Facts and comment

Bjorn [Edlund] refers to my days at UPI in the 70s and even then we wrote clearly flagged commentary and analysis pieces (never did write for Reuters), so this is nothing new. And of course journalists have their own opinions and try as we might to be objective every story is really subjective - what you choose as the main subject of the lead, for instance. But my main point is that agencies have to understand it doesn't matter what flagging you do on stories to show they are commentary and not news; at the end of the day one reader is going to say to someone "Reuters says" and the differentiating between commentary and news is gone. The company may think it has done all it can to divide hard news from commentary with all of the flagging etc, but the real bottom line is that it all gets translated out there as "Reuters says..." If that's ok for the brand then fine, but if not...  ■