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#ReutersEthics: Trust and Twitter debated at Thomson Reuters

Marion Dakers — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:25:52 +0000

“It’s good for trust in journalism to be low,” the Evening Standard’s executive editor said last night, “and we should feel like our back is against the wall”.

Taking part in the ‘What Price The News?’ debate on the ethics of modern journalism hosted by Thomson Reuters, the Evening Standard’s Anne McElvoy said that while society as a whole is less trusting, ‘it’s right for people to be skeptical’ about where their news is coming from.

Journalism will benefit, she claimed. “We’re not Mother Teresa – we don’t expect to have a high trust rating.”

Twitter ethics

The debate inevitably covered Twitter, and its value as a source of news. “Twitter was not designed to cover the world. It was designed to give a flavour of the conversation at the moment,” said Joe Lelyveld, Pulitzer prize winner and former New York Times journalist.

The panel also saw a use in ‘getting privileged information out there fast’, as with the Guardian-Trafigura case, but were wary of it becoming more than ‘just a tip-off service’ for journalists without subsequent fact checking.

BNP on BBC

While Nick Griffin sat in a BBC studio recording his appearance on the Question Time panel, the panel at Thomson Reuters considered how they would have dealt with the issue.

“It’s the responsibility of journalists in this country to report the hell out of this situation. You need to give your readers and viewers a truthful view of who this character is, and do so clearly, intelligently and aggressively,” said Lelyveld.

Sean Maguire, Reuters political and general news reporter, could see himself ‘making the same decision’ to allow Griffin on the programme. “It’s about time he showed himself up (…) Let’s turn the stone over and see what comes out.”

The situation paralleled the BBC’s contact with the Taliban, added Simon Robinson, European editor of Time magazine. “It was never going to change the outcome, but it is important to know what local people are thinking.”

Meanwhile Ray Snoddy, BBC Newswatch presenter and chair of the panel, wondered whether the BBC had ‘jumped the gun’ by letting Griffin appear before knowing the outcome of the court case concerning BNP membership.

Also on Journalism.co.uk: ‘Former employees raise concerns about Reuters’ speed over accuracy slip-ups’

The Thomson Reuters Foundation has produced an Ethics Handbook, copies of which have also been printed in Arabic and distributed to journalists in the Middle East thanks to a fund left by journalist Mona Megalli. The debate could be followed on Twitter (#ReutersEthics) and Reuters ran a live blog on its site.

Marion Dakers (@mvdakers) is an MA newspaper journalist student at City University.

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Sunday Times: Breakingviews.com in ‘advanced talks’ with Thomson Reuters

Judith Townend — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 10:51:49 +0000

The Sunday Times reports that Hugo Dixon is in ‘advanced talks’ to sell Breakingviews.com to Thomson Reuters – for a reported £10 million.

Dixon, former Lex editor at the Financial Times, co-founded the online financial analysis site in 1999 and could receive £2.7 million if the deal goes through. The other founder, Jonathan Ford, left in 2007 and has no remaining shares, according to the Sunday Times.

Full story at this link…

(via paidContent:UK)

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ReadWriteWeb: CNET signs up for Open Calais

Laura Oliver — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 08:06:03 +0000

CNET.com will now share data from its technology reviews, news and blog posts on using Thomson Reuters’ Open Calais platform, allowing other publishers to use the information.

According to this report, CNET will publish certain sets of editorial data and some commercial information, for example data on its software download services, using the semantic API.

Signing up to OpenCalais will also enable CNET to generate topic pages.

Full story at this link…

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Press Gazette: ‘Studio in a suitcase’ for Reuters journalists

Laura Oliver — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 13:48:19 +0000

No longer backpack journalism – introducing, suitcase journalism: journalists at Thomson Reuters are to be kitted out with a lightweight video camera, microphone, lights, tripod and monitor.

The trial of the ’studio in a suitcase’ will start in around 60 of the agency’s bureaux.

Full story at this link…

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NUJ Release: Thomson Reuters employees reject next year’s pay offer

Judith Townend — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 14:54:08 +0000

“Members of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) at Thomson Reuters have rejected the company’s 2009/10 pay offer and are urging it to drop its attempts to impose a draconian performance pay regime on staff,” the NUJ reports. Full release…

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Reuters.co.uk: Put your questions to David Cameron via Twitter now

Judith Townend — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 09:54:55 +0000

Reuters is hosting an interview with David Cameron via Twitter. This morning (Monday), from 10am, the Conservative party leader David Cameron is talking about the economy and the credit crunch at Thomson Reuters’ Canary Wharf office and his speech will be followed by a question and answer session. Users of Twitter can use the tag #askDC to put questions to Cameron, and Reuters will monitor all the responses. The questions are already coming in. The Reuters Newsmaker can be used to track all proceedings.

