Tag Archives: Thomson Reuters
WSJ page one editor leaving for Reuters
by Chris Roush
Alix Freedman, the page one editor at The Wall Street Journal who has been with the paper for the past 27 years, is leaving for a job at Reuters.
She will be global editor for ethics and standards.
In an e-mail to the staff, Journal managing editor Robert Thomson writes, ” We all owe Alix a great debt for what she has contributed to the paper and the culture, and her impact and imprint will linger for many years. She will leave our shores at the end of next week, by which time her successor will be announced, so please seek her out and send her your personal best.”
Freedman had been a deputy managing editor at the paper before taking over page one earlier this year.
Freedman joined the Philadelphia bureau of the Journal as a reporter in June 1984. She moved to the New York bureau in 1987, covering the food and tobacco industry and was promoted to senior special writer in July 1991. From November 1979 to December 1982, Freedman worked as a news assistant for The New York Times. In January 1983, she become a staff reporter for BusinessWeek magazine.
In 1993, Freedman won a Gerald Loeb Award in the large newspaper category for her front-page article “Fire Power,” an examination of how a secretive Southern California family dominates the market for low-priced handguns frequently used in crimes. She was a 1994 Gerald Loeb finalist in the large newspaper category for her investigative article “Peddling Dreams,” which examined the economics of the rent-to-own industry and its effects on America’s poor.
In 1993, she and Journal reporter Laurie Cohen received the Front Page Award for specialized writing from the Newswomen’s Club of New York for their article, “Smoke and Mirrors: How Cigarette Makers Keep Health Question ‘Open’ Year After Year.” In 1996 she won a Pulitzer Prize in the national affairs category for her ongoing coverage of the tobacco industry.
Prior to assuming her current position in December 2005, she was an assistant managing editor, beginning in December 2004. Freedman was a senior editor from 2002 to 2004. Before that, she was the Journal’s investigative projects editor from 1999 to 2002.
Shafer talks about his new job at Reuters
by Chris Roush
Dylan Byars, a reporter at Adweek, talked with new Reuters columnist Jack Shafer about what he’ll be doing in his new job.
Here is an excerpt:
Are you going to be doing the same thing that you were doing at Slate, or will there be differences?
I’m going to be doing the same thing, only more. I’ll write about politics, I’ll write about the media. I’ll write about the intersection of media and politics, culture. You know, what’s great about Reuters is that it’s got so many people great to work with, and so many great ideas that I think the sky is the limit. But the concentration will be media and politics.
How frequently will you be writing?
To be determined. They would be happy to transplant the tree from Slate into Reuters, but we all have bigger ambitions than that. So to say, ‘Two and three-quarters columns a week and four blog posts’—If I told you that, I’d be talking out of my ass. It’s to be determined. I don’t want to give you an answer and have you say, “But Jack! You told me your were going to write three columns a week; you’re writing four. You’re a fucking liar!”
Read more here.
Reuters launches Counterparties, a financial news link site
by Chris Roush
Reuters unveiled Tuesday its new website, Counterparties, a linkblog for financial news and commentary, offering a curated look at the day’s big stories.
The site is being edited by Reuters financial blogger Felix Salmon and Ryan McCarthy and the name is taken from the title that Salmon uses on his blog to post links to stories he has read during the day.
Megan Garber of Nieman Lab writes, “‘It’s tags, it’s voice, and it’s my dream of just being completely source-agnostic, just linking out,’ Salmon told me. It’s exploring what voice sounds like in the service of one of the purest forms of information out there: the link. ‘This is, I believe,’ he says, ‘the first mainstream/legacy media website which is just external links.’
“I believe he is right. And that makes Counterparties not just an experiment, but also a hint, if a small one, at the trajectory of wire agencies as they evolve from straight-up ‘content providers’ into…something else. The past few years have seen the AP experimenting with ‘accountability journalism.’ They’ve seen Reuters itself expanding into investigative reporting and commentary and video, news-y and opinion-y and silly. One thing that those experiments have in common is that they emphasize, implicitly, the voices and the personalities and, finally, the brands of the news agencies’ individual journalists. ‘The whole idea here is to have real voice and attitude,’ Salmon says. ‘Basically, the page is entirely built by humans. It’s not some sort of weird technology algorithm. But it’s powered by a weird technology algorithm.’
“Counterparties finds most of its content via the service Percolate, which is similar to Summify except that it includes, in addition to Twitter feeds, RSS feeds. And: Counterparties uses Salmon’s own feeds, the ones that he’s been cultivating for his private use for several years now. ‘Counterparties is based on, literally, my Google Reader list of blogs that I read and my list of people I follow on Twitter,’ Salmon says. Which means that the feeds Percolate scans include those from, say, Salmon’s wife’s friends — ‘not because I have any particular professional interest in what they have to say,’ he notes, but because they’re his friends, too. ‘It’s a very personal thing.’”
Read more here.
Reuters hires Shafer to be columnist
by Chris Roush
Reuters editor in chief Steve Adler sent out the following staff announcement on Tuesday:
I am delighted to announce that Jack Shafer will be joining Reuters as a columnist.
Described as a “fearless media critic” by the American Journalism Review, Shafer has written the influential “Press Box” column for Slate since 2000. Shafer, who joined the trail-blazing online magazine before its launch in 1996 as its deputy editor, is known as much for his exhaustive research as for his insightful, graceful prose. As the AJR put it: “The curious thing about what Jack Shafer does is the people best equipped to evaluate him are his competitors, whose beats sometimes include one another. Ask them and they will put Shafer at or near the top of a short list of the best media critics in the country.”
Prior to working at Slate, Shafer spent 11 years editing two alternative weeklies – San Francisco Weekly and Washington City Paper — where he estimates he rewrote, massaged, or merely pressed the button on 500 features. At Reuters, Jack will continue to write his widely acclaimed media criticism and will also write about politics. Jack, who is based in Washington, DC, will report to Reuters Opinion Editor James Ledbetter. Jack’s arrival at Reuters adds to a rapidly strengthening opinion and analysis bench. Award-winning writers David Cay Johnston and David Rohde have recently joined Reuters as columnists, Felix Salmon continues to set the pace among financial bloggers, and the Reuters column line-up includes regular contributions from Larry Summers and Mohamed El-Erian.
Shafer had been laid off last month by Slate.
Reuters names new Americas editor
by Chris Roush
Reuters editor in chief Steve Adler and deputy editor in chief Paul Ingrassia sent out the following announcement last week:
We’re delighted to announce that our search for an Americas Editor has reached a most welcome conclusion. Jim Gaines, whom we’ve all come to know and respect in recent months, will be moving into the Americas role.
As you all know, Jim has been our editor for ethics, standards and innovation since joining Reuters last April. During that time he has been drawn increasingly into an active role on the news file at times when we’ve been away from the office. He proved to be such an effective editor and leader that it just made sense for him to take the regional news editor position overseeing all journalists in North America and Latam. Jim has great news judgment, editing ability and people skills, and has impressed everyone with whom he has worked during his few months at Reuters.
He’ll report to Paul, and will become part of Steve’s broadened senior editorial team. More details on that will follow. Jim also will serve as Paul’s stand-in to direct and coordinate coverage of major global stories when Paul is away from the office. And he will continue to oversee, with Reinhard Krause in London, our global photography department, drawing on his unique past experience as editor of three magazines famous for their photographs: Time, Life and People (not in that order). Jim spent most of his journalistic career at Time Inc., where his last job was Corporate Editor, sharing oversight of all the company’s magazines with editor-in-chief Norman Pearlstine.
But his lives before and after that career were notable as well, including stints as a writer in the national affairs department of Newsweek, as a reporter on WNET’s nightly news program The Fifty-First State, and as the author of several works of history. While editing TIME he interviewed everyone from Fidel Castro to Nelson Mandela, and his signal interview with Slobodan Milosevic helped lead to the Dayton Accords.
