites, a video service akin to a financial YouTube, and lifestyle and entertainment coverage.

Our development from the agency of record model is a response to the structural challenges posed to the news industry in last two decades by disruptive technology, economic turmoil and emerging competitors. The challenge boils down to this: how do you capture and retain audiences and have a sustainable business model for doing so. It’s an adaption struggle faced by all “old” international news organisations that are in the business of covering national events for audiences in other countries.

In light of that, how do we go about reporting national politics, and why?

We can’t match the staff of national newspapers. We don’t have vast teams lapping up lobby gossip. Don’t have the 24hr television news magnet pulling politicians in to talk to us. We are no-vote media, so leaders don’t often leak to us. We don’t have a political agenda so government PR people prefer to hand out information to sympathetic media that will oblige with some partisan spin. Our stories don’t appear on newsstands, on mashed up dead trees, so we rarely get that “shout it to the rooftops” quality of great, screaming, above the fold newspaper scoops. And we operate in real time with all perils that urgency brings to copy quality and news editing.

Our stories have to travel, so jargon and local terminology needs to be decoded for an international audience. We have to be clear in our language, in explaining what parties stand for, and in explaining why a particular issue matters, or surprisingly doesn’t, in one or other country e.g. why do the French riot over pension reform, while in Britain voters glumly shrug when told they will have to work longer?

Do these restrictions mean all we can offer is a dumbed down account, the lowest common denominator story, an account of national difference and idiosyncrasy that will delight the distant reader but leave them none the wiser about what is really taking place?

Maybe that was how it was, but we can’t get away with that now.

A couple of years ago I visited a currency trader based in Singapore who worked for a large Malaysian bank. He traded sterling and was typical of the kind of well-educated professional news consumer we need to serve well. I had expected to discuss Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling and efforts to deal with the global financial crisis. Instead we talked about how hard it was to get a mortgage in Britain, where people were buying or not buying houses and what voters thought of schools, hospitals and levels of crime. Why? He wanted a balanced view of factors driving voter behaviour. He needed something beyond economic data, opinion polls and tendentious reporting of special interest issues.

It was also clear that if Reuters did not give him a real sense of the mood in Britain he knew perfectly well he could get it elsewhere. He could set up RSS feeds from newspapers, track blogs and Twitter feeds, and watch British television news on the internet. If he had the time and inclination he could scrape the web to get something of a view of Britain without us.

So what do we do to give this customer, or any other outside the UK, a distinctive view of UK politics? Or any other set of national politics, for that matter?

Here I am taking for granted some bedrock attributes. We still have to break news, work sources, jump on big stories and get the facts out there — all the obvious stuff that is the backbone of good journalism.

Beyond that – what’s our formula – and by extension perhaps, the formula that other international news organisations are adopting?

1) We must be expert and detailed. We can no longer write down to people. We can’t condescend. We are dealing with audiences with high expectations of sophisticated, smart political coverage, who will challenge oversimplification and generalisation. We’ve had to raise our game globally on national political reporting.

We need a bit of colour and flavour in stories but audiences also demand detail. Detail nails an issue down, illustrates a theme and drives a decision. Online and on screens there are no space constraints, so we can be more illuminating. There is a great appetite for explanatory, background and in-depth material.

2) We have to be predictive and selective. We must offer the ‘what next’ on a story. We need less of what has happened and more of ‘what might happen.’ Accordingly we have devised new formats that look at potential outcomes and assess their probability. It’s a real challenge to do this well, to analyse impartially and not speculate wildly.

We must be selective, ignoring local fascinations and froth, the white noise of events like Question Time, the weekly parliamentary dingdong debate between the British prime minister and leader of the opposition. Instead we look at whether policy on an issue will change. We have to take an issue and chew it through. For example, our special report on how one big UK city will be hit by spending cuts illustrated the wider theme of austerity measures hitting Europe. Incidentally in the course of reporting that item in Birmingham our reporters broke news the city was considering asset sales to Middle East investors. City fathers backed away from the plan after we revealed it.

Birmingham City town hall building

3) Stay neutral but stay engaged. Have perspective but don’t take sides.

On the morning after the UK government announced its four-year programme of deep spending cuts the headline in the conservative Daily Telegraph was “Cuts leave middle class £10,000 worse off.” By contrast the liberal Guardian newspaper’s headline was “Axe falls on the poor.” Our take was: “Britain slashes spending, raises retirement age. …unprecedented cost-cutting drive…that will test the strength of economy and of the govt.”

For foreign audience I would contend this is informative, dispassionate and forward-looking.

We need to convey the passion of the argument without partaking in it.

