The following is the text of a speech to be given to the Xinhua World Media Summit on October 9. David Schlesinger is the Editor-in-Chief of Reuters.

Ladies and Gentlemen:

It is my great honour to address this gathering here today in Beijing.

Reuters association with China began in the 19th century, when the agency began supplying financial and commodities information to clients here.

By the 1930’s, Shanghai was our Asian headquarters.

Today, our offices in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong provide vibrant newsgathering for our global clients who demand information about this vital economy and provide centres for Chinese clients whose need for reliable and instant information about the world’s finances is intense.

From the beginning, Reuters Chinese name was important. 路透社 – the 透 that is the key second character is part of several important words, each of which is central to our mission

“Penetrating”, “thorough” and “transparent” – these are the concepts that we bring to our reporting; these are the concepts that media in China as elsewhere in the world must strive for.

The financial crisis of the beginning of the 21st century has proven again that the Media’s role in providing the transparency necessary for a healthy market economy is vital.

While this concept has been part of Reuters name and our mission for more than a century and a half, the world of course is much different from when we moved reports using carrier pigeons and the telegraph.

The old world of national markets, operating within limited and largely ring- fenced pools of capital is dead. In the 21st century, financial markets are global and integrated– but still fiercely competitive.

Investments shift, at the touch of a trading keyboard, from one market to another, and from one asset class to another. No national government any longer has complete control of economic policy, and no company, person or organisation has unchallenged access to available capital. Financial markets are global.

Commenting on the challenges this environment creates for China’s financial sector, Premier Wen Jiabao has said:

“It is a long-term task to build a capital market that is transparent, efficient, rational in structure, perfect in function and safe in operation.”

Efficiently informed and transparent financial markets are also healthy, sound, orderly and internationally competitive financial markets. These were the lessons of the 1997 Asian crisis, and are once again the lessons of the current global crisis.

The role of financial media is central to delivering the objectives of informed and transparent financial markets, as well as the social stability that depends upon economic success.

For China, the increasing internationalisation of financial markets has at least two dimensions relevant to financial information.

First, Chinese markets participants and investors need to be efficiently informed about foreign markets, while second, their non-Chinese counterparts overseas need to be efficiently informed about China.

Mutual benefit and success depend upon this reciprocal relationship.

It is noteworthy, for example, that China has permitted more Chinese funds to invest in international equities than it has permitted foreign investors to invest in the Chinese stock market.
Accurate and comprehensive information about foreign financial markets is therefore particularly critical for markets professionals in China.

To provide some examples about the increasing global linkage of financial markets news:

US consumption data has become a reliable proxy indicator of the volume of China’s exports, with direct relevance to stock market prices in China.

Likewise, the announcement by China last November that it was to launch a 4 trillion yuan stimulus package caused sharp rises on stock markets not only in China, but all around the world.

Recent news that China has been taking action against polluting metals smelters caused prices on the London Metals Exchange to soar.

Even a seemingly low-key announcement such as China offering subsidies to producers of solar power equipment can cause major stock market rises for shares in non-Chinese companies active in this field.

The integration of China into global financial markets presents numerous challenges for financial media, on which the financial markets depend. But it also presents some challenges for Chinese policy makers to create the optimal conditions in which financial media can operate to respond efficiently to the needs of both Chinese and non-Chinese markets professionals and investors.

Let me respectfully suggest a few areas where China could take steps to facilitate the quality of financial information and reinforce the contribution of financial media:

• Greater discipline around the public release of official statistics:

Economic statistics are, of course, of critical relevance to financial markets. Still too frequently in China, rumours about statistics circulate for several days before their official release. Often the rumours later turn out to have been correct. Those “insiders” with access to the rumours enjoy unfair trading advantages over those who do not.

The correct policy response is not to punish the media for reporting the rumours, but instead to ensure that the processes and safeguards around the release of statistics are tightened. Indeed, where rumours are influencing the market, the financial media has a duty to report them –as rumours– so that the market as a whole, and not just a section of insiders, is informed, understands why the market is moving in a particular direction, and can take appropriate action to safeguard their investments.

It might, for example, be advisable to shorten the time span between the production of the statistics, and/or limit still further those with privileged access to the data before it is released.

• Enhancing the information disclosure policies of government ministries and official agencies that originate information relevant to financial markets.

There has already been some good progress here, with many more high-level news briefings and press conferences by ministerial agencies than there used to be.

I also welcome the initiatives of those government departments that have adopted web release of their information.

I applaud those that have gone one step further to alert reporters to news announcements with helpful text messages. But there is still further to go in extending these examples of best more widely until they become the norm across government.

• Aligning the treatment of Chinese and Foreign Journalists

It is important to gain greater recognition and acceptance of the important role of foreign financial journalists in China. There continues to be insufficient recognition and understanding of the important role that they have in underpinning China’s own economic goals of maximising foreign investment in China.

Journalists working for foreign media are still too often excluded or granted a lower level of access at key meetings.

As Chinese financial journalism professionalises further, I look forward to mutually beneficial competition. I also look forward to Chinese nationals having full careers within foreign media organisations in China. My fervent wish is that one day soon Reuters financial news editor in China will be a Chinese national – one step on that person’s path to be global editor in chief!

Addressing this gathering just a few days after China’s 60th National Day, it’s important to reflect not only on the challenges but on the progress China has made.

When I was Reuters China bureau chief from 1991 to 1994, there was almost no transparency; statistics could not be relied on; interviews were rare; the state of the economy was a mystery.

Today we report on China’s economy with the same intensity and professionalism as we report on any G7 economy. Our clients demand that, and, increasingly, we are able to provide that.

It is important to note as well that transparency must be a reciprocal virtue.

The news media must also be transparent about its standards and its methods.

This has been particularly true during the current financial turmoil – the media industry was in its own crisis at the same time as it was reporting on the financial downturn; our sources and our readers were in crisis, too, and this meant that our stories were watched extremely carefully and people were quick to complain about anything they didn’t like.

I am proud that most of our reporting was excellent, but those times when we didn’t get it right it was vital to correct our errors swiftly and publicly.

Maintaining our trust with our audience is fundamental to our mission as a news service. Reporting truthfully, reporting accurately, correcting errors, obeying our standards are all vital and can’t be compromised, especially not in the heat of a major and complex story.

We’ve learned important lessons from this period.

One lesson was that our standards needed to be constantly examined and sometimes strengthened.

Another is that transparency is rewarded by trust.

This year we put our entire 500+ page Handbook of Journalism free online for anyone and everyone to read and comment on – we welcome that scrutiny from around the world.

Where our standards are good and we live up to them, we want the attendant praise.

Where we need to improve, or where we fail to live up to our ideals, we want the criticism.

That should be the attitude that we in the media should strive for.

I believe Journalism at its best is a mirror, exposing back to society a true and brutally honest picture of what is going on.

When we fail at that, when our picture is not clear or at all distorted, we deserve to be criticised. We must strive to be that perfect mirror.
But for societies and economies to truly work, to be effective and to be healthy, they need to look into that mirror unflinchingly and honestly.

That is where the virtue of transparency comes in.

That is why companies and government departments and government officials need to be ready to be open. That is why they need to take interviews and to reveal figures. That is why the instinct for secrecy needs to be resisted.

That is why all involved need to help the media help society, by accepting that while openness, transparency and accountability may lead to momentary discomfort and sometimes embarrassment, they are ultimately worthwhile and, in fact, are a precondition to a truly healthy, stable and successful system.

Similarly, a commitment to these practices is also a precondition for China’s development of healthy, sound and internationally competitive financial markets that protect domestic investors and encourage foreign investors to place their capital.

Thank you.

The new world is not so different from the old world – it just moves faster and in different ways.

As early as the 12th century, the image of dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants came into discourse to mean that all knowledge advances based on the discoveries of the past.

In academia and in journalism that notion has been coupled with the doctrine of attribution – you need to acknowledge the shoulders you’re standing on, to give due credit but also to allow others to search out that perch and see if their view from it is any different.

To me, the current debate about the “Link Economy” in content terms is about:

Are you part of the conversation?
Are you adding to the debate or just playing postman and passing others’ views on?
Are you adding value and …
Are you getting rewarded for adding the value you do?

As head of a journalistic army of 2,700 professionals I obviously have an intense vested interest in ensuring that their work is valuable to readers and valued by them.

Part of that involves ensuring that they are in the centre of the action and that they fill their reports with their expertise and experience. Part of that involves ensuring that they are part of the debate, that their reports inform the debate and that the debate, in turn, informs their future reporting.

Our standards on sourcing have always emphasized the importance of giving proper credit, even when quoting from competitors. And, of course, we expect the same in return.

In the writing we do specifically for the web we’re as open to outbound linking as we are to the inbound (see Felix Salmon for some good examples). Much of our other writing doesn’t currently use outbound links because of the particular ecosystem of our professional products, for which a lot of it is specifically written. But that, I am sure, will change over time.

