wo Years of Reuters
By FRANCIS WILLIAMS
EVTERS is one of the best-known names in the world.
There can be few literate members of the public of any country—certainly on this side of the Iron Curtain—who have not heard it quoted or seen it at the foot of news-messages which may have come from any habitable corner of the globe. But although its name may secure instant recognition, a great international news agency is, and must be, in a deeper sense anonymous. A newspaper, like a man, may properly be judged by his opinions. A news agency with opinions ceases by that fact to justify confidence. Its name may be known the world over ; its personality must remain private. There are, however, occasions when this proper professional anonymity may be disregarded. A centenary is surely one of them. On July 11th Reuters will be a hundred years old. In those hundred years it has developed from the private com- mercial creation of a German-Jewish emigre of genius to the first co-operative internationally-owned news agency in the world: Not only because it has been dealing all its life with the raw material of history, but by reason of its own development of character, its story has much more than a purely journalistic interest: it reflects significantly the history of its times. Before he arrived in London in the year of the Great Exhibi- tion, Julius Reuter had been by turn bookseller in Berlin, trans- lator in the Paris office of Charles Havas, the 'originator of the idea of the general news' agency, and telegraph agent and pigeon Postman on his own account in Aachen. He had small capital but boundless energy. In English commercial enterprise and English political tolerance he recognised the twin conditions which would make success possible to a man such as himself. With two rooms in No. 1 Royal Exchange Buildings and an office staff which consisted for some time merely of a twelve-year- old office-boy, he set himself to establish a telegraphic service which would provide the brokers and merchants of London with rapid intelligence of the latest developments on the Continental Bourses. But although commercial intelligence provided Reuter with his first success and for long with the financial foundation for his other enterprises, his dearest ambition, and the one that was to make his name world-famous, lay elsewhere. This was a service of international political intelligence to newspapers. He tried hard to interest The Times but failed. The Times had its own representatives in all the capital cities that mattered, and saw no reason to believe that Mr. Reuter's agents could learn anything they could not. Nor had it much confidence in the new cross-Channel cable he relied on. It preferred to depend on a fast steamer.
Fortunately, the Morning Advertiser, owned by the Licensed Victuallers' Association, was more venturesome. Its editor, James Grant, agreed to try Reuter's service free for a fortnight, with the promise that if it proved itself he would then take it for a flat fee of £30 a month—£10 a month less than the foreign-service fees his own representatives cost him. With this provisional acceptance in his pocket Reuter persuaded the other London newspapers', with the exception of The Times, to make an agree- ment with him on the same terms. His service justified his con- fidence in it. The real business of Reuter's agency had begun.
What gave him the great commercial success that followed was, above all, his astonishing talent in' the field of communications. His agents followed the cable everywhere, supplanting it where necessary—and there were many gaps in the early days—with specially chartered mail boats or trains, pigeons, canisters tossed on the deck of ships at sea, carriers by foot or horseback. Some- times, in order to complete a link, he built cables himself. But always he set the standard that Reuters must be first with the news. To an extraordinary degree he succeeded in being so. How often he was not merely hours but days ahead, both of all commercial rivals and of Government despatches, is remarkable. Without its founder's unique talent for finding ways of con- veying news between two points mtire quickly than anyone else Reuters would 'never have established itself. But in a world in which the increasing availability of rapid communications to all users inevitably made this talent a declining asset, its continuing success rested on three principles of more permanent validity. These were that a news agency must place accuracy at the head of all the virtues, that it must be absolutely impartial, and that it must treat its clients with complete equality.
They may seem simple principles. They were by no means always accepted by Reuter's rivals ; they are today anathema to the State-controlled news agencies of totalitarian systems. Nor did they always prove easy for Reuters itself to maintain. Inter- national agreements with Wolff of Berlin and Havas of Paris to divide the world into three exclusive news empires—commer- cially advantageous and in keeping with the power politics of the age though such agreements were—placed them in some jeopardy. So also, although fortunately more in reputation than in practice, did the pressure Reuters was under in both world wars to place its news organisation at the disposal of the Govern- ment and accept a subsidy for transmitting officially-sponsored news outside its general service.
As a consequence of doing so in the First World War, Reuters earned for itself an international legacy of suspicion as a Govern- ment agency which took years to live down—particularly in America. Nevertheless, shortly before the Second World War, it again accepted an official commission, as a result of an agree- ment between its chairman, Sir Roderick Jones, and the Prime Minister, Mr. Neville Chamberlain. But not for long. By 1941 the majority of the directors had come to the conclusion that official obligations could not, even in war-time, be squared with the wider loyalties that press upon a news agency. Reuters freed itself .of Government subsidy and thereafter nailed a declaration, of absolute independence to its masthead.
Those in charge of Reuters would, I think, agree that thos Reuters of today owes almost as much to the challenge of a new competitor from across the Atlantic, the Associated Press of America, as it does to the vision of its original founder. In its youth the Associated Press had suffered under the exclusive terri- torial agreements of the three great European agencies. As it grew strong, with. the increasing power of the American Press behind it, it did more than anyone to break them. Suspicious of any kind of official control, it had a large part in awakening Reuters to the need to establish itself on foundations sufficiently strong to remove for ever the temptation of a Government subsidy—to which in the end both Wolff and Havas succumbed. And, itself from the beginning a co-operative agency owned by the American papers who are its subscribers, it pointed the way to a comparable co-operative ownership of Reuters which would guarantee impartiality by the very variety of the views andi interests represented.
Reuters, which operated as a private undertaking for three.! quarters of a century, became the property of the provincial' British Press in 1925. In 1941, under a partnership agreement with the London papers, it became the property of the British Press as a whole. Since then, in no small part as a result of the drive and energy of its present general manager, Mr. Christopherl Chancellor, it has advanced in co-operative ownership far beyond its American mentor. The Press of Australia, New Zealand and, India have also been brought into partnership. What began a' hundred years ago in the golden age of Victorian commercial and imperial expansion as the private creation and property of one man begins its second century, in equal harmony with its times,i as a great co-operative organisation of the Commonwealth—thoi first truly international news agency in the world.
It would be idle to pretend that all Reuters' problems are now over. Some new ones, indeed, are inherent in the attempt to operate a partnership in which some members are—as is at present the case with the Press of India—subject to nationalist and local pressures from which the others are free. And there is the ever-present conflict, which dogs all agencies, between, speed and accuracy. Here there is only one safe rule ; accuracy must always come first. But in a world in which triumphs art counted not in the hours or even days of Julius Reuter's time, but in minutes or even seconds, it is not always an easy one.
Now, at a time when the need for a free and untainted supply of world news is greater than it has ever been, Reuters faces a new century stronger than ever. It has served Press and public long and honourably.' It deserves our salutations.
Previous page
