Assessing the new Reuters.com

Justin Ellis of the Nieman Journalism Lab writes Wednesday about the revamped Reuters.com website and what it means for business news consumers.

Ellis writes, “On the new Reuters.com, articles will be more or less elements on the page designed to point readers in a direction they may have some interest in. If you wound up on Reuters.com because you clicked on a Apple story from Twitter, they want to offer up as much related fare as possible. Because if you came to read a technology story, it’s likely you’ll have some interest in similarly related tech content. By mingling individual articles among other content, Reuters wants to prevent them from becoming a dead-end street. As Leo put it, ‘We don’t want readers to run around the site to fetch stories.’

“It’s a move that recognizes the ascendance of individual articles over homepages, largely powered by social media. Leo said Reuters is taking some cues from services like Twitter and Tumblr that ‘display news and create engagement around the news.’ But the emphasis on article pages also makes sense for a news company that, while having a long history and significant news-gathering resources, may lack the name recognition with consumers that other news sites do. If you’re someone familiar with a Thomson Reuters finance or legal products, you probably associate the name with news. By making a social-friendly site, Reuters wants to broaden that association to a larger audience.

“Roberts said news sites homepages are still a powerful driver of traffic, but the tide is shifting in another direction. ‘The days where you could drive big portion of audience to any single page? That’s pretty much done,’ he said. The media have to be willing to adapt to changing times, Roberts said, and that means having a highly adaptable website and apps. ‘This is just the beginning,’ Roberts said. Expect the new Reuters site to regularly tweak features and roll out new tools, he said.”

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