The real danger in not being extremely open to linking, it seems to me, is that by moving yourself out of the mainstream debate you risk irrelevancy.

There will be other shoulders to stand on.

Those shoulders will be the ones that provide the lift.

Those shoulders will be the ones that will help advance knowledge and debate.

The fact that today the crediting can be done with a hyperlink is to me intellectually no different than the use of an academic footnote or a traditional journalistic “…according to XYZ in an interview”. It’s just better, because it’s fast, direct and creates an instant chain of knowledge.

What’s more interesting to me is what one does with the link, not the link itself.

I have a passing interest in the link or retweet that simply passes a nugget along.

I have a bit more interest when the linker or retweeter extracts real gold that was hidden in the original and gives it more prominence.

I have a lot more interest when the link or retweet uses the original as a jumping off point for argument, debate, or development.

That’s when it gets interesting.

And that’s when we, too, stand on that tower of giant shoulders people started visualising in the 12th century.

The follow is the text of a speech by David Schlesinger, Editor-in-Chief Reuters News, to the International Olympics Committee Press Commission on June 23.

On May 29th, James Coleman of Bristol smacked his skull on a tree branch while filing updates to the Twitter service (or tweeting) from his Blackberry during a run. His accident spawned a new word: a “Twinjury”.

Just think about it: Jogging, Blackberrying, tweeting simultaneously – what more 21st century manifestation of the spirit of amateur sportsmanship could there be?

That same day, St. Petersburg Times sports journalist Rick Stroud tweeted on his Twitter page about US Football developments: “Hearing reports that Bucs might be interested in Marvin Harrison,” he wrote to anyone following his feed.

His reader/followers read it and believed what he wrote.

Turned out, though, Stroud had different standards for his Twitter account than for his newspaper.

“People, if I tweet something…it’s … speculation,” he said. “If there’s news, I’ll post it on Tampabay.com.”

What better manifestation of the fact that in the 21st century the concept of “gatekeeping” is history?

A few months earlier, in Davos, I myself tweeted real-time updates from a lunch with George Soros and beat my own correspondent resoundingly in getting news from the lunch out to the world. My new media work beat his efforts which followed our traditional Reuters standards of sending items to an editor before transmission.

What better manifestation of the fact that in the 21st century, rules and standards and procedures drafted in the previous century are being put under severe strain?

Twitter – the service where people send out 140-character updates on everything from important real news to narcissistic details of their personal lives – is no mere fad for several million people around the world, most of them in the key demographic important to IOC rights holders and sponsors.

Facebook – the social networking service – has 200 million active users. That’s a user base the size of the population of Indonesia or of Brazil, and again, nearly all in the key demographic important to the IOC and its friends.

Video of Scottish singer Susan Boyle recently went viral on youtube, garnering 100 million downloads in little over a week – totally out of the control of the show, Britain’s Got Talent, that first gave her a stage or of its production company, which in years past would have held all the reins.

China, around the time of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, turned off access to Twitter and Facebook for its people, but that very act became a story and a subject of angry conversation inside its borders.

In the past weeks, news, pictures and video have come out of Iran using the tools of citizen journalism and social networking – defying attempts of the government to control the story.

I could go on to talk about MySpace or even more importantly the things that we know will be invented and that will become wildly popular by the time the next Olympics rolls around and then the Olympics after that.

But the point, I hope, is clear.
The old means of control don’t work.
The old categories don’t work.
The old ways of thinking won’t work.
We all need to come to terms with that.

Fundamentally, the old media won’t control news dissemination in the future. And organisations can’t control access using old forms of accreditation any more.

Those statements mean what they say and not necessarily more.

I am not arguing that newspapers and magazines and news services will die.
No, just that they must change.

I am not arguing that organisations that define themselves by issuing formal accreditations to professional journalists will disappear from the face of the earth.
No, just that they must change their definition of what they are and what they do.

And speaking of definitions, here’s just one, personal example.
I spend my days at Reuters preaching the multimedia gospel to my 2,700 journalists.

I want people to think holistically. I need them to. More and more, we’re issuing a multimedia report to multimedia-savvy consumers who no longer make a distinction between information they receive from text and information they receive from images. They demand words and pictures to be blended because… well, because that’s the way the world is! That’s the way the internet is. That’s the way schools work. That’s the way businesses work.

So that’s my gospel – to bring multimedia to life at Reuters.

And when I was in Beijing, at the marvellous Olympics there, I was working as well as supervising…and sometimes I did the two simultaneously. So one day when I visited our crew at the swimming cube, I shot a couple of images with a long lens and then blogged on the experience.

