Reuters

• 1. Introduction

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  Reuters reaches over 105 million readers every month, yet it has no single headquarters. The president of Reuters News sits in New York. The editor-in-chief works out of Canary Wharf in London. That split arrangement is not an accident. It reflects something fundamental about what Reuters has always been: a global operation that belongs to no one place and answers to no single master.

  The agency was established in London in 1851 by Paul Reuter, a German-born baron who first tested his ideas using homing pigeons to move financial prices across borders. From that modest start, Reuters grew into one of the three news agencies that, by the early 2000s, supplied most of the world's news. Along the way it scooped Abraham Lincoln's assassination in Europe, broke the story of the Berlin Wall going up and the night it came down, and built an electronic trading network that changed global finance.

  But the story of Reuters is also a story of pressure: from governments that wanted it to serve national interests, from corporate owners who wanted profit, and from the journalists inside it who sometimes paid with their lives. How did a carrier pigeon service become a global institution? And what does it mean to stay independent when the world keeps trying to pull you in?

• 2. Pigeons, Telegraphs, and a Telegram Company

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  Paul Julius Reuter was not, at first, a journalist. He worked at a book-publishing firm in Berlin and was involved in distributing radical pamphlets at the start of the revolutions of 1848. Those activities drew attention to him, and by 1850 he had developed a prototype news service in Aachen, using homing pigeons and electric telegraphy to move messages between Brussels and Aachen. The building where he operated still stands today as Reuters House in Aachen.

  When he moved to London in 1851 and set up at the Royal Exchange, his focus was commercial: banks, brokerage houses, and business firms were his first clients. The London Morning Advertiser became the first newspaper to subscribe, in 1858. What made Reuters valuable to those papers was not just the financial data but the speed at which it could report events of international importance. The assassination of Abraham Lincoln reached European readers via Reuters in 1865, before any rival could match the speed.

  Reuter formalized the operation that same year by incorporating his private business as Reuter's Telegram Company Limited, taking the title of managing director. Three years later, Reuters, the French agency Havas, and the German agency Wolff divided the world's news territories among themselves in what became known as the Ring Combination. Reuters had proposed the arrangement and, in practice, dominated it. Its reserved territories covered areas of greater news importance, it had more correspondents on the ground, and British control of undersea cable lines made London the unrivalled centre for moving information around the globe.

  Reuter retired as managing director in 1878, handing control to his eldest son Herbert. By 1883, the company had moved from pigeons and manual dispatch to transmitting messages electrically to London newspapers.

• 3. Wars, Trusts, and Independence

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  Herbert de Reuter ran the company as general manager until his death by suicide in 1915. That loss marked a turning point. The company returned to private ownership in 1916 when Roderick Jones and Mark Napier purchased all its shares. They renamed it Reuters Limited and, in a small but deliberate act, dropped the apostrophe from the name.

  By 1923, Reuters was using radio to transmit news internationally, a genuinely new approach at the time. Two years later, the Press Association of Great Britain acquired a majority interest, eventually gaining full ownership. The company moved to a new headquarters at 85 Fleet Street during the 1930s.

  The world wars brought a different kind of pressure. The Manchester Guardian reported that Reuters came under pressure from the British government to serve national interests. In 1941, Reuters deflected that pressure by restructuring itself as a private company. The Press Association sold half its stake to the Newspaper Proprietors' Association, and by 1947 co-ownership had expanded to associations representing daily newspapers in New Zealand and Australia. The new owners established the Reuters Trust, and the Reuters Trust Principles were put in place specifically to protect the company's editorial independence from any one owner.

  UK government documents released in November 2019 revealed that the Foreign Office had funded Reuters during the 1960s and 1970s through an arrangement with the BBC, channelling £350,000 over four years to expand Reuters' coverage in the Middle East. The Information Research Department acknowledged the deal would not give editorial control, but believed it would give political influence. The arrangement was structured through the BBC rather than directly, in part because an earlier shell company used for Reuters' Latin American department had begun to look, in the IRD's own words, "queer to anyone who might wish to investigate."

• 4. From Wire to Screen

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  In 1961, Reuters scooped the erection of the Berlin Wall. The agency was also among the first to transmit financial data across oceans via computers in the 1960s. By 1973, Reuters was making computer-terminal displays of foreign-exchange rates available to clients, a move that would reshape how global currency markets functioned. Eight years later, in 1981, the company began supporting electronic transactions on its network and expanded into electronic brokerage and trading services.

  In 1984, Reuters Trust was floated as a public company, with shares listed on the London Stock Exchange and NASDAQ. Five years later, Reuters published the first story of the Berlin Wall being breached. The agency had now broken both the Wall's construction and its fall.

  Through the 1990s, Reuters held a dominant position in online news, building early partnerships with ClariNet and PointCast, two of the first Internet-based news providers. Its share price rose sharply during the dotcom boom before falling after the banking troubles of 2001.

  In 2008, the Canadian Thomson Corporation acquired Reuters Group plc, forming Thomson Reuters. The following year, Thomson Reuters withdrew from the London Stock Exchange and NASDAQ in favour of the Toronto Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange. Also in 2009, the last surviving member of the Reuters founding family, Marguerite, Baroness de Reuter, died at age 96 on the 25th of January. The parent company, Thomson Reuters, is now headquartered in Toronto.

