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On Tuesday at the Future of Business Media event at the Waldorf=Astoria in New York City, Rafat Ali, publisher and editor of PaidContent.org, sat down with Reuters COO Devin Wenig, who will be CEO of the combined Thomson Financial unit and Reuters Group plc financial and media businesses after the completion of the Thomson-Reuters merger. Some highlights:
Where is the deal?
“It’s where we expected. Things are OK. We expect the deal to close in the
first quarter 2008. We’ve started a lot of cultural integration." Most important thing: Wenig wants to make sure when the merger happens, it is one company, not two. On Canadian culture vs. British culture: "I’m not sure what Canadian culture is." What will Reuters look like? "It will still be Reuters Business as we know it today, with the best of Thomson. The Reuters business itself will be larger. A lot of the strategy we have deployed at Reuters is still going to go forward. I don’t think we would have gone into this if we thought the deal was going to change our course." Impact of credit crunch on the company: "Right now, we’ve seen no impact on our business. That’s because the impact on banks has been in limited areas, and areas where traditionally Reuters is not very strong. We’re really trying to limit the impact of the merger on running our business. It will get more challenging as we get closer." On Reuters syndication and building out the Reuters.com Web site: "We still syndicate today but oftentimes that drives traffic back to Reuters.com. Our consumer media strategy is one of the fastest-growing parts of our company. There are companies under serious threat because technology is disrupting the value change. We’re in somewhat of a unique position because we have one of the world’s biggest archives — and about to get bigger — and one of the biggest brands." On personal finance category and Reuters: "We’re already in that business. I don’t think we’ll be in financial management." Effect of News Corp.-Dow Jones & Co. deal: "The landscape is changing quite a lot. We have a great relationship with Dow Jones. We were partners in Factiva. It’s one of these complicated co-opetition relationships. This year the dam broke: Technology, globalization, other factors all led to these deals. And they won’t be the last. The impact of these mergers is that everyone is going to be multimedia, multiplatform and competing in each other’s space. It will be confusing, but competition is ultimately good for business." On online video: "Critical for Reuters. You can’t be a media company going forward if you are not multimedia. That means video. We have just under 3,000 journalists, and what they do is create the world’s largest text wire each day. And I don't think that the future is in being a text wire. Text wires will be supplemented by a multimedia experience. That includes video, social networking, etc. We will always be a wire, but we’re also thinking much more in production terms. It’s a big cultural shift for Reuters. We must have a production ethos in the company. And that’s a long way of saying video, not television, will be a big part of what we do." On the future of the terminal business: "There is going to be a fundamental change in this business. I think the terminal business looks somewhat archaic. We’re now getting to the first generation of professionals who grew up on the Internet. They look at those terminals and say, this isn’t good enough. The future of the terminal is a multimedia experience. We bought a company called ClearForest. The terminal of the future is going to bring in all the content from the Web and provide context, what matters. Stay tuned. There’s a lot we’ll be saying soon about a number of these things." — Tom Groppe CategoriesComments Deal Video
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The deal is the smart way for unaccountable executives Reuters group PLC to reap ill gotten gain in cash of their questionable stock options.
The second motive is to hide irregularities accounting of Reuters Group PLC and any corporate governanc scandal at the safety harbor Thomson Reuters.