Over the last 20 years, Billions of people. they didn't know they had. whose face looks like mine. see someone else eyes look like mine So what happens to all the genetic data for all those Americans if the company goes away? That's this week on Explain It To Me. New episodes every Sunday, wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Apatow, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems.
talking with Paul Baskobert, the president of Reuters, the news and information service that you have undoubtedly heard of. This is part of a special Thursday series we're running this month to explore how leaders at some of the world's biggest companies make decisions in such a rapidly changing environment. You know, to counter stuff. Paul and Reuters are perfect for us to kick off with, because Reuters has been around for basically forever. The company was founded in 1851.
when the hot technology enabling new kinds of media was the telegraph, and the entire concept of a wire service was a wild new idea. Here today in 2025, the technology driving media has clearly changed more than just a little bit. Distribution in a world full of iPhones and generative AI is a really different proposition than distributing media 50 years before the invention of the radio. It's even a pretty different proposition now than it was
20, 30, or even 5 years ago in the Web 1.0 and 2.0 eras. There's a lot to talk about there, and you're going to hear Paul and I get deep into basically every decoder theme there is. For example, Paul and I spent a lot of time talking about how an organization with a legacy as old as Reuters can keep finding an audience and be successful.
in the current age of digital media, which is dominated by social platforms. The audience isn't reading newspapers anymore, and I'm not sure the next generation of news consumers is even going to go to websites. So Reuters is doing a lot of work to make sure that its work
can find and reach new audiences. Decoder listeners who are familiar with our other episodes with Media Leaders know that I'm very curious how generative AI is going to change the very business of news and how big media companies are thinking about licensing their content to AI companies, being in litigation with those AI companies, or even working with them to build new kinds of products.
Paul had a lot of really interesting thoughts here, because Reuters fundamentally has always been a content licensing business. That's what a wire service is. So to Paul, that dovetails neatly into how he's thinking about AI and AI training data. I pushed really hard to get some hard numbers here. I think you're going to enjoy the packaging. Okay, Paul Baskovic, president of Reuters. Here we go. Paul Basquer, you're the president of Reuters. Welcome to Decoder.
Great to be here. I'm excited. I love it when we have a guest in studio in person in New York. I'm excited to talk to you. There's a lot to talk about, but just the energy of being together is great. So thank you for being literally here. It's a beautiful day. It is a beautiful day. So you've chosen to spend it in this dark, soundproof room with the shades closed. It's great. There is a lot to talk about in the news business. There's the AI of it. There's new modes of distribution.
There's the Trump administration and the First Amendment generally. But I actually want to unpack what Reuters is for people. It's one of these brands that everybody knows, everybody sees. It's been around since 1851. What is Reuters today? What should people think of Reuters as doing? Well, first of all, thank you for pronouncing it properly. I have to say, when I told my family and my friends that I was going to this company, they all said, Rooters. I know Rooters. I see it everywhere.
It is a brand that people are becoming more comfortable with and understanding a little bit more now. So Reuters is a 175-year-old company, as you said. We're one of the largest news-gathering operations around today. We have 3,500 people, we're in 200 locations, we have one mission, and that is to bring fact-based objective news of the world to the world without fear or favor. We take that very seriously in our structure.
To deliver on that, we are guided by our trust principles, which were established in 1941, and I think we're taking a few minutes to unpack at some point. And that is run by an independent board. So I report to... That board, as it relates to anything related to editorial integrity and objective reporting, I also report up through to the Thompson-Writer boards for anything related to financial and either one. or collectively can fire me. Both of them hired me, and so does it varied.
Serious matter how we approach that. Part of the way we do that is we like to be the source. We want to be there to get the quote, to take the picture. And so our way of combating misinformation is to be the source and to record that. And we know that if we are the source, that we have great confidence in the work that we're doing. So how we run our business model, which I think is a little bit unique in the industry, we're unlike a lot of other publishers.
we have this large newsgathering operation and like a content company versus say maybe a traditional media company we window that content through different distribution windows and so we have a window the London Stock Exchange, LSEG, which makes up about 40 plus percent of our business, where we are delivering fast, accurate information that powers the exchanges, the London Exchange and others.
That has to be right. It has to be fast. People train on that news and information. So that's one window. The second window is the media industry. through our agency platform. So there were a B2B provider of the news and information to the rest of the news ecosystem. We have thousands of clients around the world.
And then the third window is our direct-to-consumer business, which we confusingly call professional. But that's where we have websites and apps and events, and we deliver to that audience as well. So we make it once. it's a little bit of an overstatement and then we deliver it through multiple windows which gives us a pretty attractive resilient business model so we're um
830 million, we're growing high single digits, we're very comfortably profitable, and so the business is in a good place today. We don't take that for granted, but that's certainly sort of just a quick sketch of who we are. 40% of the business in the London Stock Exchange. That is primarily financial news and information.
It is. It is financial news in terms of its intent, but just take a look around at everything from tariffs today. The news that's traveling through Wall Street today is about geopolitics. Geopolitics translated into policy. Policy translated into an economic story. Economics translated into a market story. And so it's a very Reuters-like narrative of what's happening in the world today.
So all three of those different distribution windows benefit, but I think from a Wall Street perspective, we're able to go deep. into the story and tell it from places around the world that are being affected by it. So the echo of what's happened in the U.S. is reverberating through the world. And we're there on the ground in all these locations with the local policymakers, local governments, able to help people understand the context from the other side of the conversation.
I ask that because I understand the market for financial news and information now in 2025, right? There's an incredible premium placed on getting information first and fast. You used to work at Bloomberg. That terminal just continues to be an enormous source of revenue for that company. But expanding that into policy seems like the tone, right? War reporting has not traditionally been something that gives financial markets an edge.
but that reporting is under the most pressure because the consumer model for that reporting has kind of gone away, right? People aren't buying it in the same way as they were before. other kinds of reporting, lifestyle reporting, under an enormous amount of pressure from influencers. So I'm just wondering as you think about the spread of what Reuters does,
the investigative journalism, the actual on-the-ground war reporting that you might have to spend a lot of money to do, and then the returns you get from the kinds of markets you're in. Do they match up? Because I understand it for financial journalism, and I even understand it for policy journalism. It's the other stuff that seems like it's under a lot of pressure.
Well, again, I go back to as the provider of news and information and visuals and photos for the media industry. There's a real service to that work. Our clients can't or won't or maybe shouldn't send people into conflict zones to cover that. It's very expensive. We do it once, and so our marginal cost is quite affordable to provide that to all the... the industry.
But there's a nuance to this, you know, and I won't get my dates right, but if you remember when Purgotion, okay, we're going to go into that, was coming down and there's a question of whether or not there was going to be a coup. And he was traveling with his group and he was heading south from the border.
And at various points, there was a question, is this coup going to happen? Is this coup not going to happen? We were there with him. We were the first to see him when he finally took a pause in the south. During that period you could watch the price of oil moving
Because the question of whether there was a coup or not was not just a war story. It was a deep economic story. And that price of oil was going to have an influence on everything from inflation to consumers to businesses around the world. So these stories that seem like... This is war reporting. They're about conflicts. They're about big power politics and big power geopolitics.
and how they play out and which direction they're moving, it's a human story, it's a business story, and it's a consumer story. So we really don't break those apart. We think of them as being a very interconnected conversation. Again, the value of Reuters is... Being there, knowing what is being said, taking the pictures of Purgoshin sitting on a bench with a Russian counterpart saying this doesn't look like a hostile conversation.
Those moments matter. There's a part of this I want to come back to when we talk about the trust principles and what all of us are actually selling in the media. But I'm very interested in just the economics of the news business and how that influences what gets made.
And you are describing at the highest level, okay, this is an economic story, and I understand how this is going to move markets, literally the oil market, minute to minute. I'm just wondering if you think that this had any impact on the actual coverage you're doing? in a way that perhaps in a different time when there were many, many more local newspapers buying your coverage, they might have had a different influence on what you're making.
That's a tricky question. I don't think that we sort of get up every morning going, I wonder what this client wants and let's go do that. We're probably far more mission driven. in our belief that if we deliver on our mission of bringing the fact-based news of the world to the world in the way that we do,
that we're playing a long game, that the world wants this form of truth. And I actually think, given all the misinformation that maybe is floating around out there, it's my core belief that doing what we're doing is people are going to gravitate towards the truth. And maybe I'm a naive optimist, but I do believe that. I believe in humanity's desire for truth.
And so I think continuing to expand that remit is really what we're thinking about. How do we cover more, more regions, more stories, more depth, more data analysis? Everything we're seeing is that demand for what we're doing is quite high. And so really for us, it's been about expanding.
One of those expansions is into consumer. I agree with you. Confusingly named Reuters for consumers. You just mean as a direct sale to an individual. Yeah, and we call it professional because we think that largely our audience are professionals in whatever form. But, you know, it's really when we look at who is consuming, it's global citizens, people that are interested in a fairly objective and global take on what's happening in the world.
You know, for us pushing into consumer, we've actually had a website since 1995, so we've been doing consumer for a long time. In October, we added a subscription. And so we decided that we're going to have a subscription front end to our business. We think that there's a real opportunity to invest to grow that. and to bring that brand forward in a much more muscular way. And so putting a subscription in front of it allows us to do that. And I would just say it's a very...
It's a very Reuters-like subscription model, a dollar a week, and you can cancel anytime, and it's one price everywhere. Not exactly one price, but it's intended to be a very low, modest price around the world with, again, in our mission to try and... bring the world together in a common set of facts and news and information. And so a dollar a week here, a dollar a week in Canada, a pound a week in the UK, we're going to try and keep it there. And that's not the...
That's not the introductory rate that goes up after six months. That's just it. Is that going to be a meaningful try of your business at that rate? Over time, we think there's a very large global audience that is out there for us or for anyone who wants to build, I think, one of the first truly global news organizations.
When we start to talk about AI, we can talk about things like curation and translation. If you look at the shape of our newsroom, Our newsroom is very global with 200 locations around the world as opposed to being sort of centralized in one city.
New York or what have you. And so the decision of how to price for us was about trying to bring a low price, high volume around the world to get to, I think, a similar or better revenue position than had we taken a high price and focused on a very narrow set of the world. How many subscribers do you know?
We haven't talked about this, but we just passed 100,000 new subscribers, which we've been very patient. For us, we have to roll out country by country by country, and each one has its own set of... complexities and regulations and payments, and so we've been marching our way across. We're not done. We haven't launched in all of our markets by any stretch of the imagination. This past week we launched in parts of Asia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan. But we're going to continue to march.
But in a short period of time, just been really, really happy with the rate and how people have reacted. But we've got a long, long ways to go. Even at that rate, there's some threat of cannibalization, right, of your other customers. A lot of the ways people would get Reuters content in the past would be to subscribe their local paper for a much higher rate. They would get local sports and some cartoons and then a bunch of Reuters wire service stories.
Do you think that saying, okay, subscribe to us directly will cannibalize your local paper customers or even your big paper customers? Well, I mean, there's a couple of things. One is putting up a paywall makes it harder. It's been free for... 30 years. So we think actually doing this, putting up a subscription, well, makes it harder for people to do what you just said.
And so we think that's actually a slight barrier. But I think you have to look at what people's roles are in the media ecosystem. We're different from others. I actually listened to your podcast with Almar Latour. Very smart guy and a good friend. I would say statistically every media executive listened to that episode and then our gadget listeners did not. So we're doing great. Well, hopefully we can get them both because I do want to talk about product. but you know a lot of our clients
Their job is to figure out who their audience is and write deeply into what they care about and to surround them with all the things that are important to them. And whether that's travel or cooking or different industry types, different industry roles. They need to take and build that surround of their customers. One slice of that is what we do.
