How does a company founded in 1851 based on delivering stock ticker data by carrier pigeons stay relevant in the 21st century? By keeping in the thick of changes in content technology every step of the way. Bill Burger of Copyright Clearance Center noted in his introduction that Reuters CEO Tom Glocer's blog is insightful, genuine and pointing out that CEOs need to be very plugged into trends themselves rather than waiting for a Harvard Business Review article to catch up with them three years after publishers can make money with them.

Tom's chat: Last year he said that he as busy with the merger, but then he realized that the SIIA IIS was the perfect forum to get out his vision to the industry. Will focus in his chat on the media company of the 21st century. In his blog he pursues a conversation on topics that really interest him, this presentation is in a sense a summation of his posts. He talks about the two-way pipe, social networking, today he wants to move the debate forward.

Tom's "strawman" revolves around the new economics of publishing. Consumer media companies are ill-suited to be public companies, payback periods long, investments to transform significant. Traditional media companies replaced dollar-monetization of eyeballs with eyeballs that are going to be monetized in pennies. Newspapers in a negative arbitrage with online services, music companies also. BSkyB, the satellite TV service in the UK. almost sank NewsCorp but now is a dominant behemoth. Early days spent building audience and reach, investment dwarfs payback. Notably family-owned. Dow Jones/News Corp a deal with families on both sides, made it easier for Murdoch to manage the multiple. Bancrofts were no longer underwriting a long-term goal for Dow Jones, then the markets did their job.

The pressure of being publicly listed exerts a positive force on managers such as himself, but professionally-oriented publishers are more suited to be public companies. New consumer model works well for startups, but in professional publishing businesses are differe.nt. First, they provide must-have information to do your job. Seconly, your reputation and millions are at stake. Third, the business pays the bills or a third party, Fourth, delivers information in a format that fits your work flow. Imagine you're a lawyer preparing for a case, all precedents are available online, would you risk your professional reputation on not having the one in a hundred presedent that proves or disproves his case [Comment: Good example, professional services that can bill through have and advantage that ]way, but it doesn't necessarily point to how mining technologies can yield these kinds of inputs from virtually any source].

NewsScope - new product that senses sentiment on stories to provide new buy-sell signals. Not only human beings but machines are important consumers for decision-making functions. [Comment: fits our "inverted curve" model of the content marketplace]. Platform across verticals, mash up content from different fields to create new services. For example, investors in the pharma industry will get both financial and scientific information when merger starts in 2nd quarter.

Turns over the floor for comments: Question - what to do with merging consumer and professional markets. Tom: Depends on your strategy and customers. Need to be quite experimental, professional space needs to watch the canary in the coal mine in the consumer space, could happen to their industry as well.

Question - Your reputation is based on rich, well organized information, how to resolve with fast-moving markets. Tom - Reuters invented UGC in the 1970s with conversational dealing systems for foreign exchange, post your rates, they agggregated, sold it back to same institutions. used to charge them for giving content. Nothing new, consulting businesses work on that model. Reuters has 2,500 journalists doing news under Reuters brand, 2,000 stringers, the extension to citizen journalism is the next concentric ring of this content, the questions becomes do you apply to your brand to it or not, but not an excuse to crawl back and say "We're the professionals, your stuff is not."

Question from me: How do publishers respond to needs of institutions that need to get more value in individual transactions? Tom - Keep on top of the technology curve is the short answer. [Comment: Difficult to maintain eye contact and type at the same time, my take was that it's one of the softer spots in all of the financial information company's strategies, they're good at delivering information but they're lacking the ability to drive the understanding of potential transactions enough to help professionals build margins in their transactions. These services have to ramp up to a whole new level of analysis to make that happen as it happens in structured finance and hedge fund investments to some degree already.]

Question from Gordon Crovitz: How to manage the transformation through the transaction? Missed some of the answers, but in general the answer is that you have to give people concrete expectations about concrete plans and how they reflect the long-term interest of shareholders, but then investors are put off because they're measured by quarterly portfolio results using - ironically - benchmarks such as Reuters' Lipper averages.

Question: How to support non-profit journalism, does Reuters support ACAP initiative
Tom - Supporting ACAP, but not exclusively, will still provide feeds on a private basis. A place for ad-supported content, content from government-supported channels such as BBC lots of interesting watchdog groups, now everyone can have a voice.

