Tag Archives: Thomson Reuters

Is quitting Reuters hurting CNN?

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On the one hand, they’re put­ting money into aggress­ive expan­sion of the news­gath­er­ing base (good stra­tegic move), on the other — people are start­ing to notice their expos­ure. Take this from Fol­low The Media:

It was 1100 CET (0500EST) and hav­ing heard on the radio of bomb­ings in Algi­ers FTM switched on CNN Inter­na­tional to see what was going on. But instead of a news­cast there was just a minute or so of old head­lines, abso­lutely noth­ing about Algi­ers, and then it was onto yet another repeat of the network’s inter­view with the Nobel Peace Prize Laur­eates. Switch to BBC World, and they’re all over Algi­ers, their strap line is quot­ing Reu­ters say­ing there are large num­bers of dead and injured, and they are talk­ing live on-air to someone in Algiers.

Makes one ques­tion how there could be so much dif­fer­ence in start­ing up on the day’s biggest story. Could it be that BBC sub­scribes to more news agency sources than does CNN? As a viewer it seems we get what the news net­work pays for.

Should CEOs be bloggers or bosses?

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Reuters CEO Tom Glo­cer thinks it is no longer either/or. He writes on blog­ging, Face­booking etc:

…it could be argued, I sup­pose, that ima­gin­a­tion and exper­i­ment­a­tion should be left to more junior or younger staff, and the chief exec­ut­ive should only per­form “ser­i­ous” duties like strategy for­mu­la­tion and order­ing people around.

I think this is a lousy and dis­con­nec­ted way to lead. I believe that unless one inter­acts with and plays with the lead­ing tech­no­logy of the age, it is impossible to dream the big dreams, and dif­fi­cult to cre­ate an envir­on­ment in which cre­at­ive indi­vidu­als will feel at home.

This does not mean that the CEO needs to pro­gram a third-party app on Face­book, but I believe it is ulti­mately more use­ful in under­stand­ing busi­ness con­cepts like viral mar­ket­ing, crowd-sourcing or fed­er­ated devel­op­ment to use a live example rather than wait for the Har­vard Busi­ness Review art­icle to appear in three years time.

CNN drops Reuters TV

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Every time an agency con­tract comes up for review at a news organ­iz­a­tion, there will always be someone say­ing: “Couldn’t we just do without [insert name of agency here]?” Gen­er­ally, it is what’s known as a nego­ti­at­ing tac­tic. This time it’s Tony Mad­dox of CNN Inter­na­tional, and the agency is Reu­ters, and appar­ently he means busi­ness.

There are very good reas­ons not to rely on agen­cies. Oper­a­tion­ally, it forces your news­gath­er­ing to be more self-reliant, but the real bonus is com­mer­cial — you own what you shoot. And there are very good reas­ons to rely on them — they have dif­fer­ent and com­ple­ment­ary strengths, they can be in places you can’t ever be.

Still dis­en­tangling your­self from a rela­tion­ship like this is a major logist­ical head­ache. I’m sure Reu­ters (and CNN teams)will be keep­ing tabs on all those times CNN don’t have access to the key pic­tures or the cru­cial angle. But will the audi­ence notice?

Per­son­ally, I’d be more con­vinced of the com­mer­cial argu­ment if Mad­dox put num­bers on the invest­ment CNN is mak­ing in its news­gath­er­ing. If it’s more than it was pay­ing Reu­ters that’s an invest­ment. If not, that squeez­ing sound is the belt being tightened.