I learned this today. Reuters is an international news agency that started in Germany 150 years ago.
Reuters was started by Paul Julius Reuter in 1851 and he could have had no idea what he was starting.
Paul Reuter was born in Germany as Israel Beer Josaphat. He moved to London in 1845 and changed his name to Paul Julius Reuter. This was partly because he converted to Christianity, but also partly because Europe was rife with antisemitism at the time.
He moved back to Berlin and started to work for a book-publishing firm and began to publish radical pamphlets during the revolutions. This was a period of political unrest that spread over large parts of Europe. He moved to Paris and joined a news agency.
He was taken with the idea of the news and moved to Aachen, in Germany and set up his own news service. He used homing pigeons to send and receive messages between Brussels, Aachen, Berlin, and Paris. His pigeons were far faster than the trains and he could get financial news from the Paris stock exchange faster than any other news service. This made his service popular. As the telegraph developed, he phased his pigeons out in favor of telegraphs.
Reuter heard that a telegraph line was being built between London and Europe, so he moved back to London. He opened an office at 1 Royal Exchange Building. He had an 11 year-old office boy as an assistant. 1 Royal Exchange was just around the corner from where the London Stock Exchange used to be. (It moved in 1972 to a new location.) Reuter was able to use this location to get financial news from the banks, brokerage houses, businesses and the stock exchange that were all in that area and send this news to Paris and other European cities. He became known for being the first to report stories.
He started with financial news but branched out. He was the first person to report Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in Europe. He had a telegraph line built between London and Crookhaven, Ireland. Ships coming from America would drop canisters containing the news into the sea at Crookhaven and a ship owned by Reuter would fish them out of the sea. The news would then be relayed to Reuter over his telegraph line and onwards, over his European network.
As more newspapers signed up for Reuter’s service, and as telegraph undersea telegraph lines were built, he started to expand. He had staff and journalists throughout the world and he entered the Far East in 1872 and South America in 1874.
Reuter died in 1899 and his son took over the company. His son tried to start a Reuter’s bank as well, but it ended up bankrupting the company. His son, Herbert de Reuter shot himself three days after his wife died and his son, Reuter’s grandson, died in the 1st World War, ending the family line.
The company was bought by Roderick Jones and Mark Napier and they called the company Reuters Limited. The company went from strength to strength. In 1923, they were the first news company to use radio to transmit their news internationally.
During the 2nd World War, the Press Association of Great Britain managed to buy a majority share of Reuters and they tried to influence the news that it produced. This went against the principles of Reuters and after the war they brought in the Reuters Trust Principles:
1. That Reuters shall at no time pass into the hands of any one interest, group, or faction;
2. That the integrity, independence, and freedom from bias of Thomson Reuters shall at all times be fully preserved;
3. That Reuters shall supply unbiased and reliable news services to newspapers, news agencies, broadcasters, and other media subscribers and to businesses, governments, institutions, individuals, and others with whom Reuters has or may have contracts;
4. That Thomson Reuters shall pay due regard to the many interests which it serves in addition to those of the media; and
5. That no effort shall be spared to expand, develop, and adapt the news and other services and products of Thomson Reuters so as to maintain its leading position in the international news and information business. (Taken directly from the Reuters homepage)
Reuters has 2,500 journalists and 600 photojournalists around the world. They provide news to most of the newspapers in the world. They have made some major scoops over the years and have become a reliable source of news.
So, Reuters is a news organization that supplies news stories about worldwide events to newspapers all over the world. They have reached the place they are in thanks to the work of their founder, Paul Reuter, who worked hard to be the first to provide the news. And this is what I learned today.
Image By Reuters – Extracted from: reuters.com, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75850029
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuters
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_de_Reuter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Reuter
https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en/about-us/company-history.html
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2007/may/04/reuters.pressandpublishing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Stock_Exchange
https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en/about-us/trust-principles.html