Well, you’d have thought I’d mixed the water with the wine, or served beef at a vegetarian banquet! The full weight of the disapproval of the IOC came down upon us. We were pressured to remove my blog post! For, yes, I’d been issued with an “E” writing/editing accreditation and not an “EP” photographic one.

The horror! I’m somewhat surprised you even let me address you today as I’m an unchastened accreditation felon!

(My only plea for mitigation, your honours, is that the AP’s Tom Curley went around Beijing snapping pictures constantly with an “E” accreditation, and you’ve let him address you now twice!)

But seriously – this isn’t a distinction that made sense anymore in 2008 and it makes less sense by the day as media organisations radically reshape newsrooms and roles to deal with both the audience and business realities of the 21st century.

Frankly, your issues are much more serious than the rigid distinction between E and EP.

You need to deal with the almost impossible question of who is a journalist, and what does it mean to report.

Remember my introduction about Twitter and Facebook and youtube and now cast your minds to the next Olympics.

Chances are, a lot of compelling video will be shot on mobile phones and uploaded on sharing sites on the internet within minutes.

Chances are, the first report of a result out of a stadium won’t be Reuters, AP, or Afp. Chances are the first report of a result will be one of 1,572 (to pick a number at random) Twitterers sitting in the stadium banging the result out in a Tweet from their mobile phone.

And since tweets can aggregated and can be searched by keyword – who is the journalist? What is the media organisation? Who has control?

I’m willing to bet that 90% of the athletes participating all have Facebook pages and blogs and Twitter accounts and video-enabled mobiles themselves.

While I know you’ve tried to put some rules and structure around what athletes can and can’t do, frankly I think you’re whistling in the wind.

To say they can blog as long as it isn’t journalistic, misses the point.

To a 23 year-old athlete, used to putting out a “news feed” of every detail of her personal life and training on various social media platforms, there simply isn’t a distinction.

Her life IS a news feed. Her blog IS a publishing platform. Her Facebook page IS the daily newspaper of her life.

And none of these things is really private. They can get indexed by Google; they get searched; they can be public to the world with a potential circulation of every single user of the internet.

Take this scenario: I will easily aggregate my imaginary athlete’s comments and thoughts on winning or losing or on the standard of judging with tweets giving the audience perspective from various parts of the stadium. I’ll then add that in with mobile phone camera pictures and video posted on Flickr and youtube.

Well, my friends, who really needs the rightsholders, AP or Reuters if you can do that?

Some may be frightened of the picture I paint. Some may think I exaggerate.
I actually get energised.

The only question I ask is: So what can we do to survive, or more fundamentally, to stay relevant?

I think the only path is to embrace the change and embrace the new. Longing for the ways of the past will not work.

We in the traditional media and you in the IOC must concentrate our efforts on defining and developing that which really adds value.

That means understanding what really can be exclusive and what really is insightful.
It means truly exploiting real expertise.

It means, to my earlier point, using all the multimedia tools available and all the smart multimedia journalists to provide a package so much stronger than any one individual strand.

It means working with the mobile phone and digital camera and social media-enabled public and not against them.

Working against them would be crazy. Could you imagine gun toting guards trying to confiscate every phone off every spectator? That would become the story of the Games and it would ultimately fail, anyhow.
No, working with them is the answer.

Inspire them, and encourage them to do things that will enhance the Olympic spirit and actually improve the bottom line.

How about a programme to allow link-backs to images from rights holders, creating a partnership?
How about citizen journalism entrees into the rights holders’ reports?
How about competitions with prizes that encourage the best work and best behaviours?
We have spent countless decades enveloping our activities in the cloak of professional mystery.
That era is over.

We must devote the time now to demystifying what we do, and working in concert with those who would seem to be a threat to the old order.

Remember that the world ultimately is a reciprocal place.

Treat people with respect and as partners, and they will partner with you.
Treat people as a threat or as criminals, and they will threaten your institution and ultimately bring it down.
This path doesn’t have to be scary.

It actually is a path we’ve been walking on for some years now.

Even staid old IBM, inventor of the US buttoned-down culture, embraced blogging instead of smothering it. Sure it put some structure around it, and some rules. But now it has some 25,000 internal blogs contributing to innovation.

Each of the new media tools I’ve mentioned, like Twitter or Facebook, is on a hugely innovative and evolutionary path of its own, developing and changing before our eyes.

Let’s embrace the change too, in the way we operate, in the way we organise, in the way we run the Games.
I’d certainly never claim that either the media or the IOC has stood still.

