Reuters: A Cold Week in January

Reuters is one of the world’s biggest news agencies. It’s a little simplistic to say that it supplies the news to the world’s news outlets (papers, TV, internet) but that is essentially its job. With journalists in more than a hundred of the world’s countries—at a time when most news outlets can’t afford this luxury—Reuters is able to quickly get breaking news onto its wire service for the world’s media to follow up.



So Reuters’ task is very different to that of a newspaper, which has time to mull over the news. It has to be fast but also accurate. Its wire service is subscribed to by every major news outlet across the world. At the Guardian, journalists would watch it constantly and I imagine staff at BBC News do even more carefully. Often you see Reuters’ snaps (breaking news pieces) ticking along the bottom of the screen before BBC/Sky etc. have had a chance to work on a story, or verify it.



I arrived at nine to meet Keith, the UK Chief Correspondent, at the company’s office at Kildare House, just off Fleet Street. (John, the UK Bureau Chief, still affectionately calls this the Fleet Street office rather than Kildare which everyone else knows it by.) Keith immediately suggested I head over to London Zoo for their annual stock take, an opportunity by the Zoological Society of London to invite the media down and show off keepers with pens and clipboards alongside their most interesting animals.



I arrived, in a cab, to the zoo on what was a numbingly cold morning. The photographers and camera crews were huddled around the penguin enclosure with some of the journalists attempting to make out a story. The TV crews did this with ease, pointing to the animals with prop notebooks and tallies. I had a tougher job, and noted that I was one of only a few ‘text’ journalists there.

I caught up with the Reuters TV presenter and crew. We interviewed the Zoological Director of ZSL before moving onto the meerkats and the Galapagos tortoise. After interviewing their keeper Seb and with the cold weather to blame for my sloppy shorthand, I grabbed a cab back to Kildare House to write the story up.

A keeper had told me on my way out that it was solely a media opportunity and in fact the keepers know what animals they have all year round.



I struggled. There was nothing to say and I clearly wasn’t going at it from the best, personal, ‘It’s so cold and I’m out here counting animals’ angle. One of the chief editors, Steve, kindly explained why Reuters wouldn’t be using it or covering the event as text



Slightly disappointed, I grabbed lunch on Fleet Street, now taken over by law firms and sadly without a single newspaper building on its path.



You’d think that a news agency would be more rushed than a paper. But in fact, the agency doesn’t have to fill pages with content. If nothing’s breaking, nothing’s breaking. Also, being part of such a massive organisation which is publishing (international) stories to its wire every few seconds, it doesn’t really make a difference if the London dateline doesn’t appear for a little while.



I also realised that there’s no necessity to have people reporting from, for example, Parliament in person. With at least two TV screens on everybody’s desk pumping out BBC and Sky News all the time, and with BBC Parliament just a flick of the switch away, I watched the staff cover Peter Mandelson’s speech from Kildare, fascinated at how easy it was.



There are, obviously, reasons why news outlets need reporters on the ground, and Reuters have two, Tim and Matt, in their own office just above the House of Commons. However, I learned that for snap news stories most of the work was done from the office. I did similar in my piece on Peter Mandelson announcing an extra Bank Holiday for the Queen’s Jubilee that afternoon, which made it to the wire. So at least I had one byline to show for the day.



That lack of having to be watching events live and in person was even more pronounced the following day as I sat in the Reuters office above the House of Commons with Matt and Tim watching Prime Minister’s Questions, taking place just metres away, on TV. This was necessary so that an important announcement could be on the wire within seconds of being spoken.



Matt had told me how he liked working for the news agency as it was always ‘straight’. He said he felt sorry for some of his colleagues who would have to toe their paper’s line. I hadn’t decided at this point whether I would like the Reuters-type environment compared to the Guardian one. I thought I preferred investigating and working on stories rather than just getting them out there. Matt insisted that Reuters did give you the opportunity to go into more depth. He, unlike many people at the Guardian, was keen that I take the internship/go-off-and-travel route into journalism. Tim disagreed.



Prime Minister’s Questions went well for Gordon Brown. However, that was overshadowed at around 12.25pm by Sky News flicking over to its reporter saying that an email had been sent round to Labour MPs from Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt asking if they would be interested in a ballot to elect a replacement for Gordon Brown. This big news prompted Tim to run down from the office to the Commons itself to chat to the reporters outside who had been watching from within the chamber. They talked of Labour’s whips having run out of the Commons five minutes before PMQs ended, and now they knew why.



