Over the past few years, the media arm of Thomson Reuters has been trying to polish its 160-year-old brand to a more contemporary sheen by recruiting A-list journalists and pundits and expanding into areas like blogging, Internet TV and magazines.How can I ever trust an ultra-low latency direct feed of machine readable news designed solely for application consumption again?
It's a strategy meant to broaden the consumer appeal of the financial-news and information service, while staking its reputation as a multi-platform media outlet for the future.
But there's one part of the operation that is decidedly Jurassic by comparison: Its website.
At a glance, Reuters.com looks as prolific and well-designed as the homepage of any news orgnization with resources as its disposal. But fundamental inefficiencies lurk beneath the surface.
The most egregious of these is the difficulty of inserting hyperlinks, people who know their way around the back-end told Capital.
"The current site was built on a legacy system conceived in the wire-agency age," said one of them.
Nor are video embeds a piece of cake. And with the exception of the homepage, live-blogs and other special features, content ends up where it does as a result of automation rather than human intervention.
But Reuters is working on a sweeping web relaunch that's expected to debut sometime in the first quarter of 2013, according to people familiar with the plans.
Known internally as "Reuters Next," the new reuters.com will be a "state of the art" offering with a redesigned front-end and a proprietary content management system built from scratch, said our sources, who described the site as being remodeled into editor-curated, stream-based channels such as world news, politics, business and tech....MORE
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
"Reuters gutting web infrastructure for 'Reuters Next,' its big online retooling"
From Capital New York:
