Tom Glocer's radical ideas about newspapers

"Why does The New York Times need to have 600-700 journalists? Why not 30 journalists with 30 apprentices? Does The New York Times do a good job covering sports? So-so. Do they do a good job covering business? No. How about The New York Times on Israel, FT on Germany and France, which is really good, ESPN on sports and other smaller things coming together on a style sheet every morning?" Thomson Reuters’ CEO said.

But would people pay for it? "People will pay for quality journalism, whether through micropayments or regular, boring subscription plans."

Glocer said Reuters is comfortable reinventing itself. Until 1970, it never made more than about $100 million a year, he said. Today, it's a $13.5 billion company because it is "getting out of provisional news gathering, like stop being like the AP and other press, and realising there was value in information from professionals in their work, whether it was bankers, lawyers and accountants and health care professionals."

Glocer also discussed Twitter, the fast-growing micro-blogging phenomenon, saying, "I think if you hooked up Einstein to Twitter, it'd be garbage, too."

And he explained why he switched from LinkedIn to Facebook for business networking: "Every asshole who wanted a job was pestering me on LinkedIn and nobody interesting was coming to me."

Glocer also emphasized the need for financial companies to move into more transparent practices and release real-time data sets, instead of quarterly or yearly reports.

"Even when it's down to press releases and Webcasts, it's really all about a bunch of people inside the walls of a company, a corporation pretending that they have some control over what gets out and a bunch of people on the other side, interpreting the official flow, and then most of the art is saying how that's bullshit," he said.

"What if we stopped this charade that people like me pretend to be in control of the timing, and to some extent, the content of my business, and instead release a real-time flow of information?"

Certainly, that will change the game for financial reporters. "I mean, what are good journalists? For good journalists, their job in company reporting is essentially to find out stuff that companies don't want to release outside of their normal cycles or templates, and get that information faster."

Glocer believes the evolution of news will be a slow process. "I've met a lot of smart people in my life, and they're the ones who are eventually always right and they always know where things are going [and] they always underestimate friction in the world and how long it takes to get there."

"Since we're still human beings, living in a friction-filled world, it'll take at least 10 years for the media cycle to catch up," he said.

Glocer was talking in Brooklyn, New York on Monday night at a Futurists Meetup about what financial news and data will look like in 30 years. His remarks were reported by The New York Observer.

“While Glocer’s proposal might seem a little drastic, last week the NYTCo did some scaling back by folding the International Herald Tribune’s site into the NYTimes.com’s global section,” the Observer said.

Postscript: Four days later Tom Glocer said his talk on the future of financial information and the ensuing discussion was not particularly controversial, “but my answer to a somewhat unrelated question on the future of newspapers has been ricocheting in an increasingly inaccurate way across the blogosphere”.

In a posting on his blog on on 11 April, Glocer wrote: “I did, in fact, imagine a future (again 30 years hence) when a newspaper (in my example my hometown New York Times) could employ only 60 journalists rather than the hundreds who work there today. In my example, I challenged our conception of what a newspaper must include and imagined my theoretically ideal paper which combined New York Times content on the Middle-East, the FT on Europe, the Wall Street Journal or Reuters for finance, ESPN for sports and so on. The web, of course, already makes such a mash-up possible today either through browser tabs or RSS feeds.

“In this sort of disaggregated world, the NYT would not need a staff of hundreds to produce a fully integrated newspaper, any more than Apple needs to manufacture its own hard drives or touch screens. I imagined that to really focus on one or two core strengths that it could do better than any other publication, the Times might need 30 star journalists - the Tom Friedmans and William Safires, a couple of great editors, and then an up and coming group (or farm system) of 30 junior staff who could grow into the next generation of stars. I readily admit this would be much different from our current view of what a newspaper should look like, but ironically this alternative reality is not so far removed from that apparently described by the great Times editor Max Frankel in a memo to management several years ago (see The Inheritance Vanity Fair, May 2009).

“Even if this vision of a more open and interoperable newspaper were financially viable, it will be difficult for the current generation of integrated papers to get there. I know from painful personal experience at Reuters that it is much easier to build new from zero to 60 staff than to reduce 1000 to 60. Moreover, there is no reason to believe (just because I came up with a low number to be intentionally provocative) that the ‘right’ number is not 200 or 300. The principle, however, is the same. When I fly on American Airlines, I am actually pleased they feature Starbucks coffee rather than American Airlines coffee. I don’t want Starbucks baristas flying or maintaining the 777, but I see no reason other than inertia why every function must be staffed by ‘insiders.’ 

“The modern digital world is increasingly frictionless. This requires every company that wishes to survive and prosper to really understand and focus on its core competence. To repeatedly ask ‘what do we do better than anyone else? What defines us?’ At Thomson Reuters, some of our businesses used to build their own computer hardware and operate communications networks, but these are not our core skill set. Today we still build our own editing systems, but likely not for ever. Newspapers are glorious, fabled institutions which serve an important civic role, but that does not give them a perpetual bye to avoid change and reinvention like the rest of us.”

Tom Glocer's blog ■