And so we're the fuel that helps them do that, and we displace probably what would be the most expensive part of that ecosystem for them to deliver on it. We like to power our clients, but we're not going to tell them how to write what's happening in the world. They will take us as a raw material. And so we see Reuters.com as being adjacent to your passion read, your first read.
And so for us, we want to be the one that you go to to say, hey, look, I want to just see the broad spectrum of what's happening in the world right now. Or, I wonder if that's true. I wonder if that's, what is Reuters saying about that? And what's sort of the distilled version of it? And I will tell you, you know, Reuters.com is not... It's not for everyone. We don't use a lot of adjectives. It's a little... It's tight.
And it's intentionally tight. We tell both sides. We don't take sides on issues. But we will tell you what's actually factually verifiable because we know it, have seen it, have sourced it, and so you know it to be true. So it's sitting next to it. All of our themes are there. Let me ask you the decoder questions and I want to put some of this into practice.
How is writer structured? Well, the simplest way is we have general managers for each of the different windows that we talked about. We have a manager for our LSEG, a general manager for the LSEG relationship. the B2B business, the consumer business. Within that business, they have the sales and the marketing and the operational control to operate within those markets most effectively.
Because there's three different dynamics, and I think that's a really important thing, the things the clients care about, the sales cycles, how you market position, the value propositions are different for each of those distribution pathways. What we have centralized is what I think of as our build organization, our tech and our product team, because there are efficiencies in what we build.
and how we deliver that. Obviously, we have a newsroom that's a separate, the whole editorial team is its own separate operation, as well as tech product editorial, and then we have centralized legal and HR. But I think the key thing is to build centrally.
to build content centrally and then be really smart about how we bring it to market through these three distribution channels. One of the ongoing themes of Decoder is that your distribution really affects what you make. The simple example I always use for everyone which is Maybe getting more and more personal to me over time, but I'm gonna keep using it, is that New Order could not make the song Blue Monday before they had the 12-inch signal.
They needed 12-inch vinyl to make that song that long. It's the one I hold on to because it's the most visual. There's lots of this. YouTube videos exist because of YouTube's algorithm. You can see the relationship between those things. You're talking about your distribution. Then you're saying my newsroom is over here.
How does the distribution affect the newsroom, if at all? Very little. I mean, I think it would be an overstatement to say there's no influence because I think what we do together... whether it's the distribution people spending time with clients or newsrooms spending time in the market, is to try to figure out what is interesting in the world, what is newsworthy in the world that people are paying attention to.
that from our mission we need to make sure we're covering. That's really what powers the choices of what we do. If there's something happening in the world that we think is interesting from a news perspective, we don't have a distribution channel for it, we'll build one. If there's a part of our distribution that's no longer as interesting or relevant, we'll shrink it. So we'll adjust the distribution to fit the core of what our mission is.
but I know it's maybe a little different from a traditional publishing business. What we don't do is we don't sort of look at what's trending and try and follow the trend. We don't have to create headlines that drive traffic. It's just not our business model. I think that keeps us insulated from some of the... some of the tribal behavior that maybe is out there in some cases. You have some analyst who says,
Traders and one in stock exchange are googling flat earth all day long. We should make some flat earth content. This is a real cycle that occurred. That would lead us to a lot of really weird places, I think, if we followed that. Is there any connection at all? Do you ever have one of those GMs show up and say, look,
Subscriptions in Canada are spiking because everyone is searching 51st state. We need more 51st state content. The first part, yes. The second part, no. The first part, meaning look at what's really trending. Great job. That was a really powerful story. And so we all take a lot of pride in the work that the newsroom does. But the idea that we would say to... the newsroom hey you should start covering this uh or more of this less of that
You could use those words. They wouldn't go very far. Well, as an editor-in-chief, I appreciate that. The other Dakota question I ask everybody, it seems very important for somebody in your position, how do you make decisions? Do you have frameworks? We do. I think the right question is, how do we make decisions as an organization? Because that's something we spend a lot of time on. I have this firm belief that decision-making is the clock speed of the organization.
And so we're pretty relentless on thinking through how do we as an organization make decisions more quickly. And there's a couple of things that we do to make sure that happens. One, is a very clear and compelling strategy that has elements to it that are understandable by people. So when people know what we're doing and why they're doing, they will make better choices. Secondly is having a set of core values.
For those moments when it's not quite sure you can go to Core Values and Core Values Done Well Drive Decision Making Velocity. Because you can ask yourself, is this doing the right thing for the customer? Are we challenging our thinking? Are we moving fast? Are we acting fast? Is this about acting collectively together? And doing those things well make everything move faster.
Empowering and giving room for our managers to make some mistakes and thanking them when they do is part of the culture of saying we're better off to move fast than to move perfect. There's an old adage that in the world of chess Anybody can beat a Grandmaster if you change one rule in the game. is that the person competing can have two moves for everyone. You cannot beat somebody who has two to one moves, even if you're a Grandmaster. And so for us, move fast.
And it creates strategic flexibility. But that goes back to this whole idea of the trust principles and sort of what we hold dear to, I think, what has built our brand over this time. And I think it's so important for us to have this brand in this moment.
to convey the trust and confidence. You know, it was a business purpose for many, many decades now to have that confidence. Now I think it's a consumer premise that I think has some real strength to it. So you've mentioned the trust principles several times. What are they? Well, I'll paraphrase, so don't hold me to every word, but first is that Reuters will not fall into the hands of
any one interest, any one group that could potentially affect a reporting. Obviously, that integrity, independence, freedom from bias must be fully preserved in all of the work that we do. and that we supply reliable news information to all of our agency clients, newspapers, agencies, broadcasters around the world.
and that we do that in a high-integrity way. And there are also other due interests that we talk about, which is related to things not to our clients, but to how we run our business. We have to make sure that we're adhering to all of the parts of our business.