After Time Inc., he edited the first digital multimedia general interest magazine in America, called FLYP, and then started his own multimedia publishing company, StoryRiver Media, in Washington, DC, where he lives with his wife Karen and their teenage children. His interest in the iPad as a publishing platform led him to a brief stint at News Corp’s The Daily before he joined Reuters.
We are pleased to have such a seasoned and adventurous journalist to guide our coverage of the Americas, especially as we enter the 2012 presidential campaign season.
AP markets editor leaves for Reuters, which revamps wealth management team
by Chris Roush
TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE
Jennifer Merritt, who joined the AP business desk in April to be its financial markets editor, is now leaving for a job at Reuters.
Reuters financial companies editor Jed Horowitz wrote to the staff in an e-mail:
I’m excited to announce the launch of our revamped Wealth Management team, which will provide news, commentary, practical business tips and industry gossip to the vast pool of retail stockbrokers and investment advisers who use Thomson Reuters “workstations,” and to their clients who read Reuters news.
The team will be led by Jennifer Merritt, an energetic and sharp-witted journalist who is joining from her post as financial markets editor of The Associated Press. Jennifer leveraged early-career internships at “Business Week,” “The Palm Beach Post” and “The Boston Globe” into senior editorial positions overseeing personal finance, wealth and markets coverage at the “Florida Times-Union,” “Money” and smartmoney.com and wsj.com. She also has been department editor of management education at “Business Week.”
Joining Jennifer will be Suzanne Barlyn, the current “Compliance Watch” columnist at Dow Jones and a frequent contributor to “The Wall Street Journal,” who will bring her smart coverage of legal, regulatory and oversight issues–and her wide following in the brokerage community–to Reuters as our compliance columnist. Suzanne, who is a nonpracticing attorney, also put in time as a reporter at “Fortune.”
Jennifer and Suzanne will start on Sept.6.
Also on the team are Reuters veterans Joe Giannone, who launched wealth management coverage for the wire more than two years ago, and John McCrank, who has led our Canadian wealth management coverage for the past two years (when he wasn’t running marathons). John will be joining us in New York as soon as he gets his visa. They will continue to offer detailed coverage of the earnings, cultural shifts and trends at big brokerage houses, independent brokers and advisory shops and discount brokerages.
Herb Lash and Manuela Badawy will contribute their considerable investment strategy skills to crafting daily investment features for advisers, with the editorial help of Jen Ablan and Chris Sanders. Please circulate any investment-related analyst reporters or other releases keyed to events of the day to Herb and Manuela.
Rounding out the group are two newcomers. Jessica Toonkel has been scaring mutual fund and exchange-traded fund marketers and salespeople for almost a decade with her coverage of their pricing policies and profit motives, and will continue that mission as the team’s chief products reporter. Jessica, who has turned out an impressive array of columns and articles since her arrival in mid-August, has worked at Crain’s “Investment News” and been managing editor of several mutual fund newsletters at Institutional Investor. She’s also covered technology at “American Banker” and “Financial NetAlert” (out of Berlin) and worked at “American Lawyer” and “Counsel Connect.”
Ashley Lau, who is completing her internship on the markets team in New York after stints at MarketWatch, NPR’s national desk and NPR’s “Planet Money” economics show, will be dogging the movement and motivations of brokers and advisers who switch jobs. Ashley, raised in Maryland and now an upper WestSider, graduated recently from Medill.
We’re also pleased that freelancers Jim Saft and Richard Koreto will be contributing weekly columns on economic issues and practice management aimed at our WM audience. And we’re lucky to have Lauren Young’s Personal Finance team pitch in by adapting its steady diet of consumer-aimed columns to our professional brokerage audience.
