Thomson Reuters Innovates via Print!

January 22, 2012

From the “beavers do what beavers do” file.

With musical chairs in the senior executive ranks, flat earnings, a drubbing by Bloomberg and a Hail, Mary! attempt to gin up excitement via YouTube, Thomson Reuters is giving me a headache. I can’t imagine what David Thomson and the other stakeholders think about the tie up of a professional publishing company with a global news outfit.

What I did not expect was the Wall Street Journal story “Thomson Reuters Considers a Magazine Launch” in the Saturday hard copy edition delivered to my goose pond. The interesting passage in the news story, which does not seem to be of much interest to other news outfits, is:

Still executives don’t rule out the possibility of a regularly produced publication. “We’re all sitting around thinking about what we do next,” said Jim Impoco, executive editor of Thomson Reuters Digital and managing editor of the Davos magazine. He said the magazine was “part of an arsenal to embellish our consumer profile.”

Yowza!

I don’t think of the Davos crowd as average Harrod’s Creek consumers. I also am not sure if “arsenal” is the word I would choose to describe the hundreds of impossible to differentiate products and services which Thomson Reuters now offers. Have you thought much about eMAXX or EcoWin Pro? I did not think so. In case you know these two products, you will make sense of these offerings as well:

Puntolex
Round Hall
Serengeti.

Yep, highly consumer oriented.

My view of Thomson Reuters is that it is a “beaver”, an animal which no matter where it finds itself, tries to build a dam. This means that Thomson Reuters is going to do products it understands; for example, a print magazine for the wealthy, well connected professional.

Is this a consumer play? Not in my dreams.

Thomson Reuters has to find a way to generate growth, pay dividends, service its debt, and compete with outfits like Factset. Until then, beavers do what beavers do and there is not much of a market for displaced beavers who are trying to build dams in a world far from forests, rivers, and glens.

And search! Yep, WestlawNext is working. The other implementations? Beavers do the beaver thing.

Stephen E Arnold, January 22, 2012

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.