Planet Abell

Five years ago I wrote about the start of an era at Reuters . Now it's time to write about the end of two. Bernd Debusmann is leaving The Baron after one of the most storied careers not only at that news agency but but surely in journalism. He reported from more than 100 countries since joining the company in 1964 and, five years ago, was the marquee name when Reuters began an opinion service with three writers. They don't make them like this anymore. If ever there was a living Le Carré character, it is Bernd, from his lifelong passion of jumping out of airplanes (most of the time, I think, with a parachute) to the 7.65 mm round, delivered with a silenced pistol on behalf of someone who didn't care for his reporting. Bernd leaves with that bullet still lodged near his spine, and with the admiration of generations of reporters who got to watch how it was done, day-in-and-day-out, even on those rare occasions when he wasn't being shot, threatened or throw...

My very first appearance on Reuters television. VICTORY IS MINE!!!

Reuters waded into the waters of opinion and analysis against a very strong tide: An iron-clad policy of doing nothing that could conceivably open the 150-year-old news agency to the charge it was not absolutely free from bias. In the not-yet three years since Reuters columnists began taking sides on stories Reuters reporters were covering, a breakthrough I called " Reuters Opinion 1.0 ," its global reporting power has only grown. But Thomson Reuters CEO Tom Glocer seemed to complicate the question of institutional ambivalence with a post on his personal blog in which he inveighed against a "rush to judgment" concerning financial giant Goldman Sachs and a civil complaint by the SEC which accuses the Wall Street behemoth of fraud. Glocer states an obvious fact: Goldman is guilty of nothing until the company is found guilty of something, or agrees that it broke a rule or regulation. But now comes an object lesson into why this may not have been the best...

Facebook is the 800-pound gorilla in the social media space, with some 200 million members, a valuation of perhaps $5 billion and a base that has expanded well beyond its early roots as a private hangout for bored Ivy League students. But, like the ad says, life comes at you fast — and there is nothing more unforgiving than internet time. So, are the best years ahead for Facebook, or is the finicky mob of cool kids — and now their parents and grandparents — already peering down the road for another Next Great Thing? One thing is for sure: Nothing lasts forever. Continue reading 'Facebook, shmacebook: What’s the next great thing?' on the Reuters 'Great Debate' Blog .

We don’t get many mentors. There are parents, sure, and for some the parents we wish we had. A fortunate few get a great teacher who just keeps on teaching long after you have parted company. In our professional life, it is even less likely that someone will have the generosity and temperament to take in interest in a pup without any house training in whom they somehow see some promise. I am among the luckiest. My mentor was a man named Arthur Spiegelman. Art’s importance to journalism, and to the world he made a better place with his fearless, righteous and unfailingly accurate reporting, is legendary to those of us who worked with him and not nearly well known enough to everyone else. Arthur died on Saturday after a long bout with lung cancer. Illness made it impossible for him to speak, depriving those around him of his incredible conversation and infectious laugh. But Arthur was receiving calls, made to a cell phone of a close friend at his bedside, who would hold it up to his ear...

“Great” is one of those words that we simply use too often. Like the phrases some Oxford people think we have all heard enough , loose usage has devalued it into a pejorative, turning "great" into a lesser compliment than the equally diluted "awesome." I have a soft spot for greatness. It is the genuine weakness that a parent has for a child or any one of us for a savior. I will spare myself further humiliation by mentioning no objects of my admiration. Except for one. A few months ago a great man, friend and colleague died. David Mitchell and I collaborated in a world that had yet to coin the phrase “virtual meeting." In my 26 years at Reuters, I never met him or even saw a picture of him. That is, until someone else I have never met and do not even know provided me with a happy snap of Mitchell in 1976, three years before our first encounter. Last June I wrote a remembrance of Mitchell on a Reuters alumni site , and repost it here in a slightly different for...

R euters last week quietly ended a 156-year tradition which, more than any other, defined its character. The walls did not come tumbling down. And while for some the change might have come sooner, and for others not at all, I think it could not have come at a better time. In a blog entry Editor-in-Chief David Schlesinger announced that Reuters had begun publishing commentary written by editorial staff (Reuters also announced this change with an obligatory but quaint wire advisory). The ubiquity of "debating" partisans on cable news networks and the vitriole in what is still sadly called "the blogosphere" may make this change seem less than revolutionary. Or, for that matter, not even particularly newsworthy. But for Reuters, whose dedication to the principle of unbiased reporting stems from its desire to be an honest broker of news from every boardroom and battlefield, this is big news. It comes despite an unambiguous editorial policy about the sanctity of im...