And then the last part is that we will spare no effort to continue to invest and expand and make the business more relevant. Things like AI, for instance, and continuing to invest to make sure that the business doesn't become a figment of the past, but is always embracing the future. We have to take a short break here. We'll be back in June. It's been reported that one in four people experience sensory sensitivities, making everyday experiences like a trip to the dentist especially difficult.
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I've only had two full-time jobs where I felt safe, they share. This is why they're advocating for change. Through deeply personal stories like Burnett's, sensory overload highlights the urgent need for spaces, dental offices, and beyond that embrace sensory inclusion. Because true inclusion requires action with environments where everyone feels safe. Watch Sensory Overload now streaming on Hulu.
Welcome back. I'm talking about Reuters president, Paul Baskober. Right before the break, he was talking about the big decoder questions, how he makes decisions, and how the Reuters trust principles inform that work for him. That was a perfect lead-in to ask him about some of the other really big questions I had. How does a big news agency like Reuters manage to survive and find new audiences here in 2025?
It feels to me like most people get most of their news now by opening some apps on their phone and consuming what is presented to them by one algorithm or another. How a wire service abstractly fits in that paradigm feels like a big question mark to me. And so you are selling content directly to consumers, but you still have to market to them. you still have to say, this is why it's worth it. I'm wondering how openly you do that.
how aggressively you say you can trust us because of our trust principles or the way we make the information. and whether you think you need to start a TikTok channel to go reach the younger consumers. Well, I think all of those are interesting points. I mean, I think when you say wire service, I think that's probably the window number to the agency part of our business. We like to think of ourselves as a news organization that has a wire as part of it.
Actually, I would push back on one of your premises there, which is people go to websites and they open them up and they look at the news. I'm worried they don't even go to the websites anymore. I'm worried they open the YouTube app. And then someone just starts talking to them. Well, I think that may be their version of that. And so last year we rebuilt our website and our app.
and I was excited to go home and show it to my son, and he's going to hate me for using him on this podcast. And he said, hey, that looks great. And I said, well, you should show your friends. They're going to see if you can get them to maybe subscribe. He said, Dad, we don't use websites. like how did I raise you in this house and you don't go to news websites he said well look what I do is I have alerts all day long and I decide you know sources that I trust
I get alerts all day long. That's how I keep up with what's happening. Maybe if I see something interesting, I'll click into a site and read an article. I'm like, but how do you get contacts? He's like, I get podcasts. Podcast. Every morning I've got a podcast I listen to. I've got one on the weekend. The day one sort of give me context on what's happening yesterday. But I've got a busy day. I can't spend all day sitting on websites reading the news.
I got a job. And so I think that we need to think about from a media industry, how do we take the content that we're creating and fit it into the way people are consuming? And this is where, you know, my... seven, eight years off in the world of doing tech companies, you know, that idea of product first.
I think is a real sensibility that we need to bring into the media. And I'm seeing it, but I just think we need to start figuring out what are users' new behaviors and how do we find our way into those. That's the thing I'm worried about, right? I spend all day listening to podcasts. And I host two of them. Not all day, just morning coffee and a weekend. I mean, I think everyone should listen to more of our podcasts. I'm nakedly biased here, but...
You look at the world's biggest podcasts. They're not run by a bunch of professional journalists. They're not even run by people who appear to have good information literacy, who understand where the information they are consuming comes from or how it is made. And the business you're in is making the information as rigorously and in many cases as expensively as possible by sending people out into the world.
to sit around waiting for something interesting to happen on a convoy from one part of Russia to another. Literally the most expensive way to make the information I can think of. And then there's a guy sitting in a studio in Texas just talking all day long, and he has all the audience. Yeah. That doesn't feel like context to me. It feels like there's a massive disparity in the quality of that information, the margin of that information. Sure.
The podcast industry or the YouTube industry or whatever, the TikTok industry, radically higher margins than I have reporters in 200 places around the world. And then somehow in there, there's an audience that has not been taught or trained to evaluate these kinds of information differently. And so I think part of my push to you is, are you talking about that? Do you say, this is Reuters, here are our trust principles? Here's why you should believe us instead of them.
Well, I would say whether it's an instead of or not, to me, you know, bloggers have been around. I think it's getting very much to the instead of. Well, I guess, you know, somebody started as a blogger. Right, the bloggers versus journalists debate was on my doorstep for years, and now YouTubers refer to The Verge as the mainstream media.
Welcome. Thank you. It's very flattering. But what I see is that maybe what The Verge sells is just our ethics policy and maybe we just need to talk about it more because the thing that we make is different. than the thing other people are making. Well, look... Whether it's what it is, it's a podcast, is it hard news that you should use to run your life on? Is it interesting, entertaining, reaffirming in some part of your life? And so it may serve a purpose that's distinct from what we're doing.
If somebody wants to spend their weekends listening to long podcasts of things that just feel good because they reaffirm who they are or they champion the cause that they care about, that's fine. But my hope would be that when there's something important and you want to have an interesting conversation with somebody and not look. uninformed, that you'll have your Reuters app too. And that we want to be part of that diet of things that people consume to help them.
live their lives, to enjoy their weekends, to whatever part of their lives. We think there's a role for fact-based news in that. But it's not really our position to judge what people do. We supply our news to thousands of news organizations around the world. It's fascinating to see what one piece of content can become.
in the hands of many different people. But they're doing the thing that they do, as I went back to. Their role in the system is to figure out, what do my audience want to hear, see, read? And what is my role with them? What does my brand convey? And I need to deliver on that. That's how you make a business, serving your clients' needs. Now, you know, they're a podcaster.
may have a different purpose of what they're doing than what we do. And so we have our mission, we do our mission, we provide. And again, I just, I think that over time, I'm an optimist that people will move towards truth. I think I might be pushing you towards a little bit more cynicism. When I talk to tech executives who are in the content business, they think about this market.
not in terms of client needs, but about the amount of attention that exists and how they can get more of it. Netflix famously says they want to compete with sleep. Netflix executives on this show have talked about taking more time away from other services. I think TikTok would prefer it if you spent all of your time and did all of your shopping in their app.
