Reuters renews emphasis on speed in US reporting

Speed is of primary importance in serving clients, Americas editor Dayan Candappa said at a meeting with representatives of the NewsGuild of New York.

There are only two ways to win: “Be first or be alone with a story,” he said according to a union account of the discussion.

Guild participants led by the union’s chairman at Reuters Dan Grebler agreed that speed had always been a Reuters fundamental but expressed frustration with the ways in which lack of training and structure could get between a reporter and the clock. New hires no longer go through a Reuters boot camp, so there was no formal training in snaps and technology.

The Guild’s account of the session began: “It used to be that accuracy and speed were the lifeblood of all Reuters journalism. All that changed four years ago with a swing toward more enterprise reporting and less focus on speed. But after that resulted in several high-profile misses and lost timings to swifter competitors, management was compelled to push the pendulum in the other direction and refocus newsroom priorities.”

It said that earlier this year editorial managers instituted four primary goals to guide the work of reporters and editors: speed, multimedia, initiative/enterprise reporting and sourcing. The union-management partnership committee, a forum for exchanging views on work-related issues, met in New York in June to review how those goals had been implemented and how the process might be improved.

They agreed on monthly review sessions in all bureaus on snaps and urgents to give staff hands-on training, and other measures.

The Guild said it thought the conversation was valuable and constructive. Participating union members hoped the meeting would become a building block towards a cooperative effort to strengthen reporting at Reuters and improve the newsroom. ■