The $10 billion opportunity at Reuters

It’s the biggest assignment in journalism: Take a set-in-its-ways 167-year-old news organization and reconfigure it radically so that it can compete on the global stage against countless young digital upstarts. If it’s done right, billions of people could end up with trusted, independent, impartial news they would never otherwise have had access to. On the other hand, if it’s done wrong — or if it’s not assigned at all — then one of the world’s most storied newswires might be entering its final years.

Welcome to Reuters, the news agency which faces, today, the most epochal decision in its history. If it doesn’t scale back, radically and quickly, its core financial-news offering, then in 30 years’ time it will be on life support. If it does make the change, however, then it can not only save itself; it might even be able to help transform billions of people’s access to trusted news.

Opportunities like this don’t come along very often — indeed, to a first approximation, they never come along. But now, thanks to a $17 billion M&A deal in which private equity giant Blackstone is taking over the Thomson Reuters financial-terminal business, Reuters News (which is not part of the deal) has found itself in possession of an astonishing $10 billion lottery ticket. The catch: This lottery ticket is timed to self-destruct.