Reuters again expresses, as it has in prior statements and in evidence presented to the Court, its regret for the error made in the television script for our report distributed on February 18, 2012 about the Budekan Ninja Club.

The error was a product of mistakes by our producer in Tehran, who no longer works for Reuters. We have taken steps in adjusting our internal processes to avoid making such errors again.

Reuters also wishes again to make clear that Ms. Hafezi, who is the sole defendant in the proceedings before the Court, had no role in or responsibility for the production of this script or the accompanying video.

As stated to the Court, as well as in prior correspondence to the Government, Reuters again unreservedly extends its apologies to the members of the Ninja Club and its officials, and the leadership,  Government and people of Iran, for the original television script’s implication that there was anything threatening or aggressive in the Budekan Ninja Club’s training or intentions for its members.

Reuters has never believed that the Ninja Club or its leaders or members represent any such threat.

By Aaron Maasho

Ethiopia and Eritrea are still at each others’ throats. The two neighbours fought hammer and tongs in sun-baked trenches during a two-year war over a decade ago, before a peace deal ended their World War I-style conflict in 2000. Furious veRed Sea, UNrbal battles, however, have continued to this day.

Yet, amid the blistering rhetoric and scares over a return to war, analysts say the feuding rivals are reluctant to lock horns once again. Neighbouring South Sudan and some Ethiopian politicians are working on plans to bring both sides to the negotiating table.

Asmara has been named, shamed and then slapped with two sets of U.N. sanctions over charges that it was aiding and abetting al Qaeda-linked rebels in lawless Somalia in its proxy war with Ethiopia. However, a panel tasked with monitoring violations of an arms embargo on Somalia said it had no proof of Eritrean support to the Islamist militants in the last year.

Nevertheless, Eritrea's foreign ministry wasted little time in pointing a finger of accusation at its perennial rival. “The events over the past year have clearly shown that it is in fact Ethiopia that is actively engaged in destabilising Eritrea in addition to its continued occupation of sovereign Eritrean territory in violation of the U.N. Charter,” the ministry said in a statement last month.

The Red Sea state was referring to Addis Ababa’s open declaration in 2011 in which its late Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said his country would no longer take a “passive stance” towards its rival following Eritrea’s alleged plot to bomb targets in the Ethiopian capital during an African Union gathering of heads of state.

Then foreign minister (and now premier) Hailemariam Desalegn followed up on the rhetoric soon afterwards by disclosing his government’s support to Eritrean rebels. Meles and Eritrean President Isaias Afewerki were once comrades-in-arms, even rumoured to be distant relatives. Ethiopia’s late leader rubber-stamped a 1993 referendum that granted independence to the former province after their rebel groups jointly toppled Communist dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam’s military junta two years earlier.

The love affair did not last long. The pair fell out spectacularly after Eritrea introduced its own currency in 1997 and Ethiopia responded by insisting on trading in dollars. Their economic spat aggravated already simmering border tensions, which culminated in Eritrea deploying its tanks months later and occupying hotly disputed territory that was under Addis Ababa’s administration.

Ethiopian troops breached Eritrea’s trenches nearly a year later and retook contested ground - namely the flashpoint town of Badme – before a peace deal was signed. What then followed is the sticking point that remains today. An independent boundary commission awarded Badme to Eritrea in 2002 but the ruling is yet to take effect. Ethiopia wants to negotiate its implementation and warns that delimitation of the border as per the finding would unreasonably split towns and other geographical locations into two.

Asmara on the other hand insists on an immediate hand-over. The bickering has evolved into a proxy war and diplomatic skulduggery as both sides attempt to bring about regime change in the other. But despite the harsh words, mediation efforts are in the pipeline. Deng Alor, neighbouring South Sudan's Minister for Cabinet Affairs, told Reuters on Wednesday his newly-independent country is about to embark on rounds of shuttle diplomacy between the capitals of Ethiopia and Eritrea. Both countries, he said, have given their blessing.

A handful of Ethiopian members of parliament are also devising a similar initiative, local sources say. Addis Ababa has never ruled out mediation. But even though Eritrea publicly dismisses any idea of a thaw in strained relations before the Badme spat is resolved, recent developments might change its mind, some believe.

Ethiopian analysts think Asmara now realises that its neighbour may easily adopt a more belligerent stance following the sudden death of Meles, who they say stood firm against a potential slide towards full-scale conflict. And of course not all Ethiopians express enthusiasm about an independent Eritrea, the creation of which left their country without access to the Red Sea.

Some diplomats say the chances of both sides making drastic concessions from their current positions remain slim. So will the mediation efforts finally yield a deal?

By Cosmas Butunyi

The dust is finally settling on the storm that was kicked off in South Africa by a controversial painting of President Jacob Zuma with his genitals exposed.

The country that boasts one of the most liberal constitutions in the world and the only one on the African continent with a constitutional provision that protects and defends the rights of  gays and lesbians , had   its values put up to  the test  after an artist    ruffled feathers by a painting that questioned the moral values  of the ruling African National Congress . 

For weeks, the storm ignited by the painting  called  ‘The Spear’, raged on, sucking in Goodman Gallery that displayed it and City Press, a weekly newspaper that had published it on its website. The matter eventually found its way into the corridors of justice, where the ruling ANC sought redress against the two institutions. The party also mobilised its supporters to stage protests outside the courtroom when the case it filed came up for hearing. They also matched to the gallery and called for a boycott of City Press , regarded as one of the country's most authoritative newspapers. 

 The controversy  has cooled down now that the newspaper  has  removed the artwork from its website, the gallery pulled it down  after it was defaced. The ANC  has withdrawn its lawsuit.

Throughout this drama, one issue that came up frequently in the huge debate that it kicked off, was the issue of artistic licence, specifically in Africa.

“We say No to abuse of artistic expression”, a placard screamed during one of the protests called by the ANC outside a court in Johannesburg after a case the ruling party had filed came up for hearing.  

In other parts of Africa novelists such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o of Kenya, playwright Wole Soyinka of Nigeria, and poet Jack Mapanje of Malawi have been locked up in the past for their critical writings.  

Where does much of Africa stand when it comes to artists challenging the ethos by which much of the continent is guided?.   What role should art play in African society?   Can art be used in modern Africa to correct ills of society?. What of African playwrights and novelists who have  been thrown behind bars for too much scrutiny of national governments.

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?