Okay, this is conjecture. The opinions expressed here belong to the author and not to the Financial Times. Reader beware, etc. Check your own facts…
The real reason Thomson Reuters has just agreed to shell out £12m to acquire Breakingviews, the Lex-copycat analysis service, is because the organisation couldn’t think of a name for its own commentary offering, built up at vast expense over the past 18 months or so.
FT Alphaville tried to help – right here – launching a competition to find a suitable brand for the new Reuters service, which was being put together by former Breakingviews editor Jonathon Ford.
FT Alphaville judges picked “Reutards,” closely followed by “Behind the curve.” But Reuters executives were not paying attention, and without a name, the media firm was never able to clarify what exactly its new battalion of comment writers were supposed to write about and how their content might be presented to their readers.
Seven months on, what’s worrying now is that there still isn’t a name for the hybrid commentary offering that Reuters plans to carve out of what is first and foremost a forced journalistic marriage. The statement released on Wednesday simply says:
The combined Reuters Breakingviews Commentary team will operate under the Breakingviews brand. The separate stand-alone brand will allow Reuters to continue to ensure that there remains a clear distinction between the organization’s news service and commentary offering.
For evidence of the uncomfortable fit on the Reuters side read this now-famous (and 100 per cent valid) post from Felix Salmon, published when news of a potential deal first surfaced in July.
For evidence of stress on the BV side, consider the fact that a little under four years ago, the company had a substantial rights issue which then valued the company at just about the same price at which it is now being sold. Founder Hugo Dixon hoped to sell before the end of the M&A boom at something like £50m.
The sense is Mr Dixon is selling Breakingwind now because he had to.
But let’s look to the future. This email to staff from Reuters editor in chief, David Schlesinger, offers plenty of clues, including this nugget:
As I have shared with you before, a fundamental plank of my strategy for making Reuters the indispensable news service for the 21st century is to expand our traditional fact-based news coverage to offer agenda-setting point-of-view journalism.
POV hackery? Some disambiguation might be required here, but what Schlesinger is telling us is that he and his colleagues are terrified by the commoditisation of news.
That’s a real problem when your founding principles say there should never be any bias in your content.
Maybe the name we are searching for here is 2POV.
Related links:
Blogonomics, or the economics of writing for “free” – FT Alphaville
Bloomberg scoops up BusinessWeek – FT