9. “Money, Money, Money”: Bloomberg, Reuters and a Changing Agency Scene; International News-Reporting a Continuing Priority. Agencies Monitor Performance. (77I4)

Computer experts write: “Data” and “information” are not synonymous. Anything stored is data, but it becomes information only when it is organised and presented meaningfully.

Bloomberg had previously reported on the dubious fortunes of close relatives of the incoming Chinese president, Xi Jinping.

From Latin America, in 1998, Reuters noted that Bloomberg was expanding fast, proposed satisfying all client needs—fixed income and forex (foreign exchange)—on one terminal, but remained weak in local news coverage.

Reuters’ reporters covering Brexit debates in Parliament noted, 12 March: “Until Brexit, the world’s $5 trillion-a-day foreign exchange markets rarely bothered to take much notice of what happens in Britain’s 800-year-old Westminster assembly …Once pitched as one of the reassuringly boring pillars of Western stability, Brexit has instead thrust the intrigues in parliament to the top of the global financial agenda, able to move the U.S. dollar, send tremors through stock markets and whip up yields on German bonds …. The news - transmitted to markets first by Reuters - that the United Kingdom voted out on June 23, 2016, triggered the biggest fall in sterling since the system of free-floating exchange rates was introduced in the early 1970s”. (The UK and the US sought to allay fears of disruption in the multitrillion-dollar derivatives market, whose participants include hedgers, speculators, margin traders and arbitragers, by taking emergency policies to ensure trading continued. Hedge funds are relatively little regulated. Considered to date from 1949, they grew from the 1990s, suffered in the early 2000s and grew again.)

The eighth richest person in the US and the ninth richest person in the world.

Arkus comments in italics.

R. Giulani.

This figure was later revised downwards to around 2750.

In 2019, M. Bloomberg considered standing for the US presidency in 2022. He decided not to but had stated were he to do so he would not want his agency to cover him.

Instinet was a Reuters’ subsidiary brokerage company, founded in 1967 and acquired by Reuters in 1987; it executed global equity liquidity for its professional client base in over 40 countries every day. Reuters sold it in 2005.

White House Press Secretary for US President George W. Bush, January 2001–July 2003.

The M. Arkus log stopped in mid-2002.

Reuters’ John Bartram, surveying agency rumour-reporting, noted: “some … rumours are sometimes no more than market talk about factual stories”; rumours should be checked; but “there is…; no reason why [RTRs] Tokyo shoud not have snapped ∗ its report that the dollar had moved on unconfirmed rumours that Gorbachev had been shot” (“snap”-send urgently) J. Bartram, 7 January 1992. The Reuters annual report 1991 devotes a page to its coup coverage, entitled “SIXTY-ONE HOURS OF UNCERTAINTY”: “Dollar rises two-and-a half pfennigs on Gorbatchev news” (Reuter news services 0804GMT 19 Aug 1991; RTR news graphic map of troop movements; Visnews TV footage of Yeltsin climbing on tank to address crowds; Excel Access spreadsheet on the RTR Terminal charts Deutschmark and sterling rates; News Graphics profile of Yeltsin.

Reuters Television News, APTN, WTN (Worldwide Television News, sold by ABC to APTV in June 1998; in April, Reuters valued it at £30 million and considered buying it). Reuters, like AFP, moved into photos in 1985, and in the 1990s ventured into television more fully than AFP. Reuters’ involvement in the provision of TV news film dated from the BCINA in the 1950s. Cf. also C. Paterson, The international television news agencies, New York: Peter Lang, 2011.

Many correspondents die peacefully. Colleagues remembering a Reuterian, Brendan Boyle, in 2019, celebrated his headline in 1990: “NELSON MANDELA WALKS TO FREEDOM AFTER 27 YEARS IN SOUTH AFRICAN PRISONS”.

He once recalled how he, desperate to reach a place whence he could transmit his copy, and his Reuters colleague, a photographer, Corinne Dufka, desperate to take one more graphic photo, argued like mad. (Dufka, after Reuters, became West Africa Director at Human Rights Watch.)

Cf. M. Palmer, Quels mots pour le dire?, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003.

Editor and Publisher, in Reuter Julius America. In September 2004, E and P showed the situation had not changed: RTRs had 40 correspondents in Iraq, the biggest network of major news organisations; Bloomberg used stringers, RTRs’ copy, that of its own staff outside Iraq. “Bloomberg between Iraq and a Hard place”, E. and P; 1 September 2004. In July 2004, AFP had in Bagdad three English-language text journalists and three French-language, two or journalists Arab-language photographers and Iraqi stringers in 16 other towns.

P. Mackler, report to AFP, May 2003.

New York: John Wiley, 1993.

Ibid., p. 57.

Le monde en direct. De Charles-Louis Havas à l’AFP. Deux siècles d’histoire, Paris: La Découverte, 2014.