Tim and I ran back to the office. Keith had clearly been watching events from Kildare and put out the snaps and first few articles on the big story. Our task, well mine and part of Tim’s, was to get expert analyses. In the event of a big story, Reuters will put on its wire expert/relevant opinions on the event which news outlets can then use in their own pieces.



My job was to call up academics, pollsters etc. for a hundred or so words on their thoughts. Robert Worcester, the founder of MORI, turned out to give the best soundbite. “They have dumped a large boulder into the pond three months before the general election and they call themselves loyalists,” he told me while we watched Patricia Hewitt on BBC News together.



I left as things died down but grateful that I’d been witness to such a big story. Matt told me, as he guided me back to Portcullis House and the exit, that he was keen to make sure the story didn’t get blown out of proportion as people tended to get excited too quickly. John, the UK Bureau Chief, who was snowed in at home, asked how my day was on the phone later and called the events of the day “historic”.



That morning I had written a piece on Frank Field and some other MPs calling for a UK population cap of 70m. I spent the afternoon trying to get quotes from immigration charities and eventually managed to get hold of the former head of the Immigration Advisory Service.



I also wrote a piece on youth crime having gone up in areas the government had ploughed £100m to help it go down. The press release, from the Department for Children, Schools and Families, had completely twisted its figures to make it look as if it was doing well. Most reports spotted this and focused on the release’s last line which gave the data.



Steve, the editor, looked at the piece before it went online. When I write stories for the student paper, they generally go in without much editing. When I write them for the Guardian there’s a fair few scribbles on the print-out from the subs. I have never been so nervous handing in articles as before I submitted them to Steve.



With lightning wit and a blunt demeanour, Steve would point out my mistakes. And every one was spot on. He was massively constructive in his criticism for which I’m grateful.


Thursday morning Keith suggested I head out to a marginal constituency and find out what people there thought about the attempted ‘coup’. The story was dying out, as Matt had suggested it may, and clearly those whips who’d run out of the Commons slightly early had done their job. There was much criticism of the Cabinet, however, as many members had taken hours to respond to media enquiries and prop up their leader. It really is like the Thick of It.



I headed to a very cold and apathetic Battersea. No one in Battersea cared or knew about the previous day’s events. The best I got was from a librarian, however, he refused to be quoted. Matt called asking if I had anything yet as a nice quote to end his piece. I told him I was struggling. He told me not to worry too much and that it was too cold for me to stay out there too long. I realised, with his help, that the apathy and the cold weather was the point. That was the feeling and that’s what we should convey.



"I'm working outside today. It's too cold and I couldn't care less about the government,” was the quote Matt used to end his piece, from 27-year-old electrician Dave Jones, working in south London. Turned out the World Editors, the rung above John, had really liked it.



John had been very keen to show me around the organisation’s Canary Wharf office. Matt told me later that this was the biggest newsroom in Europe. It was huge. This is what I expected from a global news organisation. With hundreds of staff, each with at least four monitors, the building was the hub of Reuters’ vast network of reporters.



John, very kindly, spent an hour showing me round the different groups within the office and detailed their tasks. He was arranging a Monday press conference to be delivered by Nick Clegg at the building. They discussed what may be talked out on Monday and who would be doing what. Again, very Thick of It.



Friday morning I headed to Westminster Magistrates’ Court for Harriet Harman’s careless driving charge. I was told by a lady in the public gallery that Harman would not be turning up, to no one’s surprise but my slight disappointment. Still, Harman pleaded guilty through her lawyer and I headed back and wrote up the story. I also worked on a piece later that day about a guy who’d lost out on a £7m bet as Ladbrokes had screwed up.



That piece made it into the Ottawa Citizen, and a number of the world’s papers, as did other stories in the New York Times, some paper in India and many others around the world. All are taken by Yahoo. It was nice seeing my name in print elsewhere and around the world.


Reuters’ internship is hugely attractive though I think I will struggle to get onto it. One of Reuters’ strengths that I’ve not talked about is their financial news, and the fact that they make most of their money from financial subscribers. Their wires have an effect on trading. I haven’t talked about it much because I don’t know a huge amount about finance and the internship and trainee schemes require a demonstration that you do.



I learned a huge amount from my four days at Reuters, thanks to its staff not treating me as a work experience kid and giving me the chance to work on big stories.