And while I’ve joked about my code “E” run-in with the accrediting authorities, in truth the IOC and the press commission have been hugely helpful to Reuters and to a succession of sports editors and of editors-in-chief over many years; I recognise that and acknowledge it happily and gratefully.

I know that the rules we have evolved for many and varied good, sound and logical reasons.
I know, too, that there are significant and perilous risks involved in any transformation.
The problem, though, is that old media and old institutions change incrementally. The world is changing fundamentally.

We’re changing on an arithmetic scale; the world is changing exponentially.

The four years between summer Olympics can see several generations of change in new media.

And they can see several generations of change in the attitudes and audiences for all media.

In just those four years, the differences between a fresh graduate and a new university student in terms of expectations, demands and experiences with technology, media and information are immense.

We ignore that at our peril.

The athletes who will participate in the next Games will carry in their one telephone handset more computing power than I had in an entire 800 square foot room when I had my first programming job as a teenager.

And so too will the viewers and the consumers upon whom both you and we depend.

Old distinctions and old definitions are falling all around us.

Our goal has to be to preserve the institutions and not the rules or definitions.

And the way to do that is to evolve and morph and develop faster than the changes all around us.

By being swifter in change, by aiming higher than we could have thought feasible, we can make the coverage of the Games stronger for all concerned – from the media to the International Olympic Committee itself to the most important ones of all - the members of the huge global audience.

Thank you.

One news theme I've asked our journalists to be alert to this year is the shift in power and emphasis from est to East.

The rise of China's economic power during 30 years of reform and opening to the world is just one manifestation of this; the knowledge and service powerhouse that India has come in a globalised world is another. At Davos this year I'm moderating a panel on Asian innovation that will surely highlight software advances in Japan, Korea and Thailand as well.

I'm convinced the current global economic crisis must lead to a fundamental reassessment of how power and influence is expressed through the world, from manufacturing and service oriented Asia through the oil-rich Gulf.

This isn't because of "decoupling" - that notion so prominent in discussion circles a year or so ago that said things like China's economic boom could make up for any economic weakness in the U.S. That idea has been well and truly discredited as trade and money flows have caused bank after bank, nation after nation and economy after economy to buckle and bend in the current crisis.

No, it's precisely because of "coupling" that the world will have to rethink radically its governance and regulatory and influence structures.

I see today's opening session at the World Economic Forum as emblematic of this shift. The two world leaders taking centre stage at Davos today are not from the United States or from the United Kingdom or from France or Germany or Italy or Japan or Canada.

First Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao will address the delegates from business, finance and governments (including some 40 heads of state or government) outlining Beijing's approach to solving the world economic crisis. His tour is being billed by Chinese officials as a "trip of confidence" -- the very words signal China's new importance on the world stage.

Then the conference plenary speech will be given by Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who reportedly will call for a change in the world economic order.

Two new messages from two players asserting their position on the world stage - will the delegates at Davos feel the tectonic shifts?

Dean Wright is Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards. Any opinions are his own.

Let’s say it up front: Almost all of you will find something in this column to take issue with.

That’s because the subject is the conflict in Gaza and perceptions of bias in reporting on it. News consumers detect media bias on any number of subjects, but there is nothing like the continuing Mideast conflict to bring out the passions of partisans on all sides.

Here’s a small sample of some of the more restrained comments that have come in to the Reuters reader feedback line:

--“It seems like the whole world wants to condemn Israel for the war/actions it's taking. Sorry Reuters but for me, I can see right through your pro Palestinian slant. Why don't you investigate how a U.N. Camp was used as a staging area for Hamas rockets? …”

--“Your pro Israel reporting from Gaza makes one thing perfectly clear. Israel has some control over Reuters. You are in their pocket. Why else would you choose to slant information?”

­­--“Why does Reuters insist on letting someone such as Nidal al-Mughrabi cover the war on Gaza? His reporting is completely biased and filled with inflammatory rhetoric. Doesn't Reuters have a reporter that understands both sides of the issue and that can JUST REPORT THE NEWS!! I consider such reporting on your part as an insult to my intelligence. Why must you participate in antisemitic propaganda?”

--“Your pro-Israel news coverage of Gaza is shockingly evil. Shame on you! I'll get the real news elsewhere.”

All feedback is taken very seriously by the editorial leadership.

"A story as important to so many people globally always is scrutinised and criticised," says Reuters Editor-in-Chief David Schlesinger. "I take all the comments seriously, because getting it right and giving a true picture of the situation is fundamental to our mission and to the kind of news service I want to run."