• 5. Journalists at Risk

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  Kurt Schork, an American reporter, was killed in an ambush while on assignment in Sierra Leone in May 2000. His death was not an isolated event. In April and August 2003, news cameramen Taras Protsyuk and Mazen Dana were killed in separate incidents by U.S. troops in Iraq. In July 2007, Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh died when a U.S. military Apache helicopter opened fire in Baghdad. In April 2008, cameraman Fadel Shana was killed in the Gaza Strip after being struck by an Israeli tank.

  The list in the agency's own records is longer. It includes Kenneth Stonehouse, killed over the Bay of Biscay by German aircraft; Hos Maina and Dan Eldon, both killed in Somalia; Adlan Khasanov, killed by Chechen separatists in 2004; and Waleed Khaled, killed by U.S. troops in Iraq that same year. In 2023, Issam Abdallah was killed in Lebanon on the 13th of October by Israeli troops. On the 27th of August 2025, cameraman Hussam al-Masri was killed at Nasser Hospital in the Gaza Strip by an Israeli air strike.

  Not all of Reuters' journalists faced physical danger in combat zones. Anthony Grey, while covering China's Cultural Revolution in Peking in the late 1960s, was detained by the Chinese government as retaliation for Hong Kong's jailing of Chinese journalists. He was held for 27 months, from 1967 to 1969, before being released and awarded an OBE. He later became a best-selling historical novelist.

  In 2018, two Reuters journalists in Myanmar, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, were convicted of obtaining state secrets while investigating a massacre in a Rohingya village. The arrest was widely condemned internationally. Both journalists received awards including the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting and were named among Time's Person of the Year for 2018. After 511 days in prison, they were freed on the 7th of May 2019 following a presidential pardon.

• 6. Editorial Principles Under Scrutiny

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  Reuters operates under what it calls a value-neutral approach, and one of the clearest expressions of that policy is its refusal to use the word "terrorist" in its own voice. The practice drew sustained criticism after the September 11 attacks. Reuters' editorial policy distinguishes between referring generally to terrorism as a concept and applying the label to specific events or groups. The Associated Press takes the opposite approach, using the term to describe non-governmental organizations that attack civilians.

  In 2004, that difference created a direct conflict. Reuters asked CanWest Global Communications, a Canadian newspaper chain, to remove Reuters' bylines from stories because CanWest had inserted the word "terrorist" into copy that Reuters had filed without it. A Reuters spokesman said the request was about protecting the agency's reporters and its editorial integrity.

  In July 2013, David Fogarty, who had spent almost 20 years at Reuters as its climate change correspondent in Asia, resigned and wrote that getting climate-related stories published had become progressively harder after then-deputy editor-in-chief Paul Ingrassia described himself as a "climate change sceptic." Fogarty quoted a conversation in which he was told that climate change was not a big story unless there was a major policy shift, such as the U.S. introducing an emissions cap-and-trade system. His climate change role was then abolished. Reuters responded by saying the company had staff dedicated to the story and that editorial policy had not changed.

  In August 2025, photojournalist Valerie Zink, who had worked with Reuters for eight years, resigned publicly and accused the agency of amplifying Israeli government claims in its Gaza coverage at the expense of other journalists, including its own. She also said Reuters had published Israel's claim that journalist Anas Al-Sharif was a Hamas operative, a claim she disputed. Her resignation came the same month that cameraman Hussam al-Masri was killed in Gaza.

• 7. Prizes and Accountability

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  Reuters has won 13 Pulitzer Prizes, all of them since 2008. Adrees Latif won Breaking News Photography in 2008 for a photograph of a Japanese videographer fatally shot during a street protest in Myanmar. In 2018, Clare Baldwin, Andrew R.C. Marshall, and Manuel Mogato won International Reporting for their coverage of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's war on drugs. The 2019 International Reporting prize went to staff including Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo for exposing the Myanmar military's campaign against Rohingya Muslims.

  In 2020, the photography staff won Breaking News Photography for coverage of the 2019-2020 Hong Kong protests. In 2024, Reuters won two prizes simultaneously: National Reporting for a series on misconduct and regulatory failures at Elon Musk's businesses including SpaceX, Tesla, and Neuralink; and Breaking News Photography for images of the October 7 Hamas attack and the opening weeks of the war in Gaza. In 2025, Reuters staff won Investigative Reporting for the "Fentanyl Express" series, which exposed lax international regulations enabling the fentanyl trade.

  The prizes sit alongside a record of corrections. In 2006, Reuters severed ties with Lebanese freelance photographer Adnan Hajj after the wire service used two doctored photos in its coverage of the Israel-Lebanon conflict. In 2010, Reuters was criticised for cropping photographs taken aboard the Mavi Marmara flotilla, with the cropped versions removing knives held by activists and blood from a naval commando. Reuters said cropping at the margins is standard procedure and replaced the images with originals after the issue was raised.

  On the 9th of June 2020, three Reuters journalists incorrectly used the photograph of an Indian herbal medicine entrepreneur in a story about cybercrime, leading to the man being interrogated by Indian police for nine hours. Reuters admitted the error. In February 2023, a team of Reuters journalists won the Selden Ring Award for an investigation exposing human-rights abuses by the Nigerian military.