Reuters to combine top news and online desks, reporting to MacMillan

Dan Colarusso,, the executive editor of Reuters’ digital operations, sent out the following announcement on Tuesday:

As we all know, Reuters does great journalism – in text, pictures, video, graphics and in multimedia. But great journalism isn’t just about creating all that great content; it takes fast, smart curation and packaging to make sure readers can find and explore all the great work that our journalists do.

That’s what the Eikon Top News packagers and reuters.com online desks in Bangalore do day-in and day-out; they’ve proven to be talented and essential members of the Reuters news team over the past few years. And, as we – and our customers – depend increasingly on digital and multimedia platforms, we know we have to keep moving forward on this front.

So, starting this month, we will combine the Bangalore Top News and online desks to work as one team, rather than two teams of people who sit next to each other.

What this will let them do is find ways to more efficiently curate and package our news. That means finding areas where they perform duplicate tasks and eliminating that duplication, as well as combining some of the similar functions each team performs. That allows them to take on new and creative tasks that position our producers to broaden their portfolio of journalism and new-media skills. And, as they work together, we expect they’ll find better ways to package news and show off our best content in multiple places by working together. As Steve Adler has noted, multimedia is a key initiative, and we want to get more of those assets onto more of our platforms.

We don’t expect any positions to be eliminated as a result of this merger; if anything, this is an area we want to invest more deeply in.

For the teams, we expect that basic job roles will not change, but they will broaden; producers will learn how to publish on one another’s systems so they can help each other during busy news cycles, regardless of where we are publishing our news. The unified desk will report to Robert MacMillan, who will continue as Reuters.com’s editor of global editions. He also will take on top news desk packaging responsibilities and work closely with Bangalore Bureau Chief Robin Paxton and key Eikon stakeholders.

Please join us in congratulating Robert on his expanded duties.