Reuters names Alessandra Galloni as its next editor-in-chief

(Reuters) – Reuters News has named one of its top editors, Alessandra Galloni, as its next editor-in-chief, the first woman to lead a world-wide news agency in its 170-year history.

A 47-year-old from Rome, Galloni, will replace Stephen J. Adler, who is retiring this month after leading the newsroom for the past decade. Under his leadership, Reuters has received hundreds of journalism awards, including seven Pulitzer Prizes, the industry’s top honor.

Speaking four languages, and with extensive experience in political and business news on Reuters and previously in the Wall Street Journal, Galloni takes the helm when the news agency faces several challenges. Some of these are common to all media. Others are specific to the complexity of the organization: with a global workforce of about 2,450 journalists, Reuters serves a range of divergent customers and is also a unit in a much larger information services business.

Since 2008, Reuters has been part of Thomson Reuters Corp., a corporation with more lucrative, faster-growing segments than news. Its CEO, Steve Hasker, who joined Thomson Reuters last year, has focused on aggressively expanding the corporation’s three major businesses: providing information, software, and services to lawyers, corporations, and the profession. tax and accounting. Hasker’s strategy has helped boost Thomson Reuters shares to all-time highs.

Reuters News accounts for about 10% of Thomson Reuters ’total revenue of $ 5.9 billion. Unlike many news organizations, Reuters is profitable. But it also affects the parent company’s revenue growth and profit margin, analysts say, and the executive who runs the news business, Reuters chairman Michael Friedenberg, is pushing to increase sales and increase profitability. Looking to the future, Thomson Reuters chief financial officer predicted last month that sales of its “Big Three” companies are expected to grow from 6% to 7% in 2023, while its news division and printing business “is expected to dilute the growth of organic revenue From 1% to 2%.”

Gary Bisbee, a Bank of America analyst, said he expects Reuters News to “continue to be an obstacle to the company’s growth,” but added that as other Thomson Reuters divisions grow faster, that drag will slow with Over time.

Thomson Reuters expects a turnaround in the Reuters Events business, which it acquired in October 2019. Virtually all of last year’s face-to-face conferences were canceled or postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. . But the business has driven a hybrid event strategy for 2021 with face-to-face and virtual conferencing, and hopes its revenue will improve.

While some in the industry have speculated that Thomson Reuters might want to sell the news division, three analysts said they did not expect a sale. Douglas McCabe, a media analyst at Enders Analysis in London, said Reuters is “a tremendously powerful part of” the Thomson Reuters brand and that “the powerful Reuters writing behind it and all the truly specialized business assets is a great combination “.

In a statement, CEO Hasker said: “Thomson Reuters is committed to the future of Reuters News. It is an important part of the business and is valued by our entire customer base. The last year has shown, without any kind of doubt, the value of independent, global and impartial journalism ”.

A deal was closed this year in which Thomson Reuters ’former financial and venture business – now called Refinitiv – was sold to the London Stock Exchange Group Plc in a total deal of $ 27 billion. Under the terms, Reuters News has guaranteed annual payments of at least $ 336 million to provide news and editorial content to Refinitiv by 2048. Many in the media industry envy this revenue stream.

Galloni told colleagues that one of his critical tasks would be to maintain a good relationship with Refinitiv, as he is Reuters’ largest customer, accounting for just over half of the news agency’s revenue. $ 628 million last year.

The important relationship has been a source of some tension, senior editors say. As part of the contract with Refinitiv, Reuters must meet strict performance targets for the news coverage it receives from Refinitiv customers, which Reuters has so far surpassed. Thomson Reuters, for its part, noted in its latest annual report that the exclusive deal, while lucrative, limits Reuters ’ability to sell to other customers in the growing financial services industry. A spokesman for Refinitiv declined to comment.

Gordon Crovitz, a former editor of the Wall Street Journal, said the new editor, however, will have to find new sources of income. “Reuters is in an unusual position because Refinitiv’s promise frees Reuters News from being more aggressive in creating new news products to serve new markets,” he said. “I think there’s still a lot of fruit hanging out by Reuters because of the strength of the brand and the size of the staff.”

NEW WEBSITE

Reuters’ main competitors include Bloomberg News, the Associated Press, the French news agency AFP and visual content provider Getty Images. In addition to its event business, Reuters has been looking for other growth opportunities. These include the upcoming launch of a revamped website that is expected to be aimed at professionals and eventually start charging for content.

McCabe said convincing consumers to pay for content is a challenge because “Reuters is a brand that a lot of people recognize, but don’t intuitively intuit.” But he is more optimistic that segmentation professionals can succeed on Reuters. “All the tests tell me these are the subscription models that really work,” he said.

CEO Hasker has told colleagues that he wants Reuters to be more comprehensive in the company’s other divisions. To that end, the newsroom was recently added to its legal information staff.

Adler led several movements to modernize Reuters, which gained fame in its early days for using carrier pigeons to transmit shovels. Over the past decade, the newsroom has created teams of investigative, data, and graphic journalists and uses artificial intelligence to speed up the publication of certain breaking news.

Hasker has said he is looking forward to continuing to modernize the newsroom by getting it to embrace new technologies more aggressively. He and Friedenberg considered that a wide range of journalists happened to Adler, both inside and outside the news agency, according to people who knew the subject.

Among them were two major Reuters editors, Gina Chua and Simon Robinson. External candidates included David Walmsley, editor of The Globe and Mail, and Kevin Delaney, former executive co-director and editor of Quartz Media Inc.

Galloni, based in London, is known internally as a charismatic presence with a keen interest in business news. She has explained to her colleagues that her priorities include boosting Reuters ’digital business and events.

She takes the helm after serving as Reuters ’global editor, overseeing journalists in 200 locations around the world. Early in his career, he worked for Reuters in Italian. He received degrees from Harvard University and the London School of Economics. She returned to Reuters in 2013 after about 13 years in The Wall Street Journal, where she specialized in economics and business coverage as a reporter and editor in London, Paris and Rome.

“For 170 years, Reuters has set the standard for independent, reliable and global reporting,” Galloni said in the Reuters announcement about his appointment, which will take effect on April 19. “It’s an honor to lead a world-class newsroom full of talented, dedicated and inspiring journalists.”

The search for the new Reuters editor came as other major media outlets deal with the succession to the newsroom. Both the Washington Post, where executive editor Marty Baron retired in February, and the Los Angeles Times, where Norman Pearlstine resigned as executive editor in December, are currently looking for replacements.