No surprise

I am not surprised at all at this natural turn of events where a soulless body is being laid down into its native grounds.

In the past decades Reuters worked hard and paid dearly the price for becoming a truly International news agency. It was a daunting task that only its financial autonomy once protected and supported. Now that this is lost, it is hardly a shock to see Reuters slide back to being a British news organisation.

Two unrelated among an endless list of revelatory proofs of how this autonomy was crucial when Reuters was swaying its identity from local to global: The horrified cries of the journalistic community on 9/11 when neutral Reuters insisted on using the term “militants” to describe those that everyone else was calling “terrorists”, and the (lack of) warmth and endless acrimonious exchanges across the Atlantic that accompanied the appointment of the American Tom Glocer as CEO. ■