Speed for Sale

To most Americans, Reuters news service evokes images of far-distant lands and exotic exploits amid steamy jungles and lonely paddyfields. Oldtimers can probably remember Edward G.

Robinson, playing Julius Reuter, receiving the news of Lincoln's assassination hours before anyone else from an agent who threw his dispatches over a liner's rail at Southampton. Before too long, however, the service will be associated with images much closer at hand. Last September, for the first time, Reuters started offering U.S. news to subscrib ers in direct competition with A.P. and U.P.I. This January it will launch a U.S. financial news wire in competition with Dow-Jones. "The U.S. is the biggest news producer and consumer in the world," says Reuters General Manager Gerald Long. "I have always believed we had to go in."

The move is not entirely voluntary Since the < 1930s, U.S.-based A.P. and British-based Reuters have swapped domestic news in order to avoid setting up duplicate bureaus in both countries. But the deal became lopsided as more news originated in the U.S. and less in Britain. Last year the A.P. demanded an extra fee from Reuters to continue the arrangement. Rather than pay, Reuters decided to expand its own small news-gathering operation in the U.S. Similarly, last April A.P. linked up with Dow-Jones to provide an international financial news service, a field in which it had no serious rivals. Reuters replied by challenging Dow-Jones in the U.S.

Risky Gamble. Reuters is aware that its U.S. venture is a gamble, one made all the riskier by the fact that devaluation has hoisted its expenses 17%. Nobody has especially high hopes for the general news service, which will be competing not only with the U.S. wire services but with the supplementary news services of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post as well. The financial wire is another matter. Reuters has signed up 100 clients, mostly brokers. Others have expressed interest. Wall Street is always greedy for news that will help make money, and Dow-Jones has grown a mite complacent over the years without any competition. "All Reuters needs is a couple of beats and it's made," says a Merrill Lynch broker. It is likely to get them. A staff of 70 will scout New York City and Washington for business news; Reuters will use Ultronic teleprinters capable of printing 100 words a minute, as compared with the current Dow-Jones rate of 60 words a minute.

The speediest delivery of the news has been the aim of Reuters ever since 1850, when Founder Julius Reuter filled a gap in the telegraphic system between Aachen and Brussels with 40 pigeons, which winged stock-market news at the rate of 37 miles an hour. Graduating from pigeons to cable service, Reuters moved to London in 1858 and expanded along with the British Empire. Reuters became, in fact, the voice of empire, taking the part of Britain in its quarrels around the world. Not until 1941, when the service was bought by a group of London publishers and turned into a cooperative, did it establish its independence. Since then, it has made a name for itself by getting the news out of remote parts of Asia and Africa that have not been--or cannot be--covered by anybody else. The third largest wire service in the world after A.P. and U.P.I., Reuters today has 440 full-time staffers, about half of them British, who serve 6,551 newspapers around the world.

Metaphors Are Out. The 65 U.S. papers that subscribe to Reuters value it for speed and clarity. It beat other agencies by 15 minutes in reporting the heart-transplant operation in Cape Town. It not only was speedy in reporting the Mideast war, it also provided crisp summaries instead of the conflicting versions that some of the other agencies tended to turn out. For maximum efficiency, Reuters tries to write a story as straight as possible with a minimum of colloquialisms and metaphors. Copy has to be easily translatable without a turn of phrase that will make trouble. Such is the leanness of its prose that one staffer maintains that by comparison A.P. is "colorful"--a compliment seldom paid that service.

In preparation for its U.S. invasion, Reuters has demanded more organized stories from its correspondents. "It is no longer an undigested flow of information," says Managing Editor Stuart Underbill. Since Reuters will not be able to provide as much U.S. coverage as A.P. or even U.P.I., it will "aim to skim the cream off the news," says Underbill. Already cream-skimmirfg, Reuters has occasionally sent a U.S. news item to London, which relays it back to U.S. subscribers before they can get the news on the clogged A.P. wire. It's a matter of technique above anything else, but to Erwin D. Canham, editor in chief of the Christian Science Monitor, it means that "Reuters has a better knowledge of the communications art than American services."

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