Reuters/Cohen episode: What next?

TALKING BIZ NEWS EDITORIAL

Reuters editor in chief David Schlesinger is scheduled to meet with the wire service’s bureau chiefs from North America and South America on Tuesday at 9 a.m. in New York, and if he wants to improve the morale in its newsrooms across the world, he should speak forcefully from the beginning.

The message should be this: Apologize for making the December call that led to the spiking of a story about hedge fund manager Steven Cohen and say it won’t happen again after being threatened. And then explain in detail to everyone why a story that “could have run,” in Schlesinger’s words, did not.

That decision, which came after Reuters executive Devin Wenig received a complaint from Cohen about the story, has killed what positive morale was left at Reuters and has called into question the company’s journalism standards. Since that time, Schlesinger and global company news editor Jack Reerink, who made the decision to kill the story after talking to Schlesinger, have made matters worse with how they have handled questions from colleagues.

The hubris on a Schlesinger conference call for editorial staffers and in an e-mail from Reerink, who often uses humor but went overboard this time, have shocked reporters and editors throughout the company. Schlesinger and Reerink need to repair the damage now and stop asking business journalists to accept something — someone’s word as gospel — what they urge them to challenge when they interview a CEO. They need to stop standing behind the Trust Principles that guides Reuters journalism and treat the reporters and editors at Reuters as equals. Explain to them what happened instead of saying, “Trust me.” So far, there has been no good explanation.

A bigger issue is at hand here for Reuters and its parent company, Thomson Reuters. Without quality journalism, the company’s business side suffers. And spiking a story of interest to traders and investors does not make them clamor for the Reuters news service.

On Schlesinger’s conference call Wednesday, he urged Reuters reporters and editors that the company’s editorial operations “must raise our game” and, “It’s so important that we stand out and distinguish ourselves from the competition.”

The combination of Reuters and Thomson two years ago was designed to make the operations a bigger competitor with Bloomberg. Reuters has been taking steps to beef up its news and commentary coverage in the past year to make that happen. But the customers who have their terminals have resisted replacing the Dow Jones news service on the terminals with the Reuters news service.

The Cohen episode is two steps back in that attempt. Customers are coming back to the business side, the sales people, and saying, “I can’t just rely on Reuters. You don’t cover the U.S. well enough. Look at these scoops in the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, etc. What was the last big U.S. story that Reuters was ahead on?” The Cohen story had the potential of being a big U.S. story for Reuters that would have forced traders and investors with those terminals to stand up and take notice.Â

Global awareness is a constant mantra at Reuters. The editors reject the idea that the U.S. is more important than any other country. That’s all well and good, but the numbers don’t support it. By dint of GDP, spending power, dollars at work, however you want to look at it, the U.S. is more important. And it’s extra more important to the terminal customers.

It’s time to do the right thing, not what your ego tells you to do. That leads to quality, hardcore business journalism. Only then will Reuters compete with Dow Jones and Bloomberg.