Reuters is not alone in catching flak on coverage. And we’re not alone in examining that coverage. The BBC and The New York Times have both looked at their coverage, concluding that, generally, it has been fair. But both organizations noted the difficulties of covering the conflict in Gaza, as does Reuters Jerusalem bureau chief Alastair Macdonald.

For the past two years, he says, it has been virtually impossible for Reuters staff in Gaza to leave the territory for training, rest or recuperation, as they are routinely denied exit permits by the Israeli army. The army has also prevented Reuters from sending Arabic-speaking staff based in Jerusalem or the West Bank to Gaza and more recently has banned foreign journalists from Gaza entirely. This means Reuters has been unable to send reinforcements or replacements to the Gaza bureau since the Israeli offensive began on Dec. 27. On Thursday, Reuters and other media were forced to evacuate their offices after an apparent Israeli rocket strike on the Gaza building that houses the bureau.

“Unlike many media organizations who complain that ‘there are no journalists in Gaza,’” says Macdonald, “we are very fortunate to have a team of up to 20 people working for us, led by professional journalists of long standing. Their resources, however, are greatly stretched and, aside from persistent fears for the safety of our colleagues and their families, we work in permanent anxiety that overworked equipment will fail and we will be unable to replace it.”

Within Gaza, says Macdonald, senior Hamas officials have generally accepted Reuters’ right to report independently.

“Hamas officials have largely disappeared from view since the offensive began, so they have not been in a position to restrict our reporting, even if they wanted to,” he says. Since Hamas took over, Reuters journalists “have occasionally faced problems with low-level Hamas police and other representatives who try to prevent us filming certain types of event. Such people are particularly reluctant that we should cover events that they see as evidence of challenges to their authority.”

However, Macdonald says: "We have had frank and open meetings with senior Hamas leaders when we have had concerns and are generally satisfied ... We generally feel that (they) respect our independence and give us the freedom to do our jobs. We have reported incidents of official repression, including torture ... and quoted people making serious allegations against the authorities."

The Reuters team on the ground in the region is a mixture of Israelis, Palestinians and other nationalities. Reuters Politics & General News Editor Sean Maguire says most have worked for Reuters for many years. “All of them are well-versed in the need to be scrupulous in our use of language, attentive to our rules on rigorous sourcing and aware of our requirement to produce a balanced news file,” he says.

But in a story with so many different datelines, it’s up to the editing desk to pull the threads together, see though the “fog of war” and ensure that the coverage has balance and appropriate context. This team in London has decades of experience and includes several editors who have worked in the Middle East on assignment or have reinforced the Jerusalem bureau. Maguire and I agree that the editors are acutely aware of both the realities on the ground and the complex history of the region.

Several readers have written to say they see bias in Reuters coverage because they have seen stories, like this one, that don’t tell them directly why Israel launched its offensive on Dec. 27, after Hamas militants ended a six-month truce and started firing more rockets into southern Israel. A search of our stories on the Gaza conflict shows that, while there have been stories that have lacked that context, most have included it or similar explanations of the roots of the conflict.

“We are a real-time news service so we are continually tweaking and improving the news file, hour by hour,” Maguire says. “Some stories with new developments have to be moved very quickly to ensure our customers have the latest information. To do so they need to be short, so they will not contain all the background. However, such stories are quickly updated and lengthened to include the appropriate context.”

Other readers have suggested that stories focusing on the conditions in Gaza reflect a bias against Israel and call for more coverage of the hardships Israelis are suffering in the face of continuing rocket attacks. The focus of the coverage has certainly been within Gaza, because that’s where the story—and the bulk of casualties and destruction—has been.

Still, Reuters has made strong efforts to document the situation in Israel. Macdonald wrote movinglyabout how the shadows of history hang over Yad Mordechai, a kibbutz within sight of the smoke of the Gaza conflict. And Douglas Hamilton reportedon the strong resolve of residents of Sderot, a southern Israeli town that has borne the brunt of Hamas rocket attacks. The townspeople’s advice to the Israeli forces in Gaza: Keep it up. This coverage, in turn, has drawn criticism that it too readily accepts an Israeli view of the history of the region.

Even user-generated content is not immune to charges of bias. Reuters Your View, which solicits photographs from Reuters.com users, was accused of imbalance in publishing pictures of anti-Israel demonstrations, but none from the other side. In the Jan. 2 showcase of Your View pictures there were 10 images of anti-Israel protests from six locations and seven different photographers. No pro-Israel or anti-Hamas pictures were received that week. On Jan. 9, there were images of seven anti-Israel protests from four locations and six photographers. There was one image of a rocket attack on Israel, selected from three pictures that were sent. Again, no pro-Israel demonstration images were received that week, reports Leah Eichler, editor of the online newsroom.

