A guide for the perplexed, please

I’ve been increasingly perplexed over the new directions in Reuters management over the past year and a half, as already mentioned in previous mail. Some of these points may seem minor, but they are indicative of a frame of mind. So I did a bit of “investigative journalism” and went to Reuters Ethics and Standards department for elucidation on some of the issues.

1) On August 1, I mentioned the Reuters piece in April devoted to Paul Ingrassia’s book Engines of Change. I thought it crossed the line of self-promotion, given Ingrassia’s present title of Reuters deputy editor-in-chief.

Ethics and Standards replied: “Written by a Pulitzer Prize winner, the book looks at an important U.S. industry, one to which Reuters devotes significant and detailed coverage. Many different publications wrote about ‘Engines’ or reviewed it, from the New York Times to the Weekly Standard. In an August 11 article Bloomberg Businessweek put it on its list of the top business books of 2012. So was it worthy of news coverage? I believe it was.”

Still not satisfied I went back to them and told them so. I got this in reply: “Not sure if your point of your question is ethics, or fairness, or Reuters tradition - which I understand would have eschewed such features in the name of modesty - but again, ethically, in my opinion, the decision on whether or not to cover an employee’s work should be based first on whether the subject is newsworthy, not whether the author works for Reuters.”

To me it still smacks of self-promotion, which has recently seemed more exacerbated.

2) In that same August 1 letter, I noted that Mark Egan, whose byline appeared on the infamous Soros story, was let go when his position as New York bureau chief was eliminated. I asked whether anything happened to the editorial gatekeepers who insisted on putting out the story despite the misgivings of many others.

Ethics and Standards replied: “Your second point, on the Soros story, seems to imply that ‘the burgeoning career of the editorial gatekeeper or gatekeepers who insisted on pushing out this highly dubiously sourced story’ should have come to some inglorious end, preferably public. I can only respond that mistakes happen, despite our best efforts, as they do at other major news organizations, and preventing them from recurring should be the foremost objective of the newsroom. The story was corrected and some changes in the editorial process were made in the hope of preventing such painful errors in the future.”

But my argument was not that the gatekeepers should have come to an inglorious end, but that Egan should not have and another post could have been found for him, especially as the gatekeepers’ mistake was by far the more egregious. A whole slew of desk editors was adamantly opposed to sending out the story, but the gatekeeper-in-chief, if my informants are correct, went right ahead, bulldozed over everybody and everything, and ordered the story to be published.

3) Intrigued by Ethics and Standards’ assertion that “mistakes happen, despite our best efforts, as they do at other major news organizations, and preventing them from recurring should be the foremost objective of the newsroom,” I raised with the department the issue of veteran war reporter David Fox, who was summarily fired by Editor-in-Chief Steve Adler only weeks after he (Adler) had assumed this top position.

Ethics and Standards replied: “I checked around, and no one from Reuters will discuss the Fox incident with you because it is a personnel issue.”

I know some former colleagues agree with Fox’s dismissal, but I feel very strongly that we have to stand for something more than “you’re only as good as your last mistake”. According to informants, Fox sent a very off-colour comment after the Fukushima nuclear incident on a private message wire that was only accessible to some 20 other people. He realised his mistake almost immediately, and erased or tried to erase the message, but one of the others snitched on him.

I remember a much more widely distributed off-colour incident many decades ago and the way it was handled. One Christmas eve the sub on the South Africa desk in London, celebrating the festivities early and often, fed the ticker-tape of a previous day into the transmitter back to front, adding on at the end “the best of British luck” followed, if I remember rightly, by a rather common four letter word. Of course, the last add-on was the only thing that arrived in legible form at the headquarters of the South African Press Association, which complained bitterly to the News Editor, Doon Campbell. We all thought the sub was for the chop.

Now Doon had only one full arm and hand, a birth defect, the other stump ending in a mechanical hook-like contraption, but he had waded ashore with British Royal Marine commandos on D-Day and tapped out his first dispatch under a hail of shells and bullets in a muddy Normandy ditch. He was the first with a report from Belsen concentration camp and, later, scored a world-wide scoop with Gandhi’s assassination. He gave the sub a right bollocking, banned alcohol from the editorial floor under pain of instant dismissal, but never fired that poor man.

4) In July, when Jim Vicini resigned after receiving a PIP, I wrote an open letter to Adler asking him whether he was aware of some of Vicini’s stellar service to Reuters. I probably didn’t expect any reply, though I think Adler is definitely under a moral and ethical obligation to provide one. Vicini, neither the head of nor part of a team but solely by dint of his own talent, should have been nominated for and awarded a Pulitzer for breaking news for his coverage of the Supreme Court Bush v Gore decision in December 2000.

These PIPs are a very sorry state of affairs. It’s not that the old management didn’t engage in such practices. We all remember when some 650 Reuters employees were laid off to save money in 2002, the same year in which the cost cutting exercise saw CEO Tom Glocer take a $1 million bonus. Now it is reported that the dismissals are linked to recruiting people familiar to the new management at significantly higher salaries.

6) One final point – quality control. In March Americas Editor Jim Gaines sent out the following message: “‘Narrowly backed a key plank’ is in no way acceptable English. Our political coverage is full of this laziness. In fairness, so is others’, but let’s work on it.” This was followed by a second message: “Oopsy-daisy. Deep, red-faced apologies to those named here.”

He had apparently sent the message too widely, but that is not the point. The point is he is giving quality advice without explaining what is wrong with what he is faulting or, much more importantly, giving a serviceable alternative. Does he think the phrase is a cliché? If so, say so. I don’t think it is at all. If they in fact narrowly backed a key plank, then they narrowly backed a key plank. More to the point, give your alternative. There’s nothing quite like it for focussing the mind and you owe it to yourself and your staff if you are trying to improve quality.

It’s not that I’m picking on the new management for the sake of it. There was certainly no love lost between me and previous managements. Many previous managements at times also seemed to be working along the principle of “if Caligula appointed his horse consul of Rome, why shouldn’t I appoint a laughing jackass”. The issue is much more serious than that. I just can’t see where Reuters is going at the moment.

Is it just to get Pulitzers? Is it just to try to get our own talking heads on U.S. TV talk shows, as with Chrystia Freeland, though with all the bobble-headed nodding up and down I’m not sure that that is the best public face that Reuters wants to put forward, especially in the absence of any real insight and substance? Both these directions would seem to cut back on Reuters core values as a news agency and as such endanger its future. ■