Reuters to expand opinion offering

There is a role within the traditional Reuters marketplace for opinion and commentary, said James Ledbetter, who joined a year ago as website editor from US online magazine Slate. 

Now Reuters op-ed editor, he told media magazine Adweek: “We are in the process of substantially increasing the volume of opinion material that we produce and the range of the issues that we want to offer an opinion about. We want to get ourselves in the midst of all sorts of issues and news stories that we know Reuters’ readers, existing and potential, care about … We really want to be a leader in the space of opinion and commentary, which has never really been an explicit goal for Reuters in the past.”

Ledbetter was asked about Reuters’ “reliable model in being a straightforward wire service, without worrying about unique content or opinion pieces”. He replied: “I don’t see the two as in any way mutually exclusive. You don’t have to look very hard at the staffing levels of American newspapers to realize that places where you might have had local columnists or a local opinion staff commissioning pieces — in many places those jobs no longer exist. We think that there is a role within the traditional Reuters marketplace for opinion and commentary.

Adweek said some people had expressed concern that big-name writers were going to go to Reuters and then disappearing. Ledbetter said: “Well, there’s a genuine issue there that’s not in any way exclusive to us, which is, ‘How do you make sure that the fantastic voices that you’ve gone to all this trouble and expense to hire get heard?’ Certainly, there are opinion aggregation websites where there are so many contributors that it’s hard to even name a single one. It is a genuine issue, but we have had some design changes in recent months that should help us prevent that kind of obscurity.” ■