''The Net Is Increasing The Demand For Localised News''

Geert Linnebank, Editor-in-Chief of Reuters, talks to BT's R. Sridharan on how the news-wire transnational is re-inventing itself in the digital age.

As the Editor-in-Chief of Reuters, Geert Linnebank has his task cut out: to transform a lumbering news provider into a Net-based, multi-media content major. Just how is Reuters, which employs 2,000 journalists in 185 bureaux, coping with the challenge? Recently in India, Linnebank--whose wife, incidentally, is Indian--took time off his busy schedule to speak to BT's R. Sridharan. Excerpts:

BT: It's been about six months since Reuters set about transforming itself into a Net-based news organisation. How easy or difficult has it been?

Geert Linnebank: The pace at the company has changed fantastically since the beginning of this year. Editorial has been in my department, and one of the main beneficiaries of the change. After years of controlling costs and very little and piece-meal growth--essentially stagnant operation, as far as journalistic side of the operation is concerned--we've had a flood of investment coming our way on the back of realisation within the company that content is king.

BT: Has Net forced Reuters to change the way it packages information?

GL: It has changed a little bit, and I expect it to change very dramatically over the next 15-18 months as we equip ourselves with the tools that we need in order to bring that new packaging about. Reuters is often seen as the epitomal multi-media organisation with a well-established base. It has text reporters in 150 countries, it also has a news picture operation, television operations, news graphics, and very strong investment in numerical operation as well.

But what we had trouble with in the past is to actually string these individual media strands into something multi-media. We didn't have the tools, and we didn't really have the market for it either. No one actually was asking us for genuine multi-media products. The Net has transformed that. Browsers and web servers are capable of holding and displaying multi-media information nakedly. That is starting to allow us to plan the coverage of news in such a way as to introduce genuine multi-media news planning.

BT: Peter Job, Reuters' CEO, is on record saying that the Net is not revenue-friendly. How do you, as the contents man, plan to handle that?

GL: I don't know if he would still say that today, (though) he may have said it in the past. We believe that we can generate very sizeable revenue on the Net. We believe that we can dramatically increase the number of paying users that we can reach, courtesy the Net. One of the problems we suffered from in the past is that we have had to develop our own technology and maintain and service that technology to deliver our services to customers. This was done at very substantial cost. We even had to maintain our own manufacturing plant because no one else could do it for us. Therefore, we had to charge our customers sizeable amount of fee.

As time went by, we have been able to disengage from manufacturing hardware, setting up our own telecommunications network, and now with the Net, we've been able to disengage from the entire infrastructural business. As a result, the costs of operation have come down sharply. As such, you can expand the market size very dramatically by offering lower costs of services. Peter Job might be on record saying that the Net is not revenue-friendly, but he's also on record saying that we now aim to increase Reuters' reach from 4.5 lakh professional users and about 900 web-sites to 65 million people. Now, that's a quantum leap, which without the Net could not have been considered at all.

BT: Reuters is well-known for its generic information products. But would reaching out to these 65 million people mean that it will have to produce more niche products?

GL: Yes, that's very much the trend we are witnessing. Reuters, in the past, has tended to generate most of its revenues from, as you say, generic services and products. They were available in every part of the world and roughly at the same prices and roughly for the same kind of audience. Even in financial services, which generate most of our revenue, we have these large Reuters 2000 and Reuters 3000 international products.

What we are now seeing with the Net is people saying: ''Well, these aren't particularly the services that we are interested in. We are interested in services that are of immediate and direct relevance to where we are.'' Therefore, although the Net is seen as a globalising power, it is dramatically increasing the demand for heavily localised services.

BT: What are your India plans?

GL: We have fairly ambitious plans in India, because of the explosive demand for our information and news services. Very specifically, we are looking to recruit upwards of 20 new reporters and editors. Expansion that we estimate will cost us $800,000 this year and, on a full-year basis, will cost us somewhere between $1.5 million and $2 million in annual running costs. Specifically, what we are targeting here is Net outlets.

What we are now trying to address is the appetite for far more news, and information about India in particular. People would like us to cover more companies, they would like us to provide sectoral analyses and data, and also political and state news. Also, we are interested in developing for India, a range of new package content services that we call on-line reports, essentially covering a model we invented in the United States. It basically involves a media editor sending these packages out to customers' Websites, where they can be automatically uploaded and updated.

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