T he gifted former TV Newser blogger Brian Stelter , now a New York Times media correspondent, has one of the first stories about the consequences of CNN's decision to dissolve its 27-year-old relationship with Reuters: they missed the story. I say this not to gloat, since I am not short Time Warner and neither employed by (anymore) nor a shareholder (anymore) in Reuters, but to commiserate . Because if CNN's stated reason for dropping Reuters is basically accurate there will be quite a bit more of these gaps in coverage until the cable news network realizes its goal of taking the money they have saved and putting it to work for them on the street. And there is serious reason to believe that it won't be remotely possible to replace the coverage organically. This kind of money won't go far spent a la carte. I shudder to think that CNN hopes a big part of the slack will be picked up by iReporter contributions -- but these days you never know A Few Million Bucks Doesn...

T here has been a fair amount of discussion about Google's new news experiment by which they will publish comments on stories they aggregate from "those people or organizations who were actual participants in the story in question." The chatter has mostly been about Google's criteria: whether it is undermining journalism and/or giving a PR gift to disgruntled subjects. But I haven't seen any discussion of what I'd say is the fundamental issue: Does Google know what it is getting into? I agree with those who say that in not going far enough with the initiative -- open it up to everyone -- Google is choosing to empower a class that is already empowered, and which journalism exists to check. But why curtail comments and create a clunky infrastructure for authenticating "legitimate" comments that only seems to invite charges of favoritism? Does Google really want to take a position on publishing or not publishing pushback from entities which have not...

P ut aside the considerations about free speech and commercial political speech. Recognize that there are no losers when enemies from opposite ends of the political spectrum mud wrestle. By the way, the clearest winner is always the feral beast , of course. Score one for MSNBC , which cracked the Ann Coulter lightning and stole a lot of thunder from CNN's get of that other tabloidly blond . The question is: will you have any impact when you "politely ask" a leopard to change her spots? Should you even bother? (remember, we're putting aside commercial political speech. It always make sense to raise money by demonizing your enemies.) The best-case scenario for accountability zealotry is that everyone will then know Coulter for what she is. Trouble is, her fans already know, and love it. We Can't All Get Along? OK. Some people can't be ignored because of the damage they may do. But Elizabeth Edwards v. Ann Coulter isn't Joseph Welch v. Joe McCarthy. Reuters ...

R euters appears to be on the verge of merging with Thomson, a deal that would create a financial news and information powerhouse to rival Bloomberg by reducing the field to two major players. It should also enhance the profile of Reuters editorial, which for all the time I was part of it looked over its shoulder to protect itself not so much from external threats but powerful insiders who questioned its relevance far too often for comfort. The proposed deal as outlined by Reuters CEO Tom Glocer would be a bit complicated; the companies would tie up as a "Dual Listed Company" with two identical boards, and each would remain separately listed on exchanges. The company would be called "Thomson-Reuters" but the combined news gathering and publication divisions would be called "Reuters." The Trust Principles and the Reuters Founders Share Company , which aim to ensure editorial independence, would be retained. Glocer said he would become the CEO of the merge...

R euters was a bit late to embrace the Internet for its core franchises and now wants it known that it gets it. Loud and clear. Sure, Reuters lagged Bloomberg on instant messaging and failed to gain traction with "Reuters Mail" but, as CEO Tom Glocer recently asserted, Reuters invented the UGC phenomenon 50 years ago by getting contributed data from some of its customers and selling it to others. Now Reuters is talking about creating a financial MySpace. "It won't have the latest hot videos and the 'why I am into Metallica and the Arctic Monkeys' blogs," Glocer tells the Guardian. "Instead we are going to give our financial services users the ability to post their research or if they are traders, their trading models." And then there was this other money quote: "People don't want to have 100 friend requests from teenage girls in Florida if they are trading the credit derivatives market, but they probably are interested in b...

This could be a test of how professional and amateur journalism can cohabitate. It may provide some intriguing insights on how the public perceives the difference between "pro" and "am" content -- if it does -- and which of the two readers tend to prefer in times of crisis vs. calm. Reuters has considerable assets in Africa, a woefully underreported continent with a disproportionate share of suffering and underdevelopment, and is quite capable of parachuting in anything it needs to should the need arise. So its new Africa website , with a fairly balanced mix of news from trusted sources and information and opinion from external blogs, is an interesting experiment in going not only where it has not before but didn't necessarily have to. Rather than just take an overdue opportunity to play to an obvious strength, Reuters seems to be treating this as living laboratory of the pro-am philosophy, putting its money where its mouth is . Africa is difficult (read: exp...