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Thomson Reuters gets social with Gordon Brown

Laura Oliver — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 13:03:28 +0000

Thomson Reuters went all out this morning in its coverage of Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s speech at the company’s London office.

First off the organisation’s own coverage: the Newsmaker event was twittered by Reuters journalist Mark Jones, whose updates were fed into a special microsite.

There was also video of the PM’s announcement originally livestreamed on Reuters’ website – including a handy dropdown menu that lets you skip through the clip to different key moments.

A full transcript and text article of the speech have also been published on the site.

But in addition to Reuters’ own reporting on the event was live footage streamed using mobile phones and hosting service Qik by social media bloggers Documentally and Sizemore.

“With Gordon Brown due to start talking on the present economic crisis what can two beardy blokes with a few laptops and small cameras possible hope to add?

“Well nothing directly on what is about to be said. I have as much interest in current politics as I did in marketing movies. I’m here with Christian [Documentally] to start conversations around the NewsMaker event that are currently not part of Reuter’s remit,” wrote Mike Atherton aka Sizemore in a blog post.

Below is Documentally’s mobile video of the Newsmaker:

The pair also used social media tools such as online site Phreadz, which builds multimedia forums around content submitted by users, to generate discussion around Brown’s speech.

“I sincerely hope that following today the idea of getting these events discussed on social media platforms such as Twitter, Seesmic and Phreadz becomes a natural part of the news media’s roadmap,” added Atherton.

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Thomson Reuters creates site for deal makers

Laura Oliver — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 10:35:46 +0000

Thomson Reuters has rolled out a new channel aimed at business executives, providing data and information on ‘deal-making activity’, a release from the company announced.

Reuters Deals features multimedia content, an aggregation of business articles and columns from titles including Private Equity Week and The Deal magazine, and blog content from Reuters.com, paidContent and more.

Data on the industry sector will be displayed in interactive graphics, including a league table of top deals.

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Press Gazette: Automated news will free up journalists, says agency report

Laura Oliver — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:59:53 +0000

Automated news – produced by machines for machines – is set to become an increasingly important part of the news agency’s arsenal, according to a report released by Thomson Reuters.

The news provider hopes the increase of such automated news, for financial information in particular, will free up journalists to write analysis of this info instead.

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Three spheres of relevance for news online

Oliver Luft — Mon, 19 May 2008 15:42:25 +0000

Today’s a good day to point at three examples of how you can enhance the value of online news by linking it to additional, meaningful and relevant content.

I’m calling them the Three Spheres of relevance, three different approaches to creating news relevance: locally on a news site by bringing related content to a single destination, by using tagged metadata to enable better linking to relevant material and in the newsgathering process itself (stick with me, this might get into seriously tenuous segue territory).

Thomson Reuters has launched a new version of its semantic tagging tool Open Calais that broadly enhances and builds on its first round of development (hat tip Martin Stabe).

Open Calais has made publicly accessible a piece of internal software used by Thompson Reuters that automatically reads content and creates relationships between different articles, news pieces and reports based on the businesses, places, events, organisations and individuals mentioned in them.

External developers have been encouraged to play with the technology to create an additional level of metadata for their own sites that could offer users a more sophisticated level of additional content around news pieces and blog posts by relying on automatically generated semantic links rather than more rudimentary manual or algorithmically created versions.

The second round of development two has brought WordPress plugins and new modules for Drupal to allow developers to more easily integrate metadata into the applications and third-party tools they are building.

As part of round two, Thomson Reuters has also launched Calais Tagaroo, a WordPress plugin that automatically generates suggested tags for bloggers that want to incorporate additional relevant content to their posts.

This weekend has also seen the launch of New York Times’ Olympics blog, Rings, as a destination where readers can get a plethora of Times content about the Beijing games. The blog is the latest edition to the Times’ Olympics sub-site.

In addition to covering the sporting competition the blog – like the Times’ sub-site – draws in reporting from Times’ sports, foreign and business desks, as well as taking pieces from bureaux in China.

Compare this with the Olympics destination the BBC is running for the games. It could easily draw sporting coverage together with relevant material from the news pages but it has chosen not to make that link and instead leave its users to drift off elsewhere to find out about the other issues surrounding the games. It doesn’t make the most of pulling all the relevant and related material togther in the way the Times does with its blogs and sub-site.

The final example of news organisations working on relevance comes before any of that content is even written.

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger told the Press Gazette that as part of the newspaper’s adoption of an integrated print and digital news production process reporting staff would abandon the traditional newsdesk structure to instead ape the set-up of Guardian.co.uk reporting staff and be rearranged into subject-specific teams or ‘pods’ to allow closer working between reporters and the ability file for both the web and the print edition as the story demands.

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