Reuters sees the future of news in multimedia

Betty Wong, the global managing editor for Reuters News, sent a letter Sunday to attendees of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers annual conference discussing changes at the wire as a result of its merger with Thomson.

Wong wrote, “We see the future of news as multimedia.  We are in the process of implementing a multi-year upgrade of our editorial technology. We have established several ‘fusion’ newsrooms where editors for online, text, TV and pictures sit side-by-side creating multimedia story packages on major news. At the same time, we are also continuing to automate ‘commoditized’ work from press release and exchange news feeds, allowing our reporters to focus on enterprise reporting as well as breaking news in the field.”

Later, Wong added, “Last year, Reuters Americas equities editor Martin Howell wrote to you about major initiative reporting projects we undertook that required temporarily freeing staff resources from daily deadline pressures. As part of that initiative, we produced a package on subprime lending that has been named a finalist for a Loeb award for news wire reporting. More recently, we took an indepth look into rising food prices worldwide and published an engaging package on this issue on Reuters.com.

“Blogs have been generating around 1 million page views a month for reuters.com. Tales from the Trail on the U.S. political campaign is our most popular blog, followed by the Photographers and the Oddly Enough blogs. DealZone was launched less than a year ago to compliment our M&A reporting.”