Reuters

Reuters is one of the world's largest and oldest news agencies. Officially the Reuters News Agency, it is headquartered in London. Reuters, which is a division of Thomson Reuters Corporation, provides news on a wide variety of topics—including current events, politics, business and finance, sports and entertainment, health and environmental issues, and technology—to print and broadcast media, agencies, and individual consumers. As electronic media became more prevalent and the journalism industry changed to accommodate this, Reuters expanded its line of services to provide news alerts and more electronic content.

Background

Reuters was established by Paul Julius Reuter (1816-1899), a German printer who was born Israel Beer Josaphat. He learned about the new technology of telegraphy while working in his uncle's bank and was fascinated with its potential for quickly transmitting information over great distances. It would later become an integral part of his life.

After converting to Christianity, he took the name Paul Julius Reuter. He moved to London in 1845 and married Ida Magnus; the couple then returned to Germany and settled in Berlin, where Reuter became a printer. After he found himself at odds with the government over some pamphlets he printed, the Reuters moved to Paris.

Reuter took a job working for the world's first news agency, Agence France-Presse. After a time, he opened his own agency in the town of Aachen. The agency relied on carrier pigeons to take breaking, or newly received, news from Aachen to Brussels, where telegraph lines were used to further spread the information. In 1851, he returned to London and arranged to have access to stock prices, which he sent out via a fleet of two hundred carrier pigeons and a new telegraph line that ran under the English Channel.

This first Reuters office, located in London's financial district, was initially staffed by Reuter himself and an eleven-year-old boy but quickly grew as business increased. Reuter demanded high standards for accuracy and speed from his staff, which helped his company build a reputation and gain customers. The company's prestige and fame grew when it was able to share news of the death of American President Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) hours before any other service.

In the early 1870s, Reuter took advantage of newly installed telegraph lines running both overland and under the sea to expand his company's reach to Asia and South America. By the early 1880s, Reuter had retired as director, and his son, Herbert, was running the company. The senior Reuter remained an active part of the company, however, which was, by then, using the newest electronic technology to send information to London.

The company was eventually acquired by the Press Association, a multimedia agency in the United Kingdom, in the 1920s. In that decade, the company also took up the use of radio to send news internationally. In 1941, Reuters restructured to become a private company and then sold half the interest in the company to the Newspaper Proprietor's Association, which expanded its reach throughout the world. Reuters continued its founder's practice of using the newest technology when it became the first news agency to use computers to transmit financial data overseas in the 1960s and to adopt electronic data transmissions in the early 1980s.

Reuters was listed on the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (NASDAQ) stock exchange headquartered in New York City and on the London Stock Exchange for a time. In 2009, when the company merged with the Thomson Corporation, a Stamford, Connecticut-based information company, it withdrew from the stock market. Later, the newly merged company Thomson Reuters would be listed on both the New York Stock Exchange and the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Through the 2010s, the company produced new products such as their risk management solution Accelus, their legal research system Thomson Reuters Westlaw, and their video news platform Reuters TV. The company also aimed to open doors to China's capital markets in 2014, expanded Canadian operations in 2016, and announced its goal to become carbon-neutral in 2019.

In 2020, Steve Hasker was appointed CEO, and the company committed to reaching 40 percent female representation in their leadership and aimed to use more renewable resources. As the COVID-19 pandemic left a lasting impact on the workplace, the company adjusted to a virtual work environment in 2020 and began a transition from being a holding company to an operating company and from providing content to becoming a content-driven technology company. The 2022 Thomson Reuters Annual Report indicated the company was well positioned for growth and future investments. In 2023, the company sold 10.5 million shares of London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), profiting a reported $1 billion.

Despite these adjustments, Reuters continued to draw praise for its journalism. In 2024, for example, the company won two Pulitzer Prizes. It won the Breaking News Photography prize for its coverage of the renewed outbreak of the Israel-Hamas War, which had begun in October 2023, and the National Reporting award for its investigations of working conditions at companies led by South African entrepreneur Elon Musk, including SpaceX, Neuralink, and Tesla.

Overview

Reuters is a news agency, or a company that gathers and verifies news before writing articles on it for distribution to print and broadcast media. These companies subscribe to the services offered by Reuters and other news agencies. Journalists can then use these stories and the facts contained in them to research and write their own stories, or editors may use the prepared stories in newspapers, periodicals, on radio and television broadcasts, or for other news venues. Stories are produced and information is transmitted in a number of languages, including English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.

In February 2017, Reuters employed two thousand five hundred journalists and six hundred photographers working in two hundred locations around the world. Together, they produced more than a million and a half news alerts on more than two and a half million different stories, along with more than seven hundred thousand photographs. These stories and photos were shared in newspapers, magazines, news broadcasts, and other venues around the world, as well as through direct sources such as its website and an app for cell phones and handheld devices. It was ranked the number two news agency in the world for 2019 by 4imn.com Web Ranking Methodology, which uses Google search results and other factors to identify the most-viewed news agency stories. By May 2023, the company employed 25,000 individuals and was the world's largest multimedia news provider, according to its website.

While Reuters has largely been successful, it has had some struggles. For example, an endeavor the company called "Next" was withdrawn in 2013, two years after it was launched. Next was intended to be a direct-to-consumer news platform but was plagued by cost overruns and development delays, as well as lower-than-anticipated international customer interest. Although the effort was keeping in line with the company's founder's enthusiasm for embracing new ways of reaching customers, the news agency ultimately decided to continue using the company's website to provide information directly to consumers.

Reuters also serves the journalism industry by providing data about technology and news media trends. This includes reports and statistical data, surveys, webinars and events, and news-gathering tools marketed to news organizations.

Bibliography

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