Yeah, I would probably prefer they do all their time with Reuters too. Sure. Once you start the TikTok shop in Reuters, I think all bets are off. How do you compete with that? Is that something that you are thinking about? Like, I need to take this attention. I need to steal these minutes back. I think from a business perspective, I certainly would like to command more attention. I think it's on us, though, to do that through great product innovation.
to do that by communicating our brand and who we are, so that people know, first of all, know who we are, know what we do, and can find a place in their day for us, and through great product innovation, find a way into that. So I don't think that hammering the same business model of
You know, let's go out and tell you how many stories we write and just how much volume we have is going to get anybody to come to us. I think we have to find a way to get to the point of the things that they care about. That's where I think some of the innovation that is about to come, particularly through AI, is really going to start to transform the role we can play in people's lives. One of the reasons I'm pushing so hard on this is that
Maybe in a normal environment, I would be inclined to believe you. The cream rises to the top. Information is a product. You get what you pay for. The market is going to sort this out. Particularly financial markets tend to care about whether things are true or not. There's an economic incentive that pushes the truth out. This is not normal time. You have a president in the White House who is openly attacking news organizations. I think today he said he was going to sue the New York Times
for calling his lawsuit against CBS baseless. That's a big circle. Yeah. That's a lot of pressure. Reuters, as you've described it, with the trust principles, with the very tight writing. This is the sort of pinnacle of straight-laced, dead-ahead wire service reporting. And then, you know, there's reports that Doge goes into an agency like USAID and there's a contract for Reuters services.
and now you guys are part of a sinister plot against the government or something against everyday Americans because the government's paying you to do propaganda. How do you defend yourself against that? Because that's not the market. That is an open distortion from the very highest levels of this government. Well, I think it's important to remember Reuters is a global news organization. And so what we're talking about here is a U.S. conversation.
We operate in markets all over the world where there's a less than friendly relationship with the local governments. There are companies that we have less than friendly relationships with. and you know look back over the decades there are periods of time and so this idea of a challenging
moment for us is a point-in-time problem. And so I know it feels, if you live in this country, it feels like a large existential thing, and not to diminish it in any way. But from a Reuters perspective, we practice high accountability journalism. all over the world in many different contexts. We're very good at this. We know how to get the story, how to get the exclusives, how to get to the truth.
regardless of the environment in which we're operating. We have to do that. We have to do that with governments. We have to do that with companies. And again, as we've been doing this for years and years and years, we're very good at it. So it's challenging. but it's not distracting from what we do by any means. And just, you know, I know this is sort of tech is everything. Tech eats everything. There's an important piece of history to remember, too.
You know, we talk about being in this very polarized time. There was another time when we were very polarized in the media, and that was back in the 1700s when Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson each had a printing press. and they pointed them at each other and just hammered each other all day long. And so the technology at the time reflected a very sort of tribal approach to media. And it wasn't until we started to get mass media that the conversation changed.
And the structure of the technology often reflects the nature of the media patterns in the market. And so it's important to put it into context. So when we have broadcasts, radio and television, massive fixed costs to build these things and put these up and build the towers. And you think, well, what's the right media strategy for that economic strategy? Well, it's to build a very big tent. To not create tribes, but to create a conversation that everybody wants to be a part of.
and then along comes cable. And cable, all of a sudden, the structural cost comes down. And now, actually, it's a better strategy to say, I'm going to build a gardening. I'm going to build a political tribe. I'm going to build a lot of 300 or 400 different tribes. And so we became a little bit more divided as cable came along. With the internet,
Now you've got one person, one place that can speak to the world. What's the best economic to go even further into the tribalization? And so in many ways, I think what we're seeing now is reflection of the technology. And so for me, the question is with AI, does that change it back? What's the media echo we'll see in the market as a result of what AI can do for the industry? How do you think AI will change those things?
Well, I think the biggest thing I'm excited about from a media perspective is the thing that we haven't changed in hundreds of years in the media business. With all of this innovation... 300 word articles. we still make 300, 600 word articles. And if you think about the absurdity of that idea, our reporters will go out and spin.
Days, hours, thousands of hours getting interviews, documents, etc. And they'll put all this stuff together and then they go to the editor and they say, great, give me 600 words on that. You're like, okay, I just spent half a year putting this together. It's 600 words. That's all I get. And then you get your 600. He says, great, can you get it down to 300? And it's got to work for everybody. That distribution goes back to the Gutenberg press.
Because that was the medium by which we could transmit. We built the internet and then we put 300 word articles on it. And the question with AI is, can we, through a thoughtful approach, to organizing all that source information? Find a new way for people to access the hard work of journalists. Part of that is the journalist writing through, because good writing, good journalism is thinking, building the hypothesis, building the structure. We don't want to lose that.
But to allow people to explore all of that work through whatever forms that they want, to me, is the first time we're really starting to rethink what the product experience could be. And that I think could be transformative. It could be transformative. I spend a lot of time thinking about the other side of it, which is most of these AI systems.
lie all the time, constantly. They're being used to help other people lie. Last night, the night before talking, the president insisted that comar abrigo garcia has ms 13 tattooed on his knuckles Even though that is just obviously Microsoft Paint. And that's not even AI. That is just a blatant lie or confusion by the president who is hostile to the press pushing back on him.
Do you see the flip side? Are you on guard against the flip side that you're talking about distribution and how it might change? The president owns a social network. The billionaires go direct. It's all great to have a hostile relationship with big companies. Many big companies have been very angry at me.
But I'm able to do that because I live in the United States with a functional First Amendment, a culture around free expression and not punishing free expression, and at least the sense that if you lie, that's a problem. And kind of the swirl that I'm seeing now is, well, all of them go direct, and the consequences for lying are dropping precipitously. And the state punishing you for your speech is ticking up. Like you see it.