Question: Like your perspective on building a global economy.
Tom - Reuters is"effortlessly global," bigger question is how to serve a market like the United States which is in some ways harder to crack. Thinking about it more purposefully, with Thomson the opportunity is to tap the growth of global markets instead of just U.S.-driven markets that drive Thomson revenues. Email may have English as the standard language, local meetings are in local languages, hard to start, glad it is.

Question: W here are the most unexpected opportunties and challenges in the merger?
Tom - Thought that I knew about Thomson from using WestLaw and other Thomson products that he knows from Reuters' competitive profile, but Thomson doesn't beat its chest about a lot of its assets and its opportunities. Trying to keep things simple, Reuters is more complex than it ever needed to be, getting out of businesses, reducing product lines. Priorities are around integration of Reuters and Thomson Financial, tempting to look at other standing units at Thomson but they're doing fine right now. The financial businesses were always highly complementary, don't overlook the size of the prize in terms of cost reduction and revenue opportunities. Internationalization of entire company is also key, fantastic time to have buy-side assets in Asia, keep a light touch on centralization, focus on central resources for data mining, reasearch, will keep it simple.

Question: What are some of the interesting verticals in paid content space?
Tom - Would you include financing, accounting, legal? [crowd chuckles - sometimes the West Coast folks just don't get it from this perspective.]. We'll see a lot more convergence, weather, commodities, water availability will become important. Plenty of runway, can build leadership positions in new verticals and strengthen ties.

Good session, Tom's on top of a lot of key trends, his ability to make Reuters more lean and responsive has been quite admirable, especially in his ability to reinvent the culture of a 150-year-old institution. I think that the merger will go fairly well, they're focusing on the financial integration short-term, obviously, but the hoped-for synergies with other sectors is bound to evolve fairly rapidly using Thomson's approach to cross-silo product development.

Labels: financial information, reuters, SIIA Information Industry Summit 2008, Thomson

Ann Michael, Founder of DeltaThink, moderated a panel including Bill Burger, VP of Marketing at Copyright Clearance Center, Sasha Gurke, SVP and Co-Founder of Knovel Corporation and Jim Reeves, SVP of New Product Development for Thomson RIA. Why, integrate content, into who's workflow, and what does content integration mean? Ann outlined how enterprises can review numerous workflow products in "bakeoffs" to determine which are meeting user needs most effectively.

Sasha outlined Knovel Library, a collection of scientific references that has been digitized through Knovel to allow engineers to access individual graphs, charts and tables from these references and to use them interactively via Knovel-generated tools. By getting the content to be highly usable, the user's workflow is transformed through increased productivity. Jim Reeves from Thomson Tax & Accounting focuses on CPAs and other financial professionals. Users can log in and find information on Sarbanes-Oxley andother key topics of interest, search by keywords. Documents retrieved from this system can be integrated into Microsoft Office documents and charts can be generated using content from a wide variety of sources into a common view of regulations. Bill Burger outlined how CCC's Rightsphere has integrated content licensing awareness relicensing capabilities into corporate workflows. Rightsphere is integrated across all kinds of content as opposed via a vertically assembed content collection. Starting with Pfizer and AstraZeneca as research and development partners CCC provided a tool that helps enterprises to understand licensing across all of their licensed content. The key thing that CCC learned from their research into enterprise markets is that rights management is a "speed bump" that people need to verify quickly and effectively. The Rightsphere tool provides a simple graphic that lets users check whether they have full permissions to redistribute content.

All interesting examples of workflow integration, but I think that the key lesson I learned from this is that your product will benefit from thorough field research to understand your users' needs. I.T.-centric products that presume too much about the value of a current platform are likely to result in "workflow" solutions that may increase productivity on some level but are not necessarily truly integrated into the ways in which users really to their job. Workflow is a sword that can cut both ways: if you invest heavily in a tool that works well in a closed environment when your customers are looking for more open-ended workflow integration you may be finding your content locked in to a platform that will have a problem responding to competitors who can devise more horizontal integrations via widgets, mashups and other new technologies.

Labels: CCC, Knovel, SIIA Content Forum 2007, Thomson, workflow integration