Doing 'the happy dance' at Reuters

Some 5,000 copies of the 64-page proof-of-concept publication were printed for Davos and another 6,000 for clients and others.

“I would be very surprised if there wasn’t a print product in our future,” said Jim Impoco, executive editor of Thomson Reuters Digital. “We’re having pretty extensive conversations about it right now …

“We feel there is an opening for a magazine along these lines, a sophisticated, well-designed magazine that doesn’t dumb down” its financial, business and foreign policy coverage, he told The Poynter Institute, a journalism school at the University of South Florida, St Petersburg.

Impoco said the magazine was assembled over about two months, starting in October when editor-in-chief Stephen Adler posed the idea to him.

“Steve Adler and [chief executive] Jim Smith and key players at the company seem to be very excited about it,” Impoco said. “We’re sort of making this big consumer-facing push, and what better to hit people with than a lush magazine that you can sort of cuddle up with?”

But, Impoco said, “Let’s keep it in perspective … We are digital natives. We believe in electronic news. Every day we do the happy dance because we don’t have a legacy product dragging us down … We are afforded the luxury of trying something like this.”

There’s one thing the magazine is not, said Poynter: the “first-ever” Reuters magazine. “A previous version was discontinued at some point, which Impoco said he just learned on Wednesday.” ■