For instance – what drives the Tea Party in the United States? Instead of fixating on their more quirky aspects we have looked at what has driven their emergence, in particular the structural economic challenges which mean that many US jobs that disappeared in the recession will not come back. That has translated into anger. Then we asked: Can the Tea Party convert that anger into influence? And what will that influence do to policy-making, we asked, given the disconnect between the cries of voters for spending cuts and their cries for tax cuts. Both cries are dear to Republicans but few argue that you will make a dent in the worryingly large U.S. deficit if you do both.

Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell speaks at Tea Party rally

If that’s the formula then what practically do we distil from our chemistry? Does it deliver the distinctive coverage that meets the criteria of being worth paying for? The argument can’t often be proved by citing a single story. It’s rather the package of content that a reader signs up for, and Reuters offers far more than national political coverage.

So it is perhaps best to offer a couple of small examples that illustrate a wider approach and leave you to decide if they help make the case.

One contrast would be between our coverage of looming UK defence cuts and that in the national press. The conservative Daily Telegraph, notoriously the house journal of the national military elite, was serially leaked to by rival top brass at the Ministry of Defence who warned of devastation to their respective services if government cuts went ahead as planned. It was great journalism and full credit to the paper’s reporters. But was it hard for readers to get beyond the lobbying and military rivalries played out across the paper to concrete detail on what was likely to happen?

This story mattered to our customers, because Britain is a big military player and a big defence spender; it had both geo-political impact and investor interest. We got the sources we needed at the MOD and kept playing it straight, reporting what we could confirm at each stage of the negotiations in what was a rapidly changing picture. We were pretty much on the money with spending on carriers, cuts to fighter jets and delays to replacing the Trident nuclear weapons system – shares in defence contractors Babcock and BAE Systems fell.

Another example: Brazil’s presidential election went to a second round because last minute voter concerns about the social views of lead candidate Dilma Rousseff deprived her of outright victory. Some news organisations led by describing her as a former Marxist guerrilla tripped up by her support for abortion. Reuters described Rousseff as “the hand-picked successor to President Lula who has pledged to continue policies that have made Brazil one of world’s hottest emerging markets.” The contrast is between the personal interest and the immediate versus the “so what” and the “what next.” Rousseff was duly elected in the second round as the importance of social issues to voters fell away.

I have suggested that changes to how Reuters reports national politics for international audiences are an example of how news organisations can respond to technological, financial or competitive challenges. We don’t always hit the mark with our coverage but directionally we think we’ve got it right. I will leave it to you to decide what lessons can be drawn from our experience and applied elsewhere in the news industry.

A newspaper seller organises British papers in his shop

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?

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.

Facebook status updates become a newsfeed created by people I know and even often like.

A Twitter feed is a news service of facts, opinions and referrals from an ever-vigilant army of people with similar interests and proclivities.

They alert me to news and articles that are almost guaranteed to fit my interests because we are a group that has formed around each other.

And it is a self-correcting group, where each of us has the ability to fire, replace and refine the membership at will.

No reader selected me to be editor-in-chief of Reuters – I was selected by the corporation to lead the news service in its interest.

Conversely, no corporation selected the people whom I follow on Twitter, no board set my blogroll, no executive committee befriended my Facebook pals. I did those things.

What technology has done is it has upended the power equation to give control to the end consumer.

The beauty of that is obvious – control is always satisfying.

The danger is that without care it becomes an information universe that is too hermetically sealed.

The days of the all-powerful paternalistic editor may be dead, but what can’t replace them is the era of people only having their preconceived ideas reinforced.

What’s needed is a new model, one that combines push and pull.

What’s needed is a publishing model that embraces both the professionalism of the journalist and the power of the community.

The great press critic A. J. Liebling wrote that freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one. Today’s technology means that the means of production and the means of distribution actually belong to anyone with access to an Internet onramp.

If you ask the public, “What will you pay for?” The answer is certainly a yes for tools (ipad, iphone, blackberry, android). The answer is certainly a yes for broadband and access.

But what about the content? And what about those who create that content?

Far too often the answer is “no”.

I know even when I last lived in Hong Kong 15 years ago this was an issue the FCC itself had to wrestle with – what was the ideal ratio of full-time correspondent members to journalist members to associate members to corporate members.

I guess from seeing the special promotional offer the club has been running for new correspondent and journalist members that this is still an issue, both because there are fewer people who fit the bill, and also because those who do can’t necessarily PAY the bill.

I’m lucky to be leading a journalistic organization 3,000 professionals strong – that’s an extraordinary figure at a time when other organizations have been shedding staff.

By comparison, in 1987, the year I joined Reuters in Hong Kong and the year I first became a member of this club, I was one of 1,581 journalists in the company.

We’ve survived and thrived by changing.

We aren’t the agency we once were; tomorrow we will be even more different from today.

