For traditionalists at Reuters, it is akin to the British prime minister moving out of Downing Street into a suite of serviced offices or the Queen swapping Buckingham Palace for a loft in London's trendy Clerkenwell. But for Tom Glocer, chief executive of the international information group, the shift from its 66-year-old headquarters at 85 Fleet Street to the futuristic Canary Wharf financial district, which began last week, is an entirely logical -- and very necessary -- next step in his makeover of the company.
The move marks the departure of the last headquarters of a major news organization from the thoroughfare that gave the British national press its name. The former Telegraph and Express buildings across the road have been combined as offices for the bank Goldman Sachs. Associated Newspapers left Northcliffe House down towards the Thames for west London's Kensington long ago, and the roar of the Sun's vans on Bouverie Street is a distant memory.
When I first worked at Reuters as an office boy in the late 1950s, one of the most important tasks on the overnight shift was to cross Fleet Street with a white enamel jug to fetch tea for the subeditors from Mick's all-night cafe -- if you were not too generous pouring out the contents, you could turn a sixpenny profit. Now Mick's is an upmarket French bakery.
In those days, tea was central to the functioning of the newsroom. Another "boy" -- actually a man in his early twenties with Buddy Holly glasses and a stock of naughty magazines in his locker -- played a game of hiding behind a pillar and shouting "Trolley" in a fair approximation of the tea lady's tone. We kept a tally of how many subs rose in Pavlovian fashion, mug in hand, before realizing they had been had -- yet again.
No need for any of that at Canary Wharf -- the new Reuters building has a built-in Starbucks coffee shop.
Technology
Nostalgia ain't what it used to be, and the move from Fleet Street has been an inevitable part of an evolution of the press and other media organizations that once congregated there. It is surprising that Reuters should be the last to go. The agency started using computers back in the 1960s when such innovations seemed light years away from the hot metal British press.
When I was editor of Reuters World Service in the 1970s, I must have been the only media executive to have received a letter from the print union complaining about the slow pace at which information technology was being introduced into the newsroom -- the teleprinter operators were anxious to get the pay bonuses and employment opportunities that came with being taught to work on the computers.
The windfall that national newspapers reaped from their Reuters shares when the company went public in 1984 helped to pay for their move down, or across, the Thames. Revenue from the press had never covered the bills incurred in reporting the world, and, as its profits boomed in the 1990s, the link between Reuters and the conventional media became overshadowed, financially and in terms of staff numbers, by the burgeoning services for the financial and business world.
As the company grew, so the building at 85 Fleet Street designed by the fashionable interwar architect, Edwin Lutyens, and opened in 1939, became an anachronism. It was, to be sure, a monument, linked to the agency's history. Stories were told of how an office boy would be sent to jump on the pad controlling the traffic light beside the building so that it would be green when the prewar managing director, Sir Roderick Jones, stepped into his Rolls-Royce.
Then there was the day in 1941 when a German bomb fell outside the building, and was only prevented from exploding by being caught in telegraph wires strung across Fleet Street.
Number 85 was not, in fact, owned at the time by Reuters, but by the richer Press Association -- though the arrogant Sir Roderick always passed it off as "the Reuters building." By the time Reuters bought the freehold in 1994, the editorial departments had moved to the ITN building further north in Gray's Inn Road. Sales staff were installed by the Tower of London. Only the senior central management remained in what Glocer terms "a beautiful shell." The sprawl of the rest of the company round a dozen London locations was, to say the least, inefficient and worked against the corporate cohesion after which any chief executive must hanker.
Symbol of change
Having brought the company's operations in New York under one roof when he was in charge of North America, Glocer set out to do the same at the center. The result is the new headquarters for 2,500 staff in Canary Wharf, which could hardly be more a symbol of the way the company has changed.
In place of the cramped Portland Stone edifice, with its winding corridors and an entrance hall which looked daunting when I stepped through it as a fledgling journalist but now seems decidedly on the small size, there will be a gleaming, 10-story headquarters in east London's Docklands. Outside, a giant screen will parade photographs and television reporting along with a 100m electronic ticker. It feels, says the chief executive, "very New York."
Although the move makes sense financially, deeper purposes are at work. For one thing, Glocer makes no bones about his feelings for a need for a change from the culture he found when he moved from New York to London four years ago.
In an interview during his last days in Fleet Street, he spoke of moving from the "baronial heights" and of not looking down on staff as "galley slaves."
He will work from a room without a door, opening on to an internal staircase connecting to colleagues on different floors -- a far cry from the innersanctum offices of past chief executives on the seventh floor at Fleet Street, to which one was summoned during the 1960s and 1970s by a continuous, overbearing telephone tone. And no need for any pretence about who the owner is -- the street outside has been renamed Reuters Plaza.
The move also chimes with the severe pruning of the company's activities pushed through by Glocer under his Fast Forward program of change, which has led to the sale or closure of 80 units, and the loss of 2,000 jobs.
"In the 90s," he says, "the excitement was at the periphery" -- in the successful flotation of the Instinet dealing service or investments in new technology.
"The smart people were given authority to do that, and this got them away from the centre," Glocer says. "It was very worrying. There wasn't enough talent to go round and we couldn't afford to neglect the center."
For peripheral services, read peripheral premises. So, now, joining the circle, he adds, "we will concentrate people in one building as part of the desire to get the best and brightest to focus on the center."
There is, clearly, a long way to go. Looking back to the turn of the century, Glocer uses adjectives such as "mediocre" and "failing" to describe the condition of the biggest global news company. Now, he adds, Reuters is doing "reasonably well."
But, despite results from Fast Forward, it still has to establish itself as "good" and has even further to go before becoming "great."
Reuters has yet to show it can do more than cut costs and retrench to the center. It needs to find the 21st-century equivalent of the electronic services that propelled it forward so dramatically in the final quarter of the last century. Glocer says he will unveil the follow-up to Fast Forward later in the year. Whatever it is, he will have an office tailored to his strategy to work from.
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