Other readers have suggested that journalist Nidal al-Mughrabi’s first-person accounts from within Gaza, such as this onein which he describes the horrified reactions of his children during an Israeli raid, disqualify him from reporting on the conflict. Some readers have suggested that it’s impossible for a journalist to set aside his feelings and report objectively. However, I think a close reading of the article shows that while al-Mughrabi’s first reaction was to make sure his family was safe, he quickly set about the journalist’s work of filing a complete, accurate report of what was going on. “That is what you would expect from a seasoned and responsible reporter of Nidal’s high caliber,” says Maguire.

“I think first-person accounts bring to life the drama and the horror of this conflict,” says Maguire. “Journalists are human beings as well, and it is honest of our reporter Nidal to acknowledge his concern as a parent and the fear of his children when they found themselves under bombardment.”

Indeed, all journalists are called on almost daily to set aside their personal feelings or politics as we objectively cover wars, elections and other stories. Some partisans will never believe it’s possible for journalists to do that. Thankfully, I see it happen every day.

Editor-in-Chief Schlesinger puts it this way:

"Reuters News has journalists from 80 different nationalities working around the world, sometimes in their homes and often in other places. There are certainly times when events affect them and their families personally. But our professional ethics and our company's Trust Principles mean they try their utmost to put their personal feelings aside in the interest of telling the story truthfully and without bias. As an organisation we have our standards and editing procedures in place to safeguard our report. As editor-in-chief, I take my responsibility for maintaining our standards extremely seriously, and will not tolerate willful breaches. "

So—has Reuters News given people reason to believe we might be biased against Israel? Perhaps, if they believe a journalist can never separate his reporting of what he sees from what he may feel. And, yes, there have been stories—not many, but some—that have lacked context and have seemed imbalanced. We need to be more vigilant in making sure that all our stories carry appropriate context, as we can’t assume that every reader has read every one of our stories and thus can see our overall lack of bias.

And what seems to be pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli reporting to readers on one continent may not raise any eyebrows on another. It’s also fair to say that articles from different news organizations have differences in tone. That's good. Who would want one big, bland news source for the world? Reuters News is produced for a global audience and there are bound to be different reactions in the United States, Europe and other regions.

But has there been systematic bias against either side? No. I believe Reuters journalists–-the text, photo and video journalists on the ground and the editors who pull it all together-- have, by and large, produced journalism that is fair and as complete as possible under the most difficult circumstances. Can we do better? Surely. Will we satisfy the partisans on both sides? Probably not.

I recently visited one of the most frightening sites on the Web—the place where I look at my shrinking retirement account.

As I calculated the investment loss since the steep decline in the markets began, and particularly since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in mid-September, some questions arose (in addition to: Will I ever be able to retire?).

–Did we in the media do our job in reporting on the run-up to the crisis?

–Now that an “official” recession has been declared in the U.S. and the depth of the crisis is becoming clearer around the world, are we in the media keeping things in perspective? Should we even be using words like “crisis” or “meltdown?”

On the first question, I can’t help thinking of Claude Rains’ “Casablanca” character Captain Renault, who was “shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on” in Rick’s club. In hindsight, given the current state of the financial markets, wasn’t it obvious a problem was brewing?

Not necessarily. And it probably wouldn’t have been obvious to anyone reading online or print coverage or watching television news in the United States.

A look at a study by the Pew Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism indicates that, in the United States, coverage of the economy was pretty much drowned out by coverage of the presidential election—at least until the two stories converged in mid-September. Indeed, as the Pew material shows, in the month preceding the week of Sept. 15, which saw the Lehman bankruptcy, the Merrill Lynch sale, the AIG bailout and large drops in share prices, the proportion of the news hole devoted to the economy reached a low for the year, filling only 4.8 percent of the time on television and radio and space in the print and online media. Since then, that focus has shifted, as the presidential campaign narrative became, again, “it’s the economy, stupid,” and as the presidential transition has focused on U.S. economic problems.

Reuters News Editor-in-Chief David Schlesinger is skeptical that financial journalists could have done much more to predict the depth of the crisis.

“Journalists do best when reporting what’s happening and giving the news context and analysis,” he said. “We also do well when we look backwards and discuss past events from the perspective of the present. We do least well when we prognosticate. While our reporting and commentary did discuss potential weak points in the economy, we did not — and nor frankly could we — accurately predict the calamitous events of this year.”

