After years of puttering with half-hearted online presences, Reuters lifted the veil today on its new home site portal. This is far from half-hearted - it's a masterful positioning of the global news, finance and media content company's wide spectrum of assets in a highly usable and attractive venue. The ad-supported site features a general news and multimedia main section complemented by a finance section that highlights Multex-based research, alerts, tie-ins to corporate events sponsored by Reuters and a "Reuters Recommends" section of featured picks from its services. The finance section is oriented towards individual investors, but with a wide array of stock picking and evaluation tools, strong fundamental data and a risk alert evaluation tool, it's a pretty good kit for off-floor financial professionals as well. There's also a convenient individual and corporate signup for Reuters Messaging to encourage the growth of this online investor community. Within the scope of its domain this is a very strong offering in almost every imaginable way. Main weaknesses: it is, as always, a Reuters-only world, which is probably par for the course for a company that is sorely in need of establishing a stronger vContent brand value. Over time hopefully we'll be seeing capabilities to integrate in general Web and third party contextual content sources, which have helped portals such as nyt.com to develop strengths where its core editorial team and ad presences needed a boost. But when one thinks of the painfully slow progression of the Baron's online home from a brochureware nonpresence to various half-hearted interpretations of engaging individuals with Reuters content and capabilities, this represents a statement that Reuters is going to try everything that it knows how to do to compete effectively in the markets for individual content for consumers and semi-pros.