And that feels like a very different kind of swirl for an organization like Reuters. Where, yes, you could have an antagonistic relationship with governments around the world, but the existence of the First Amendment in the United States is a bulwark against whatever intimidation might come elsewhere. Well, I think that's certainly in this country, yes. And again, I just keep reminding you and your listeners that we operate around the world.
Our New York office isn't as big as, it's not our biggest office by any means. And so we are... We do have a strong presence in the U.S. We cover it well, but we operate in countries all over the world. You can imagine different time periods over the last hundred years in different countries where we have faced.
difficult reporting situations. And in fact, the trust principles themselves came out of a moment in 1941 in Britain, and that the origin of that was due to pressure from the British government. in a state of financial turmoil for Reuters. to allow them to shape the news And rather than do that, they took an entirely different path to protect the integrity of Reuters news service back then. It's made us stronger today.
Again, our mission isn't to get everybody else to stop doing something. Our mission is to create a beacon of truth for people to come find us. No, I think it's on us to let them know where we are and how to find us. And so we take that very seriously, and with our subscriptions, we'll start to do more of that.
AI is not perfect, nor is somebody sitting in a microphone somewhere, wherever they might be. That's not perfect. Somebody blogging is not perfect. So the market has to choose these things. For us, AI is always going to have either human in the loop or rigorously validated and monitored content flow where our editorial team has looked at that and said with a high degree of confidence we know that works even with that remonitor.
But we're investing tremendous amounts of money in AI, in our newsroom, in our products, in our news gathering. These systems are out, they're deployed, they're in production, they're running. But there's a human in that process. Yeah. Let me ask you the same question I asked Omar, and then we should dive on AI. But I asked him this, and I'm going to ask you the same one. When the president's lawsuit comes for Reuters, are you ready? yes of course we're ready now we we face
lawsuits all over the world, all the time. So we have an amazing legal team. We have an amazing security team. We fly our lawyers all over the world when needed to be there with our team. And so if you're part of the Reuters family, we will have your back. Has that assessment changed as you've seen what he has done with your competitor at the Associated Press? Famously, they won't call it the Gulf of America. He's kicked them out of the briefing room. There's a lawsuit.
I think they're back, but yeah. They've been ordering back, but the Trump administration has a lot of creative interpretation. Has that changed your assessment of the risks? It's changed our assessment of the risk that could be there, although I would say that we sort of, you know, we went through this for the first administration. We saw signs of how we were going to have to operate, and so we prepared ourselves for this time.
I think that and some of the news around subpoenas and other things. But these are, again, these are... I don't want to diminish them because diminishing suggests that we're not paying attention to them. We take them very seriously. In fact, so seriously that we do our scenario planning before the election. So we're ready and we continue to do scenario planning. Our risk and security teams force us to do constant drills and security exercises to make sure in the moment if something happens.
We know what to do, where to go, who to call, how to get to people and make sure that we're ready for those moments. So again, it's just part of what we do. This administration, we're ready for. You're describing this, and I just keep coming back to cost. It sounds like you have a lot of lawyers and security people thinking about what you're making, how you're making it, how to protect your journalists. That's great.
Not a lot. We have really good lawyers, so we don't need a lot of them. Well, you can have a lot of bad ones or a few really good ones, and it kind of nuts out the stuff. That's just the cost of how you make the work at Reuters compared to some YouTubers just talking to a camera.
How are you getting that money back in a world where AI companies are scraping all of the data on the web and just delivering the results, not even in a 300-word article that's on your website, but in a 50-word summary at the top of the Google search results page? Two parts to that. I think how we make money is, I think, largely because we can window the content in multiple ways, which I think is pretty unique to our business model. We think of it as like a factory, a content factory.
We window it multiple times. So that gives us the revenue growth that gives us the nice margins we enjoy and some stability. So, you know, the question of can AI take our content and build something? They can. But I think, as you said, it hallucinates. It has issues. And so... Could you go there for something? Sure, I do. I use it to look up information and data, but I double-check it if it's something that's an important issue. If I'm trying to make dinner, then I'm less concerned.
if I'm trying to get facts and analysis out of something. I'll double check it or I'll use multiple sources. I'll do what I need to do. And so how we make money in that. is to continue to deliver on fact-based news, to build a brand that people know that, look, if it's important, if I'm going to place a trade, a client's trade or my trade, and it's a lot of money on the line for getting it right.
I'm probably not going to go to a potentially hallucinating chatbot to look at that. I'm going to stick with Reuters because I believe as they should, that the Reuters product, whether it's an AI interface or experience or AI in the loop somewhere, has been validated, humans have been involved, that it stands up to the quality and the trust principles that we adhere to.
So that brand, I think, is really the biggest opportunity. I think in some ways, if the quality of the news and other sources degrades and becomes more and more questionable, that's actually good for us in the long run. There's this old adage that the lies are free and the truth is expensive. Particularly on the web now, everybody's got a subscription.
That thing you're describing might be economically beneficial to Reuters. The news ecosystem degrades. Our Facebook feeds are just full of AI slop. And then the Reuters website, which again is inexpensive as you point out, but it's still beyond the reach of many. That's where the good information is. Do you perceive a world in which that is
successful and that we have functional governments, functional companies in a world where there's that much disparity. I don't know if it's disparity, but I do believe that I do believe that people will want the right information for important decisions and important parts of their lives. It's not just decisions. I think people want to be informed.
I think it's just human to want to understand the world around us in a truthful and meaningful way. And to be able to deliver that to people at a price that's cheaper than most of the things they stream to themselves for entertainment. I just think that's part of the diet of being a global citizen. And I know maybe it sounds naive, but I do think that, look, we don't have to convince the entire planet.
to have a great business, but I do think that there's a large group of people around the world who do want to know what's happening in the world, who want to be confident about that, and we need to bring them that service. We have to take another quick break. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Mercury. What if banking did more?
