What is This Reuters You Speak Of?

In a recent 60 Minutes /Vanity Fairpoll, a large amount of the public mistook what the Reuters global news agency actually was.

The poll taken in May of this year found that 22 percent of people asked related the Reuters name as that of a German airline, a private New Jersey college, a fast food chain, and a London investment bank. Furthermore, 36 percent of those polled did not even have a guess as to what industry Reuters belonged.

How can this be? Reuters has been covering the world’s news since 1851. They currently employ over 3000 journalists worldwide. Are the Reuters bylines at the bottom of their 1000s of articles published daily too subtle?

Well, one thing is for sure, their competitors might just be better at tooting their own horn. Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief Matthew Winkler recently said, “that his news organization aims to be the world's "most influential."

In response to the encroachment of the other news agencies, Reuters has gone on a Pulitzer Prize level-hiring spree, in that they have recently hired many of the recipients of the prize in an attempt to raise their public profile.

Reuters has also made great strides with updating their website to attract an increasingly techno-savvy audience.

It would be a shame to see a world-renowned news agency go out of business simply because they did not carry the name recognition of some newer upstarts. I do not think that will happen in this case, but I guess I just wish Reuters would get the credit that is owed. 

The Media's Assange Problem

Are WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange re-raising the journalistic bar originally set by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein during the Watergate debacle?

The Woodward and Bernstein team fearlessly reported on and released information that eventually lead to the resignation of the President of the United States. As a result, the duo has been heralded as the best journalistic team of all time. They set the gold standard of what it meant to be a journalist.

However, when WikiLeaks releases diplomatic and military cables that uncover even greater wrongs committed by our government than the ones carried out by President Richard Nixon—we label them as a treacherous and anti-American cabal. However, this defamatory talk is not just coming from our government; it is coming from the Mainstream Media themselves. Time Magazine’s writer Joe Klein wrote this, “I am tremendously concernced [sic] about the puerile eruptions of Julian Assange. . . . If a single foreign national is rounded up and put in jail because of a leaked cable, this entire, anarchic exercise in "freedom" stands as a human disaster. Assange is a criminal. He's the one who should be in jail.”

 I cannot help but think that this sort of fiery talk from the likes of Klein and others is based entirely on a childish-professional jealousy. Every journalist who is proud of his or her profession, regardless of his or her personal political bent—deifies the Woodward and Bernstein team for what they were able to pull off. However, after slogging it out in the pressroom for twenty-plus years without a Pulitzer Prize sitting on their mantle, some journalists are put off by the fact that a computer nerd from Australia (Assange) can consistently scoop them.