The excellent U.S.-based editorial team behind our Wealth Management, Inv. Mgt. and Asset Mgt. top news pages — Richard Satran, Bernadette Baum, Chelsea Emery and Walden Siew — will serve as deskers for the WM team
Reuters readying new app with just photos
by Chris Roush
The Wider Image iPad app was conceived and produced by Reuters pictures. Its vision is to re-imagine the way news photography can engage through evolving platforms, to position imagery at the heart of multimedia and to realize the potential of photojournalism. For more information, go here.
Reuters names investigative projects editor
by Chris Roush
Mike Williams, global enterprise editor at Reuters, made the following announcement to the staff on Thursday afternoon:
I’m pleased to announce that Blake Morrison, currently the investigations editor at USA Today, will be joining Reuters in the new role of Investigative Projects Editor.
Blake has worked as a reporter and editor at USA Today since October 1999. As the investigations editor there, he leads a four-person team and works closely with a group of database editors.
Blake’s team has earned a reputation for doing creative work with high impact on public policy. His investigation of the impact of industrial pollution on American schoolchildren spurred the Environmental Protection Agency to launch a $2.25 million project to examine the air outside more than 60 schools across the nation. The reporting earned Blake and colleague Brad Heath the Grantham Prize, a Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism and half a dozen other awards.
Morrison was also part of an investigation that examined the quality and safety of food served to American children at schools. The investigation prompted the U.S. Department of Agriculture to launch sweeping reforms that raised the quality and safety standards for food served to 31
million children each day. It also earned the top investigative reporting award from the Education Writers Association.Before joining USA Today, Blake spent six years as a reporter and editor at the St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press. There, he worked on the metro desk and as an investigative reporter.
Blake will be based in New York, reporting to me. Please join me in wishing him success in his new role.
Reuters changes how it handles retractions after killing tax column
by Chris Roush
In the wake of a David Cay Johnston column about News Corp.’s taxes that turned out to be erroneous and was killed, Reuters has changed its policy about retractions and will now keep the content on its website.
Steve Myers of Poynter.org writes, “‘The correction/kill policy that is followed at Reuters is long-established by the wire service,’ Ledbetter said. ‘There isn’t a procedure for taking down something that is wrong because for the vast majority of Reuters’ existence, there was nothing to take down.’
“Under the new policy, the erroneous post would remain online even after Reuters published a follow-up.
“‘I think it stands as a transparent record of what occurred,’ he said. ‘I think to take it down – while I can see some argument for that – it’s not being fully transparent with our readers about the process, and it could be subject to abuse.’
“One advantage of this approach is that it retains reader comments, which disappear when a post is deleted.
“In this case, user comments could have helped Reuters and Johnston identify a critical error within a few hours of publishing the original story. Shortly after the column was posted the morning of July 12, a reader suggested in a comment that Johnston had misread News Corp.’s documents.”
Read more here.
Global editor leaving Reuters
by Chris Roush
TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE
Reuters deputy editor in chief Paul Ingrassia sent out the following announcement to the staff on Monday:
After a distinguished journalistic career with Reuters and Thomson Reuters, Sean Maguire has decided to leave the company to pursue new opportunities.
In his four years as global editor, Sean redefined Reuters coverage of politics and international affairs by focusing it on the political risks that decision-makers need to understand and on the interplay between politics, financial policy-making and economic challenges.
With Steve’s reorganization and the creation of a network of regional editors reporting to me, Sean felt the moment was ripe to move on. Sean will be taking a short break and then embarking on fresh challenges.
Sean made his name covering the Yugoslav conflict and the economic transformation of eastern Europe in the 1990s. He watched the first Cruise missiles hit Baghdad during the Gulf War in 1991 and accompanied the first US Marine unit to reach the east of the Iraqi capital in 2003 during the US-led invasion. He has interviewed figures such as Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, South Korea’s President Lee Myung-bak, General David Petraeus and Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal.
We’re grateful for Sean’s commitment and leadership at Reuters, and everything he has done during his two decades as a foreign correspondent and editor. We wish him all the best and look forward to hearing of his future achievements.
