Today, I’m speaking with Paul Bascobert, who’s the president of Reuters, the information and data service you have got undoubtedly heard of. This is a part of a particular Thursday collection we’re working this month to discover how leaders at among the world’s greatest firms make selections in such a quickly altering atmosphere. You know, Decoder stuff.
Reuters is a superb firm for us to kick off with, as a result of it’s been round principally eternally. The firm was based in 1851, when the new know-how enabling new sorts of media was the telegraph, and all the idea of a “wire service” was a wild new concept.
Here, immediately in 2025, the tech driving media has clearly modified greater than just a bit bit. Distribution in a world stuffed with iPhones and generative AI is a extremely totally different proposition than distributing media 50 years earlier than the invention of the radio. It’s even a reasonably totally different proposition now than it was simply 20 or 30 years in the past, within the net 1.0 period.
There’s rather a lot there, and also you’ll hear us get deep into principally each Decoder theme there may be. For instance, Paul and I spent plenty of time speaking about how a company with a legacy as previous as Reuters’ can hold discovering an viewers and being profitable within the present age of digital media, which is dominated by social platforms. The viewers isn’t studying newspapers anymore, and I’m not even positive the following technology of reports shoppers will even be visiting web sites. So Reuters is doing plenty of work to ensure its work can discover and attain new audiences.
Decoder listeners who’re accustomed to our different episodes with media leaders know I’m very curious how generative AI goes to vary the very enterprise of reports. And how large media firms are serious about licensing their content material to AI firms, being in litigation with those self same firms, and even working with them to construct new sorts of merchandise.
Paul had plenty of actually attention-grabbing ideas right here, as a result of Reuters basically has all the time had licensed content material preparations, as a result of actually, that’s simply what a wire service is. To Paul, that dovetails neatly right into a approach to consider AI and AI coaching knowledge. I pushed actually exhausting to get some exhausting numbers out of him, so I feel you’ll actually benefit from the back-and-forth.
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