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Welcome back. I'm talking to Reuters President Paul Baskerberg about the way media works in the modern age and how that intersects with technology. And of course, that led to a conversation about AI.
A lot of what you're describing involves a consumer in the last window coming directly to you, paying your subscription, using your products. You're talking a lot about brand, saying the brand stands for something, hopefully the truth. We're going to go use the Reuters AI tool because we believe that it's validated. The other model of the past 20 years now is that the platforms are the places where the audience demand goes to. They aggregate that demand and then all of us
Tech platforms. Facebook, Google. The next generation of platforms might look like the AI companies themselves. It might look like ChatGBT or Perplexity or Google Search or whatever else is going to happen. and then all of us have content licensed to them. Vox Media has a licensing deal with OpenAI. Many, many companies have licensing deals with OpenAI. I believe Reuters has a deal with Meta to show some headlines, some news content in Meta's AI chatbot.
Are those deals, they look like the future to you? Yeah, just experiments. For us, it's core business for us. And so we haven't commented on any specific company we've done a deal with. So I know there's been some reporting about some of those. But for us, I think I would say a couple things. One is the nature of that 20-year-old relationship has changed. So 20 years ago, a lot of them were pass-throughs.
through search or social, you would find the article, you'd click through, and they helped you find our content. And so I think of them more as a pass-through entity today. A lot of these companies are building what I think of as consumer-facing product. Like they're building a news product. You can go to get your news and they're using our content as part of a bunch of other sources to build a product that's news. That's a very different premise.
To win on that premise, they actually have to do the thing that our publishing clients have to do. They have to be reliable. They have to be trusted. They have to speak to an audience. They've got to deliver on more than just passing through. So I see them in the same way I see our agency clients.
And that's the way we think about them. They are taking our content. They're building a consumer-facing product. And so for us, it actually feels very familiar to license to them. Now, I think for people who haven't been in the licensing business, It's a little unnerving to think of, well, what are they going to do with our content? How do we control that? What's the right way to price it? What's the right way to control it? What kind of rights do I have back when things go sideways?
We've been doing this for decades around the world. So for us, with the idea of licensing our content to a platform that is looking to build a consumer-facing news product, We just took out our fairly standard structure relationships. We know how to value them. We know how to control them. We know the terms. And so we're in a good position, we think, to build this as a nice addition to our business.
But it's in the same window in the same team that does all of our other licensing. It looks pretty similar. So for us, this is pretty normal for us. All right, I have to ask a follow-up here. I'm looking at a Reuters story. Okay. It says, Meta Platform said in October... Uh-huh. It's artificial intelligence chatbot will use Reuters content to answer user questions in real time. Is that true? Do you have that deal with Meta?
Well I think what the article says is that Meta is saying they have a deal. Or you're the president of Reuters. Do you have a deal with Meta? We don't comment on any of our client relationships. Okay. Do you have deals with any of the other AI companies? Again, we don't comment on those. I think in our quarterly earnings, if you go through that, they have talked about AI licensing deals as having been part of our revenue. And so it's not a... Secret at all that we are doing
licensing our content to AI engines. We just don't talk about the specific ones or the terms of anyone because they're agreements between us and our clients and no more than we would talk about any of our client agreements. That's just it's between us and our clients and I don't think they would prefer us to talk about them. and it's really none of our business to disclose them. You have an interesting view here, rooted in the fact that licensing is a big part of your business.
You seem comfortable with it in a very specific way. I have other executives on the show who think the rate conversation is wide open. Nick Thompson is the CEO of The Atlantic. One of the reasons that... He did a deal with OpenAI, and he said it on the show, was I needed to set some public rates so that when the New York Times is in a lawsuit... there's a market and that fair use conversation can have some reference to the market. Other people have disagreed with an exercise with this. I think.
I think maybe there's a view that... Did he disclose the right? He did not disclose the right. There's a sense that those lawsuits will push the rights up, right? The Times' lawsuit against OpenAI in particular, there's other ones that... These are not standard licensing deals. The rate you should pay for AI training should be substantially higher or different than the standard syndication deals other people might make. The rate that you might pay to reproduce an entire article.
in one of these trap bots should be different than the training rate. Are you thinking that granularly? Yeah. Again, if you were reading our contracts, you would see things around display. You would see things about categories and volumes and use case. Time to market. Is it real time? Is it 24 hours? Is it 48 hours? Is it archive? All of those dimensions we have to deal with all the time. So for us to put a price on that, it's not a new concept for us.
There's a wide variety of AI companies. There are the big established players, Google. Google is in the licensing business. YouTube is often described to me as a licensing business. They have to body up against the music industry in Hollywood, and they're good at it. There's a lot of people at Google who have been doing that for a long time. Then there's...
five-person startups in the AI space for building maybe the most interesting products of all. They have no idea what they're doing and they're just taking everything for free. How would you assess the industry as a whole. I would ask you to go company by company, but you're not going to do it. So how would you assess the industry as a whole in coming to terms with Reuters, given Reuters sophistication here?
Well, you know, if I keep drawing on analogies, it would probably make this more boring. Well, you're welcome to go company by company. Perplexity, how are they? Well, what I would say is in our licensing today, we have everything from the largest news organizations to tiny little companies. Our pricing has the ability to think about how much impact will they have with our content in the market? Because that's ultimately how broad is their use of the work.
It helps us to think about the value that we're providing them and they're extracting from us. We also, by the way, have a lot of monitoring tools. So we know if somebody takes one of our photos and uses it and didn't pay us for it, We will find them. They will get a letter within a couple of days. And we have the ways of tracking our video. And so we...
Because of the work we do, we are very good at monitoring what people are doing. And I would expect, you know, we will have something similar in this way, and we will ask people to pay for the work. Or there is legal consequences where possible. But, you know, the case law is still being decided out there on some of these conversations, and I think there's some good progress being made from a legal front that we've had.
