YouSaid · the spoken record

Alessandro Goloney

lines on the record: 77
first: 2025-05-08
most recent: 2025-05-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“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 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 or 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 and then”
2025-05-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Reuters is ready to stand up for the press — and embrace AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 or more of this and less of that. You could use those words. They wouldn't go very far. Well, as an attorney chief, I appreciate that.”
2025-05-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Reuters is ready to stand up for the press — and embrace AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very little to be. 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 news worthy 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 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.”
2025-05-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Reuters is ready to stand up for the press — and embrace AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 El Sigrill, a general manager for the LSEG relationship for 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. And because there are three different dynamics, and I think that's a really important thing, the things that 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 has 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.”
2025-05-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Reuters is ready to stand up for the press — and embrace AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. So for us, we'd 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, you know, 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 does Reuters saying about that and what's sort of the distilled version of it? I will tell you, you know, Reuters.com is 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 verified.”
2025-05-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Reuters is ready to stand up for the press — and embrace AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, hopefully, we can get them both because I do want to talk about product, but 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.”
2025-05-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Reuters is ready to stand up for the press — and embrace AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, there's a couple of things. One is putting up a paywall makes that harder. It's been free for. 30 years. So we think actually doing this, putting up a subscription, 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”
2025-05-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Reuters is ready to stand up for the press — and embrace AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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. We'll cannibalize your local paper customers or even your big paper customers”
2025-05-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Reuters is ready to stand up for the press — and embrace AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We haven't talked about this, but we've 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, really happy with the rate and how people have reacted. But we've got a long, long ways to go.”
2025-05-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Reuters is ready to stand up for the press — and embrace AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Over time, we think it will. 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 like 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 in focus in a very narrow set of the world.”
2025-05-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Reuters is ready to stand up for the press — and embrace AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 introductory rate that goes up after six months. That's just it.”
2025-05-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Reuters is ready to stand up for the press — and embrace AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and we call it professional because we think that largely our audience are professionals in whatever form. But it's really when we look at who's consuming it's global citizens, people that are interested in a fairly objective and global take on what's happening in the world. And so 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 that allows us to do that. And I would just say it's a very Reuters-like subscription model, a dollar a week, and you can cancel any time. And it's one price everywhere, not exactly one price, but it's intended to be a very low.”
2025-05-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Reuters is ready to stand up for the press — and embrace AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-05-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Reuters is ready to stand up for the press — and embrace AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, right? 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 in what you're making.”
2025-05-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Reuters is ready to stand up for the press — and embrace AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 in everything from inflation to consumers to businesses around the world. So, you know, 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 is a really, 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 Progotian sitting on a bench with a Russian counterpart saying this doesn't look like a hostile conversation. Those moments matter.”
2025-05-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Reuters is ready to stand up for the press — and embrace AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 industry. But there's a nuance to this. And I won't get my dates right, but if you remember when Progoshin, 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 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...”
2025-05-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Reuters is ready to stand up for the press — and embrace AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-05-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Reuters is ready to stand up for the press — and embrace AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 is just... Continues to be an enormous source of revenue for that company. But expanding that into policy seems like the turn, 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 is kind of gone away, right? People aren't buying it in the same way as they were before.”
2025-05-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Reuters is ready to stand up for the press — and embrace AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is. It is financial news in terms of its intent, but just take a look around at everything from tariffs today. news that's traveling through Wall Street today is about geopolitics. Geopolitics translated into policy, policy translated into 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 US 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...”
2025-05-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Reuters is ready to stand up for the press — and embrace AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that has to be right, it has to be fast. People trade on that news and information. So that's one window. The second window is the media industry through our agency platform. So they're 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 830 million. We're growing high single digits. We're very comfortable 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.”
2025-05-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Reuters is ready to stand up for the press — and embrace AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anything related to financial in either one or collectively can fire me, both of them hired me. And so it is a very 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 news gathering 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.”
2025-05-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Reuters is ready to stand up for the press — and embrace AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, we're 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 Report.”
2025-05-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Reuters is ready to stand up for the press — and embrace AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. The AI of it, there's new modes of distribution. There's the Trump administration and the First Amendment generally. I actually want to unpack what Reuters is for people. It's one of these brands that everybody knows, everybody sees.”
2025-05-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Reuters is ready to stand up for the press — and embrace AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. Literally”
2025-05-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Reuters is ready to stand up for the press — and embrace AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 back and forth. Okay, Paul Bascobert, president of Reuters. Here we go. Paul Bascobert, you're the president of Reuters. Welcome to Dakota.”
2025-05-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Reuters is ready to stand up for the press — and embrace AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“30 or even five 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 being 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. Dakota 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”
2025-05-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Reuters is ready to stand up for the press — and embrace AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hello and welcome to Dakota. I'm Neil Lai Patel, editor in chief of the Verge. And Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Paul Bascobert, 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, Dakota 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, 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 years ago.”
2025-05-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Reuters is ready to stand up for the press — and embrace AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT