Reuters in 2010 and a look ahead to 2011

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.

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

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.

David Schlesinger is editor-in-chief of Reuters. This column was first published as a Reuters Editors blog on 1 December 2010.​ ■