Reuters’ newsroom of the future focusing on five key areas

Reuters editor in chief Steve Adler, along with global news editor Alessandra Galloni and Simon Robinson, regional editor, Europe, Middle East and Africa, sent out the following to the editorial staff on Tuesday:

To: All Reuters editorial staff

Colleagues –

We wanted to update you on the work our Newsroom of the Future teams have been doing to help position Reuters to be most successful in 2020, 2025 and beyond. Last October, as you’ll recall, we launched this important effort. The impetus was Reuters emergence as a full P&L business in the wake of the Refinitiv deal, coupled with all the changes rocketing through our industry – from technology advances such as AI to the rapid transformation of business models and customer habits.

Since then, we have solicited helpful input from all of you via the Hub, deployed to the project working groups of journalists from every part of our multi-region, multi-media, multi-customer organization, and reviewed all available data on usage and customer preferences. As we’ve worked, we’ve focused on achieving three overarching goals – to enhance the quality of our journalism, improve Reuters as a place to work, and provide more value to our customers. Through the process, we identified five critical areas where we thought we could make a meaningful difference and concentrated our working groups on these: Editing, led by Kevin Krolicki; Integrating Visuals and Text news planning, led by Mike Caronna; Technology, led by Jonathan Leff; Balancing Regional and Global operations, led by Arlyn Gajilan; and Talent, led by Mari Saito.

All the working groups have now met for two- or three-day intensive sessions in New York, London or Singapore, and all the feedback we’ve been getting is extraordinarily positive. The teams have been creative in challenging the status quo and in offering bold ideas. The leadership team is eagerly looking forward to hearing their recommendations in the next few weeks. Then we will move quickly to implement agreed-upon improvements in how we work, in the interest of our journalism, our journalists, and our customers.

Our thanks to all who have contributed ideas, the team leads, and all the working-group members for the dedication, expertise, energy, and intelligence they have brought to this initiative thus far. We’re really excited about how this is taking shape and will report back as we progress.

Best regards,