Schlesinger worries, though, that there was a certain inevitability to the crisis and that the media played a role.

“I do worry about the narrative lines of reporting that contributed to the crisis,” he said. “To take just one example, much of the crisis was caused by banks taking on excess risks in the pursuit of higher profits. Yet had a major bank president stepped back from that fray and declined to participate, the ‘grammar’ of our results reporting would surely have compared that bank’s results negatively against expectations and against its peers.

“That brave bank president would surely have lost at least his bonus and probably his job. The very fear of that kind of negative comparison helped spur things on — as Citibank’s ex-CEO Charles Prince said (while still in his job), ‘As long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance.’

“We in the media help play that music, probably exacerbating the highs on the way up and the lows on the way down.”

So did our reporting help change the tune that was being played? Did it raise questions about the factors that contributed to the crisis, including complex financial instruments, subprime mortgage lending and excessive risk?

To fully answer that would require a deeper analysis than we have room for in this space, but there is evidence that questioning notes were sounded.

As early as Aug. 18, 2003, a Reuters story quoted Fed governor Edward Gramlich citing the dangers of “predatory lending” in extending subprime credit. By 2006, the pace had accelerated. A Factiva search of Reuters News found 128 stories that mentioned the phrase “subprime mortgage” that year, including a number in which analysts predicted a deterioration in credit quality. The crescendo came in 2007, when there were more than 10,000 stories that referenced subprime mortgages and when Reuters.com built a special section to house material on the issue. That section developed into the current Crisis in Credit and Housing Market sections.

Still, the overall “music” was loud and infectious and it’s easy to understand why so many couldn’t stay off the dance floor.

Now that the crisis is here, some are accusing the media of deepening the problems. Richard Lambert, director general of the CBI, a U.K. employers group and a former editor of the Financial Times, said “careless headlines or injudicious reporting risk becoming self-fulfilling prophecies of a very serious nature.” He urged journalists to be especially vigilant in their fact-checking and called on the press to avoid such words as “panic,” “fear” and “chaos.”

He also suggested that journalists should cut bankers, regulators and politicians a little slack, since “precious few journalists gave any hint at all of what was about to come.”

The FT’s Lex column (Note: subscription required) accused Lambert of shooting the messenger and lamented that some would “seek to clamp down on the fourth estate…, hoping regulation will recreate a golden age when the business press was a tamer, more deferential beast” that “could be hushed up in times of financial turbulence.”

But those days are gone, as Lex put it. “The digital revolution, by lowering entry barriers and intensifying competition, has put paid to all that. It will not return.”

And good riddance. As a card-carrying lover of the First Amendment and the digital revolution, I’m happy those days are gone. But with our freedom comes a sometimes frightening responsibility, especially in troubled economic waters.

As Schlesinger says, “We have a responsibility to be careful, and most of our reporting has been very careful. But we too have played some discordant notes and we need to learn from that.”

What do you think? Did we in the media do our job in reporting on the financial crisis, both before the market collapse in September and since? Are we being careful enough not to sow panic and make things worse? How can our reporting help you weather the storm?

Please post your comments here.

I’ll be using this space regularly to explore issues arising from Reuters and other media coverage of the world and to have a discussion with you. Among the topics I plan to look at: the dangers and rewards of covering religion; the use of anonymous sources; the debate over shield laws for journalists, and much more. I’ll also be providing lots of space for you to have your say.

In the meantime, I’ll be watching that retirement account.

Dean Wright, Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards

This is Day One of the new Reuters News, a news organization that is part of Thomson Reuters, the company formed when two great leaders of news and information came together.

As Editor-in-Chief, I want to assure you that the Reuters News you will see will maintain its commitment to independent, trustworthy, useful news; news that is free from bias and filled with the insight you need.

That’s the excellence that saw us recently win, among other awards, a Pulitzer Prize for spot photography and a Society of American Business Editors and Writers award for commentary.

Over the next weeks and months, we will combine the best from the old Reuters news and from Thomson Financial news; we’ll be bringing together people and services. Most of the difference will be seen immediately on our desktop products for financial professionals, but over time I’m sure you’ll see new bylines and data on our Reuters Media consumer-facing sites as well.

My commitment is for Reuters News to be the global, insightful and innovative powerhouse you want to serve your news needs in words, pictures and video. There are more than two and a half thousand professional journalists around the world backing up my words with their actions every minute of every day of the year.

David Schlesinger is Editor-in-Chief, Reuters News, Thomson Reuters