My job is to ensure that survival and to ensure that the journalistic tradition of yesterday melds with the social media ethos.

Let’s start by thinking back two years.

The photographs of distraught, confused and angry bankers leaving their offices jobless helped symbolize the seismic shifts in the financial system 24 months ago.

During the same period, thousands of journalists lost their livelihood too as the profession and craft changed almost beyond recognition.

If we have learned anything from these past two years, it has been that pure facts are not enough.

Pure facts don’t tell enough of the story; pure facts won’t earn their way.

The arguments about whether the factual seeds of the financial crisis had been adequately reported are ultimately meaningless. The facts were there. But they weren’t put together in a way that was compelling enough or powerful enough to change the course of events.

We’ve been drowning in facts, and that deluge continues to threaten.

How different from October 1851 when Julius Reuter set up his pigeon and telegraph shop, sending out facts to a world starved for them.

Today, it’s context, connectedness and community that matter.

That’s why the traditional agency or “wire” pouring out a never-ending stream of “more” can’t be the answer.

That’s why we must be a service to our customers and to our readers.

That’s why this is the age of the publisher.

Journalists who understand this will survive. Those that don’t will become irrelevant.

A publishing ethos is not defined by the number of stories we deliver. It is defined by our ability to keep our clients tuned in and returning. We will do that with a heightened knowledge of what they need, and with focused breaking news and insight that is fast, relevant, actionable and engaging. Deploying all our multimedia assets allows us to tell stories compellingly via packages of interlinked news and information. And we will enable clients to connect to each other, and to us.

I’m as excited about content that gets created in a chatroom by journalists and readers interacting together as I am about a good story being pushed out. Sometimes I’m even more excited because the intelligent interaction between people who all know something about a topic can create a much smarter product than any one writer struggling at the computer alone.

Is it journalism?

Sometimes it is pure journalism. Sometimes it’s commentary. Sometimes it’s just a sharing of ideas or the annotating of a graphic.

But whatever you call it, it is an intelligent service between the journalist and the customer and that’s something we should be aiming for.

Why? Because like the “pure” journalism of old, it helps makes sense of the world.

Why? Because it is news, data, content and information that is actionable because it adds insight to transparency.

It’s the community that interacts with information and in that interaction creates yet more and better content.

It’s the context and analysis around the news that helps people make better decisions, helps them do their jobs better, and gives them an edge in making sense out of the confusion around us.

It is also the humility to know that the old one-way relationship between editor and audience has no place in the world any more.

There’s huge learning to be had from the audience.

Some of it comes from listening to its expertise. Some of it comes from watching its behavior. Much of it comes from enabling the conversation you get when you combine facts, data, journalism, analysis and fact-based opinion in a really smart way.

The rules of today’s journalistic world are these:

Knowing the story is not enough.

Telling the story is only the beginning.

The conversation about the story is as important as the story itself.

The more you try to be paternalistic and authoritative, the less people will believe you.

The more you cede control to your audience, the more people will respect you

The more you embrace new technology as a platform, the more your ideas will compete.

The more you abandon the faceless and characterless, the more you can set the agenda

The more you look beyond the story for connections, the more value you will have.

And if you have value and no one else does, you will get paid.

Simple? No.

But it is exciting and transforming.

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 way I see it, I prefer to resolve issues with our business development arm rather than through lawyers.  That way we can find new ways that respect each other’s hard work and make journalism prosper in the digital age.  Perhaps it is old fashioned, but to me that is doing unto others.

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.

These were pre-Internet days. No texts by phone – telephone pagers were considered state of the art. No Facebook, no Flickr, and absolutely no Twitter.

As a journalist that seems terrible. As a former hostage I am not so sure.

What might have been the outcome if insensitive, speculative or just plain bad reportage had been provided and available to the hostage takers? Supposing clandestine filming of the preparations to break the siege had been transmitted on the BBC, CNN or Fox?

Experience tells me there is no such thing as a complete news blackout. The very best intentions by responsible media organizations can be confounded either by screw-ups or by commentators sitting outside what used to be a cozy circle. And social media contributors have their own take on information flow – mostly innocent chatter, sometimes rabid or with a fixed agenda.

It’s a good time for media outlets to plan for the next siege. And to determine, in advance, what their response might be.

It’s also a good time to reflect on our reporting of the victims of terrorist acts. My ordeal was a brief one, though sufficient to write my Last Will and Testament and leave me with long-lasting after-effects. It ended my ambition to be a dashing war correspondent and started me thinking about the effects of trauma on members of the media.

Thirty years on, responsible media organizations –Reuters, AP, the BBC, CNN and others – take for granted the duty of care they have for their own staff. Other media organizations might care to examine their own consciences.