Has Reuters given up on news?

“Ancient news outfit Reuters has given up on working out news based on facts and will ask the virtual prediction site, Hubdub what will happen instead,” The Inquirer, a UK-based website that bills itself as “News, reviews, facts and friction”, said on Tuesday.

Hubdub, launched in February, is an online game that has created a section that allows players to predict the outcome of ongoing Reuters stories. Reuters will be able to establish a network of “friends” and link back to its own widgets and articles, according to the website www.journalism.co.uk.

Reuters questions have gained popularity on the web, in particular with financial news forecasts, Hubdub said. Its members made predictions about the recent HBOS take-over by Lloyds TSB “long before mainstream media” began covering the story, Hubdub founder Nigel Eccles said.

“We want to build up our user base, and as that gets bigger they’ll see Reuters’ questions, which sends traffic back to those news sites,” he said. Hubdub has 150,000 users.

“Reuters are obviously very very aware of how their news affects the markets - we’d be pretty aware of not letting that become an issue,” Eccles said.

Reuters’ top question on Hubdub on Tuesday was: Who will use the word “regulation” most in the first presidential debate? Respondents were split evenly between Barack Obama and John McCain.

“Reuters is a phenomenal agency,” Eccles said. “The technology we’ve got can make the experience for their readers really interesting. We’re really excited about the editorial content that comes out of it.”

He said Hubdub’s growth has “been very, very quick” and the relationship with Reuters took just two months to finalise after a “chance encounter” with the organisation in the United States.

Asked whether people could make predictions to better their own shares, Eccles said: “We’ve been running the markets for about 8 months now, and we’ve become pretty good at catching most of them. In general, we catch the vast majority of it.”

The Inquirer commented: “Apparently the combined fortune-telling powers of Hubdub members is far greater than all of the hacks in all of the world.”

The Washington Post, which launched a similar current events-related prediction market in July, said Reuters’ Hubdub connection could have a more significant impact: “If the site can grow a large and diverse user base, it could potentially help pollsters and news organizations quickly get a feel for the public’s perception on a given issue.”

Hubdub is not Reuters’ first foray into the virtual world. Two years ago it launched the first ever virtual news bureau on Second Life, an online world inhabited by hundreds of thousands users with its own virtual economy. The opening of the bureau was described as part of Reuters’ strategy to embrace new digital platforms to deliver next generation news and information.

“Reuters is all about innovation - new technologies, new audiences, and new ways of presenting the news,” CEO Tom Glocer said at the time. “In Second Life, we’re making Reuters part of a new generation. We’re playing an active role in this community by bringing the outside world into Second Life and vice versa.”

Reuters’ Second Life bureau has a virtual bureau chief known as Adam Reuters and a reporter called Erik Reuters. In real life they are Reuters journalists Adam Pasick, a technology and media correspondent, and Erik Krangel, who covers technology from  New York. ■