Reuters news: the long and the short of it

Talk about a crazy carousel and Alice through the Looking Glass. The announcement that, as news coverage in the Americas is aimed at excellence in breadth and depth, there will now be greater discipline on story length - under 500 words - to make time for more reporting and editing of distinctive content seems exactly the opposite of what editor-in-chief Steve Adler announced a couple of years or more ago: that Reuters would focus on fewer stories but stories of greater length in order to showcase our breadth and depth. That gave birth to the 4,000-word non-analytical analyses, the non-exclusive exclusives and the purblind insights, among other abortions. If this means those are a thing of the past that is generally a good thing. But it certainly continues the cyclical tradition of announcing with great fanfare new directions, desk transfers (New York to Washington) etc only to recant and do a 180 degrees reversal a few years down the line. ■