Reuters

Reuters is a global news agency headquartered in London, United Kingdom, owned by Thomson Reuters.

Until 2008 the Reuters news agency formed part of an independent company, Reuters Group plc, which was also a provider of financial market data. Since the merger between Reuters Group and The Thomson Corporation the Reuters news agency has been a subsidiary of Thomson Reuters, forming part of its Markets Division.

History


Paul Julius Reuter noticed that, with the electric telegraph, news no longer required days or weeks to travel long distances. In the 1850s, the 34-year-old Reuter was based in Aachen – then in the Kingdom of Prussia, now in Germany – close to the borders with the Netherlands and Belgium. He began using the newly opened Berlin–Aachen telegraph line to send news to Berlin. However, the telegraph did not extend the 76 mi to Brussels, Belgium's capital city and financial center. Reuter saw an opportunity to speed up news service between Brussels and Berlin by using homing pigeons to bridge that gap.

In 1851, Reuter moved to London. After failures in 1847 and 1850, attempts by the Submarine Telegraph Company to lay an undersea telegraph cable across the English Channel, from Dover to Calais, promised success. Reuter set up his "Submarine Telegraph" office in October 1851 just before the opening of that undersea cable in November, and he negotiated a contract with the London Stock Exchange to provide stock prices from exchanges in continental Europe in return for access to the London prices, which he then supplied to stockbrokers in Paris. In 1865, Reuter's private firm was restructured, and it became a limited company (a corporation) called the Reuter's Telegram Company. Reuter had been naturalised as a British subject in 1857.

Reuter's agency built a reputation in Europe for being the first to report news scoops from abroad, such as Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Almost every major news outlet in the world now subscribes to Reuters' services, which operates in over 200 cities in 94 countries in about 20 languages.

The last surviving member of the Reuters family founders, Marguerite, Baroness de Reuter, died at age 96 on 25 January 2009, after having suffered a series of strokes.

Journalists
Reuters employs several thousand journalists, sometimes at the cost of their lives. In May 2000, Kurt Schork, an American reporter, was killed in an ambush while on assignment in Sierra Leone. In April and August 2003, news cameramen Taras Protsyuk and Mazen Dana were killed in separate incidents by US troops in Iraq. In July 2007, Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh were killed when they were fired upon by a US military Apache helicopter in Baghdad after having been mistakenly identified as carrying weapons. During 2004, cameramen Adlan Khasanov in Chechnya and Dhia Najim in Iraq were also killed. In April 2008, cameraman Fadel Shana was killed in the Gaza Strip after being hit by an Israeli tank using flechettes. The first Reuters journalist to be taken hostage in action was Anthony Grey. Detained while covering the Cultural Revolution in Peking in the late 1960s, it was said to be in response to the jailing of several Chinese journalists by the colonial British Government in Hong Kong. He was considered to be the first political hostage of the modern age and was released after almost 2 years of solitary confinement. Awarded an OBE by the British Government in recognition of this, he went on to become a best selling author.

Policy of objective language
Reuters has a strict policy towards upholding journalistic objectivity. This policy has caused comment on the possible insensitivity of its non-use of the word terrorist in reports, including the 11 September attacks. Reuters has been careful to only use the word terrorist in quotes, whether quotations or scare quotes. Reuters global news editor Stephen Jukes wrote, "We all know that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, and that Reuters upholds the principle that we do not use the word terrorist." The Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz responded, "After the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and again after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Reuters allowed the events to be described as acts of terror. But as of last week, even that terminology is banned." Reuters later apologised for this characterisation of their policy, although they maintained the policy itself.

The 20 September 2004 edition of The New York Times reported that the Reuters Global Managing Editor, David A. Schlesinger, objected to Canadian newspapers' editing of Reuters articles by inserting the word terrorist, stating that "my goal is to protect our reporters and protect our editorial integrity".

However, when reporting the 7 July 2005 London bombings, the service reported, "Police said they suspected terrorists were behind the bombings." This line appeared to break with their previous policy and was also criticised. Reuters later clarified by pointing out they include the word "when we are quoting someone directly or in indirect speech," and the headline was an example of the latter. The news organisation has subsequently used "terrorist" without quotations when the article clarifies that it is someone else's words.

Photograph controversies / anti-Israel bias
Reuters was accused of bias against Israel in its coverage of the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict, in which the company used two doctored photos by a Lebanese freelance photographer Adnan Hajj. On 7 August 2006, Reuters announced it severed all ties with Hajj and said his photographs would be removed from its database.

In 2010, Reuters was criticised again for anti-Israeli bias when it cropped out activists' knives and a naval commando's blood from photographs taken aboard the Mavi Marmara during the Gaza flotilla raid. In two separate photographs, knives held by the activists were edited out of the versions of the pictures published by Reuters. The live arms wielded by the Israeli forces who had boarded the ship were not cropped out.