Reuters (NSDQ: RTRSY) COO Devin Wenig, the proposed CEO of the Reuters media businesses following the pending Thomson-Reuters merger, shared some interesting thoughts on the current merger process and the next generation of business media data at our Future Of Business Media conference late last month in NYC. The full video and the text highlights after the jump…
– Culture clash in the merger?: “There’s some very similar parts of the culture, there are also some very different parts of the culture of the business.” Asked about fitting Toronto-based Thomson (NYSE: TOC) with Reuters, Wenig jested: “I haven’t been able to figure out what a Canadian culture is yet, but so far so good.” “We’re not necessarily wedded (to the idea) that the Reuters brand must be the single brand everywhere – Thomson will come in to it.”
– Direct-to-consumer: Reuters talked three years ago of creating consumer-facing sites; where’s the evidence now? “We’ve changed out approach. Our strategy did change from trying to monetize that content directly by selling it to portals and other hubs to a traffic acquisition strategy. We still syndicate but oftentimes that ends up driving traffic back to Reuters.com. If you look at our consumer media strategy, it’s very small but it’s one of the fastest growing of our company.” … “We don’t have a traditional consumer business that’s been disrupted by the shift in traditional advertising for instance.”
– The future: Wenig has an exciting vision for overhauling financial data terminals that are “somewhat archaic compared to what’s going on on the web”. His “next-generation” terminal would be a “multimedia experience, is fully social network-enabled, is collaborative”. “Part of that is also about aggregating context that we don’t have … the terminal of the future is not only going to have Reuters content … it’s also going to bring in a bunch of information from the web and do it contextually”. Wenig acknowledged wires can give their own coverage of events but “I want to see what the blogosphere is saying about it – i want to see not just what Reuters says about it but what the world is saying – that’s a huge shift for a 1980s DOS screen.”
– The Holy Grail: How will this happen? Wenig talked up “data concordance” – the application of a single metadata system that facilitates linkages between articles. “As basic data is commodotized, it’s insight that people are looking for… a lot of that insight may reside in other vertical pillars (ie. blogs) … If we can get all this data to speak to each other, then you’ve created the professional internet and that’s the holy grail.” When? “Stay tuned because there’s a lot we’ll be saying soon about a number of these things.” Five years from now – “everybody is going to bleed out in to multimedia and there’ll be more competition – these boxes that companies have grown up in, that’s over – the impact of these mergers is that everybody will be multiplatform, multimedia, monetizing in each other’s space and it’s going to be an exciting world but it will be confusing.”
Video after the jump…RSS readers will have to click through…
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