Thomson Reuters is in many other businesses, and I think this is an important conversation for all of our businesses. Do you think AI training, broadly the way it's been done, is copyright infringement? Not if they pay for it. Well, that requires a license, so yes. Yes. Right? Because the open AI executives are saying, we trained on the public internet.
which does not require copyright licenses to do, are you thinking that there's already liability that they need to pay you for up front or that you might have to go sue against? You know, I don't want to get into any legal strategy in this conversation, but I do think that if our content is being used to produce something commercial, then we want to get paid for that work. Have those conversations generally gone well in the context of the lawsuits, or are they still ongoing?
Conversations in the context of lawsuits. Help me. The New York Times, obviously, did not have a good set of interactions that led to a lawsuit. That's a strategy choice. For us, we are trying an approach of trying to bring people along. I would say, has really been our approach. Now, you know, if that doesn't work, we'll resort to other methods. But I think our instinct as a licensor is to begin in a humble and generous way to say, let me help you do the right thing.
And if that doesn't work, then we will... find other pathways. When you think about the products you want to build, it sounds like AI is a big part of them. Are you thinking that some of these models and companies We'll help you make better products. Do you think the models are all kind of the same in the context of what you're trying to build? Oh, I think we're finding them to be very different in terms of what they do. And they're a part of how we deliver our products.
Our solutions are a mixture of large language models, some very specialized tools. We have some of our own small language models that we've built for very specific purposes. And so what we're finding is that the right answer is a series of tools orchestrated well to get to the level of quality that we want to have. So it's both. And you've lightly described what it is you want to build, right? A new way of accessing the information your journalists create. Is that a chatbot to you? Is that...
A voice assistant? That's just one piece on the professional consumer side of it. The bigger part of what we're doing is actually we've been investing in our newsroom operation for the last year and a half. Alessandra Galoni, our editor-in-chief, has been, I think, an incredibly inspiring leader. She has a vision of the newsroom of the future being an AI-powered newsroom.
So we have built tools that access every piece of moving news around the world. And using a combination of language models, we can access this data in multiple languages. grab it, pull it in, look at it, validate it with a human and push it out. Anything from a government press release to NVIDIA's earnings, you can think about all of the importance of speed and accuracy in that.
We've taken that from 85 down to 33 seconds. It's an enormous amount of time. And so that tool is running. 600 people are using that. A million alerts so far this year. Six, seven languages. In our core newsroom, we've got a headline generating tool. We've got a bullet point generating tool, summary tools. We've got error checking tools.
But these are in production. They're not interesting experiments. They're running today. Our news team is using it around the world. We've got a translation tool that goes to and from 12 different languages. Take a guess which is the hardest language.
Chinese, Japanese, French. French! Makes sense. They have their own vocabulary for everything. Have you ever tried to order from a waiter in France? Even if you order in perfect French, and by the way, my grandparents are French, they will correct me. So the standard for getting French right is very high. We also have a transcription service. So you can hold your iPhone out and grab what's happening live in 67 different languages.
turns that into a first draft of a story. Are these first-party tools you're building? Are you wrapping OpenAI? How does this work? We have multiple tools that we're using. Again, some that are in-house, some that are third-party. What we're finding is the orchestration of the tools. that makes it work. Even in our translation, it's multiple different. Some models are good in romance language, some are good in Chinese, Japanese.
put them all to work on French. But, you know, the point being that it's really about being smart about what's working now and being very nimble. And, You know, it's worth mentioning, we do something now called the future of news for our clients. And we do this around the world. We get our clients together, our thousands of clients together.
and we talk about AI in the news operation. We share what we're learning, what we're seeing, how it's working. They share their concerns. They tell us what we're doing. We're trying to bring the industry together on a really high-quality set of tools. And what we're finding is that what works today
is going to be different than what works in six months. And so part of our job isn't to just land it and get it, but to be relentless in finding what's the next thing, what's the next thing, and how do we get that in there and constantly be the ones innovating, setting the standards, and then sharing it with the industry.
Are your reporters driving this change? Most newsrooms are full of a lot of conflicted feelings. Yeah. No, my God. Yes, they are relentless. And again, going back to Alessandro, who just articulated this vision to the newsroom. And it really was in the spirit of, we have a world to cover.
And AI is going to allow us to get more of our people in the field, more of our people doing the distinctive work, the new work, less of our people moving content through the system. And that's really powerful to our mission to cover the world. But, you know, we're beneficiaries of Thomson Reuters, who's committed $200 million to AI investments a year. And so we draft off of all of that.
And they built this amazing tool for our newsroom called Open Arena, where our reporters can go into this place knowing that it's insulated from the open Internet. None of the work that they're doing is going to find their way out. They can build their own little mini-agents, and they're in there doing that, and they're sharing their little tools with each other. They're sharing their tools. Hey, I built this thing that quickly grabs a source. I built this thing that will build a footnote.
And our tech teams are watching this and grabbing the best stuff, the most used stuff, and they're building it into our operating systems for our newsroom. And so they're driving it. When we do our town halls and we do a demo, the first question is, hey, can you add this? And when am I going to get that? And so the spirit and the vision is really exciting, and they're pushing us harder than anything. My roadmap, you know, I could go on and on. We have so many interesting things to build.
It feels like you should come back and we should talk about those tools at length for a long time because there's The idea that you're going to move the cost into the field and have the reporters in the field and have reduced the cost of production is one of those new ideas in media. We have not reduced the cost of production substantially.
since word processors arrived. I think that was the last one. Grammarly. Yeah, Grammarly was pretty good. Spellcheck was pretty good. So you should come back and talk about that. But Paul, thank you so much for being on Decoder. This was great. Great, thank you. I'd like to thank Paul for taking time to speak with me, and thank you for listening to Decoder. I hope you enjoyed it.
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