David Schlesinger has dropped the other shoe from last August's incident involving altered photos from the Middle East . The Editor-in-Chief of Reuters discloses in his blog that the senior photo editor in the region has been fired and replaced, the code of professional conduct for Time is at a tremendous premium at a place like Reuters, where there absolutely no sense of a beginning, a middle or an end. photographers has been re-written and changes to vetting procedures instituted. "We called together our senior photographers to strengthen our existing exacting guidelines on ethical issues in photography and wrote a new code of conduct for photographers, appended to this note. "We have restructured our pictures editing operation to ensure that senior editors deal with all potentially controversial photographs, and we have ensured that shift leaders are focusing solely on quality issues instead of doing editing themselves. "In addition, we have invested in ad...

Reuters CEO Tom Glocer publishes the text of a recent speech in his blog in which he says that the news organization is partnering with Canon, which makes the pro-grade digital cameras Reuters uses, and Adobe, of image-editing software fame, to create a "solution" that will report what changes have been made to photographs. This is a direct result of an incident last summer in which two photos Reuters published had been doctored in a way which changed their meaning and thus no longer accurately portrayed what had been shot. I am pleased to announce today that we are working with Adobe and Canon to create a solution that enables photo editors to view an audit trail of changes to a digital image, which is permanently embedded in the photograph, ensuring the accuracy of the image. We are still working through the details and hope this will be a new standard for Reuters and I believe should be the new industry standard. It is important to say that we sought this technical solut...

it may be that Schlesinger is the most senior editorial executive blogging (though not the highest paid. See Katie Couric or Brian Williams or Charles Gibson for that.) T here is something new going on at the traditionally stodgy place where I used to work. I've already written about Reuters' foray into covering non-events from a place that doesn't exist by opening a "bureau" in the Sims-like online community, Second Life. This may be too hip to be cool or too cool to be hip, but either way it is iconic rather than informative. Now, the global managing editor at Reuters, David Schlesinger, is taking the lead in blogging for senior editors at the news agency . This is notable in at least three respects: Reuters has always been exceptionally insulated, not behaving as if it were terribly concerned with public image Reuters has tended to be at best reluctantly reactive to the discussion of journalism hot topics, engaging in public discourse only when necessary and u...

About 10 years ago it was considered heresy at Reuters to propose building a web site with real-time news and rich multimedia content. So the North American Editor secretly conspired to build one even though he had been specifically told to do no such thing. Of course, our prescient leader knew a thing or two about the company and guessed -- correctly, as it turned out -- that it was just a matter of time before his superiors told him that what they had meant was build a web site with real-time news and rich multimedia content . So it is with some amusement that I read this week -- 155 years later in Internet time -- that Reuters has "opened" a news bureau in the virtual world, Second Life . Reuters is getting scads of press attention -- all positive, for a pleasant change -- and the company seems to have made genuine inroads at establishing the street cred which had not so much eluded it as they seemed to intentionally evade. Now, with all the positive reinforcement, c...

Joe Maguire, an editor at Reuters, has lost his job. That fact may be the only one not in dispute; while neither Reuters nor Maguire say he was dismissed, the proximate cause was the imminent publication of his book, Brainless: The Lies and Lunacy of Ann Coulter . Reuters has an iron-clad editorial policy requiring freedom from bias but it does allow its employees write books. As the New York Times reports , Maguire got "conditional approval" for his and it quotes him as saying: "I thought I had met the conditions, and proceeded accordingly. As a result, I no longer work there.” Freedom from bias in one's reporting is not a debatable point at Reuters, and it shouldn't be anywhere journalism is done. Still, some critics of MSM see it everywhere and some of those do so, I believe, to justify taking sides in their own "reporting." When I was a reporter at Reuters neutrality was just one of those things that permeated the air. Tiny transgressions of the ...

The worst thing that can happen to a news organization happened to the one where I used to work over the weekend: Reuters published a doctored photo of Beirut , depicting damage from an Israeli air raid. They got 2,000 emails and also discovered, from another reader's observations, that the same photographer had altered at least one other image that they previously published. So, on the most sensitive story in the most sensitive arena in the world – you hear the word ”tinderbox” a lot on TV these days -- Reuters is forced to defend itself against lots and lots of people who already think that it in particular and MSM in general is biased. When I was there the complaints from readers ran pretty even that Reuters was biased in favor of the Arab and Persian nations in the region and/or the Palestinian cause and biased in favor of Israel . Sometimes readers would look at the same image or read the same story and come to opposite conclusions. It comes with the territory, no pun intende...