Reuters launches effort to make daily news more compelling, relevant

Paul Ingrassia, the deputy editor in chief of Reuters, sent out the following email to editors:

Dear Colleagues:

In just a few weeks we will be launching what is perhaps our most important editorial initiative of the year, the Sharper File project. The goal is both simple and profound: to make our daily news file more compelling and relevant. As we prepare to go global with this effort, I want to explain what we will accomplish and how we’ll do it.

First, some context. As we have increased the time and effort devoted to initiative coverage, many staffers have asked, quite logically, “What do we do less of?” The Sharper File initiative provides the answer. The goal is to get away from rote coverage that clutters our file, makes it harder for our customers to find what they need, and wastes our own time. We provide much routine or recurring coverage that is important to customers, but rote coverage is different. It includes:

• Writing a reflexive article about a simple fact when our customers would be better off with a table or a chart.
• Writing a story even though our snaps and urgents have told our readers everything they need to know.
• Digging up a sell-side analyst to state the obvious about a company’s announcement and filing an update, when our readers are certain to ignore that update.
• Covering an event or announcement with a story just because it happened, not because it’s news.
• Marginal updates that don’t change a story materially. (London’s Mike Peacock urges his colleagues to ask: “If we aren’t going to change the first three or four paragraphs, why update the story?”)

In other words, rote coverage consists of stories no one needs or wants. The essence of the Sharper File initiative is not writing those stories so we can focus on meaningful coverage.

Sharper news judgments are the only way we can get rid of these stories and updates. Our challenge is exercising this judgment across a global news organization of more than 2800 journalists in 200 or so bureaus. Fortunately, however, we have a strong foundation in our three regional editing desks.

These were formed early last year, many of you will recall, by consolidating the plethora of “asset class” desks in each region. Unified desks with chiefs who report to each of the Regional Editors give us a central place where we can challenge our own judgments about what is and isn’t worth publishing. With strong editors leading each desk, we can separate wheat from chaff without making customers do it.

We piloted this initiative successfully in Asia last year. Dayan Candappa, Dean Yates in Top News and Jean Yoon as Desk Chief led a significant transformation of our file. As regional desk editor, Jean’s role was pivotal. She and her team, with Dayan’s support and guidance, worked with bureaus and EICs each day, in real time, to spike marginal stories, direct our correspondents and editors to better angles and free them to pursue stories of genuine interest to readers.

We have not slowed the file, nor will we. Snaps still move immediately; urgents, critical stories and important updates still move quickly. Because we have reduced the time devoted to marginal coverage, we have more time to produce stories that matter. In fact, they can now run more quickly, they can read better, and we can run more of them. This is what success looks like.

This initiative is not about running fewer items overall, although that might be an outcome. If a smaller file was the only goal, we could achieve that overnight with a simple mandate reducing the size of the file by some arbitrary percentage. But such a blunt effort would reduce both the valuable and the marginal stories, hurting our customers as much as helping them.

Instead, sharpening our news judgment and then allocating our resources accordingly will only help – indeed, significantly help — our customers. It will also be more fun as conscious choice replaces reflexive behavior, and as faster and smarter snaps, richer stories and deeper insights replace marginal coverage.

Given the experience we gained in Asia last year, we’ll put Jean Yoon on the ground in London and New York to help launch the initiative in those regions. Jean will counsel and support our teams there as we learn together how to make better, smarter choices that give our customers more news they must have. I’ll be working right alongside her and our regional deskers. The project will be launched in London on April 29 and in New York on May 20.

Best regards,

Paul