Reuters v Bloomberg battle 'may change news'

Peter Osnos, a former Washington Post correspondent, said the recent hiring of Alix Freedman, a Pulitzer prize-winning 27-year veteran of The Wall Street Journal, as global editor for ethics and standards was another signal that Thomson Reuters is in a major contest for dominance with its principal rival, Bloomberg.

Osnos is founder and editor at large of PublicAffairs books and vice-chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review. Writing in The Atlantic, he noted that Reuters editor-in-chief Stephen Adler said that in Freedman’s new job she will work “closely with reporters and editors on major stories, final-reading many signature pieces and holding us all to the high standards set out in Thomson Reuters Trust Principles and the Reuters Handbook of Journalism”.

Osnos also noted recent high-profile arrivals at Thomson Reuters and said Bloomberg had amassed a similarly impressive roster as it launches its opinion section and invests in its multiple news teams in Washington and around the world.

“The growth of Thomson Reuters since their merger in 2008 and the rise of Bloomberg … are major developments in journalism that aren’t fully recognized by the public at large because so much of their activity and income comes from financial data on terminals and in specialized packages,” he said. “Unlike the leading newspapers in this arena that also have formidable ranks of reporters, commentators and editors – the New York Times, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal – the lack of a daily anchor in print seems to reduce the visibility of their output in the traditional competition for attention in mainstream news circles.”

Because Bloomberg is privately owned, it is hard to know just how profitable it is, Osnos said, but every indication is that it has come through the prolonged financial crisis since 2008 without any meaningful loss of momentum. 

“Thomson Reuters is a more complicated situation. According to a recent takeout in the Wall Street Journal, the Thomson family and its investment arm, Woodbridge, which controls the majority of shares in the enterprise, is ‘impatient with the company’s performance.’

Like Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters’ revenue is significantly tied to its sales of sophisticated and extensive material to Wall Street and to the international banking community through its markets division. Over the summer, Thomson Reuters restructured the markets division, leading to the departure of six top executives. The division now reports to CEO Tom Glocer. The stock price of Thomson Reuters has been lagging, and posted a 52-week low recently, a drop of almost 20 per cent this year, Osnos said.

“But assuming the shake-up on the financial side and the strengthening of its already formidable news operation gain the necessary traction, its competition with Bloomberg will be a vitally important aspect of how journalism is adapting to the continuing turbulence in the industry …

“With so much uncertainty elsewhere in the news business, the robust competition between Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg looms especially large in the overall future of news gathering. With thousands of reporters and strong leadership teams, both companies are bound to be factors in the news business in the digital age, even if their overwhelming profitability is tied to financial data.” Osnos said The Wall Street Journal's loss of Freedman was much more than a job shift. “It is a measure of bigger changes in how news and data are being collected, paid for, and distributed.” ■