Devin Wenig sees more media sector mergers

Wenig, chief executive of the group’s markets division that includes Reuters news agency, predicted the return of media sector merger activity.

“We’re a b-to-b [business-to-business] company but marriage of content and distribution has been critical… Reach and original content production can sit together. I would not be surprised at seeing mergers and acquisitions coming back.”

Wenig said the company is still integrating its own big merger so won’t be making massive acquisitions of its own, but expect smaller deals — like its recent purchase of Breakingviews — instead.

Wenig said the company would add paid services to its reuters.com news site this year. The site gets 30 million unique users a month.

He said Thomson Reuters would soon begin to syndicate third-party content and make it available to its customers. “When we talk to clients they say that’s what we need.” As part of that, the company would also syndicate some local content (although it has no plans to produce local content of its own).

Outside the conference venue in New York, demonstrators protested about prolonged contract negotiations between Thomson Reuters and the Newspaper Guild of New York, representing editorial employees. Asked about labour issues, Wenig said: “We’re not cutting either staff or salaries.” He said the company was thinking about structuring compensation in order to “play to win”.

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