Thomson Financial gears up U.S. business and markets coverage

While its parent company works on finalizing its deal to acquire Reuters, Thomson Financial has been building a team of reporters and editors to cover the U.S. stock market and launched coverage for European and Asian customers in October, reports Michael Baron, co-managing editor of U.S. equities.

Baron told Talking Biz News: “We’re building a 16-person staff, providing spot coverage of U.S. equities. We began publishing to Thomson customers in Europe and Asia on Oct. 22. Our copy will begin flowing through to U.S. customers sometime in January. Our fill-outs — not headlines — currently appear on both CNNMoney and Forbes.com through AFX news feeds on those sites. There is also an additional four-person group in Washington, D.C., covering economic data and government policy.”

The Thomson Financial coverage concentrates on breaking U.S. equity news for now. They’re also publishing a blog focused on financial news to compliment similar Thomson blogs covering private equity and foreign exchange.

Thomson has been making inroads in business news for a while. It partnered with MarketWatch in April 2004 to launch a newswire. That move was followed by the purchase of the AFX newswire from Agence France-Presse in June 2006. Prior to the Reuters deal, Thomson Financial decided to build its U.S. news presence instead of extending the licensing contract with MarketWatch.

Baron, who worked at Dow Jones and Bridge News before joining Marketwatch in 2000, was hired earlier this year, along with a number of other journalists, including co-managing editor Tomi Kilgore. They’ve spent the summer hiring staff, training and preparing for the launch. They’ve been publishing for more than eight weeks.

The staff is spread out, with 10 in New York, three in San Francisco and two in Boston.

Also from MarketWatch are Padraic Cassidy, an editor who previously covered airlines; Gabriel Madway and Katherine Hunt, who anchor coverage from San Francisco; and Wanfeng Zhou, a markets reporter who previously covered forex.

The rest of the editorial staff includes Joseph Woelfel, who was the assignment editor at the Dow Jones News Service for more than 15 years, and Charles Mikolajczak, an editor with Wall Street Source for roughly 10 years.

The reporting staff includes Michelle Rama, formerly of Dow Jones Newswires and in her second stint with Thomson, and a number of recent journalism school graduates.