Reuters Balances Business Needs With Public Good By Investing in Investigative Team

Reuters is building up its investigations team, recently hiring talent from Bloomberg, the AP and The Wall Street Journal. This move is built for the long-term, which is just fine for Alessandra Galloni, editor-in-chief. 

It certainly helps that they have a solid 30-year deal with the London Stock Exchange Group that guarantees a heap of revenue: In the first quarter, Reuters reported revenue of $196 million, of which about half is estimated to have come from the LSEG agreement. That, alongside the newswire business, direct to consumer subscription business and events, among others, means they have diversified sources of income that help support investments whose payoffs are harder to show on paper. 

Investigative reporters tend to do deep dives that can take a significant amount of time, not contributing to the daily feast of stories demanded by shortened attention spans. Take The Boston Globe’s revelations of the Catholic church abuse scandal that took five months of deep reporting to uncover, or the two years that it took for President Richard Nixon to resign following the Watergate investigation. 

But to Galloni, the investigations team is worth the investment. Reuters remains committed to its mission to deliver high-quality journalism that serves the public interest, covering news from 200 locations worldwide, and providing critical information for financial markets, media customers, professionals and, increasingly (hopefully), consumers.

AMO spoke with Galloni about the new hires, the motivation behind investing in an area with little immediate reward at a time when newsrooms shrink and consumer-facing news becomes more and more competitive, and with less and less reward thanks to the advent of AI overviews. We also touch on events, which every single media company seems to be investing in after seeing a thirst for in-person gatherings.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. [Editor’s Note: Galloni refers to investigative journalism as “enterprise.”]

Why grow the investigations team? 

There is a wide array of enterprise that we do. There is certainly investigative, and our Pulitzer this year is our first in investigative, which is super exciting. But, there’s obviously different kinds of enterprise, explanatory, long form features, or graphic or data journalism. We really run the whole gamut, which is, to me, it’s impressive for a relatively small team. The trick has been that the enterprise team has its own editors and reporters, but also works incredibly successfully with the global newsroom. 

For example, the fentanyl series was a combination of enterprise editors, investigative editors, together with reporters in seven countries across three continents. The fentanyl series, which essentially explored the supply chains of how to make that fentanyl by basically making it. We didn’t make it the whole way, or, obviously, we didn’t want to get into trouble with the authorities, but we showed how one would make it, and so it was a real global effort. 

That’s been the success of the enterprise team, and that is to leverage the globality and the local sophistication of the global Reuters newsroom. 

Reuters hired four investigative journalists in 2025:

• Laurie Hinnant, focused on EMEA, from the AP; she won a Pulitzer for her investigation of the rush of Mariupol/
• Jeff Horowitz, focused on tech, from The Wall Street Journal; he did the Journal’s Facebook file series and led the coverage that exposed Russia’s connections to the Trump campaign.
• Gavin Finch, focused on EMEA, from Bloomberg; he has done currency market manipulation in Europe and rigging of electric power trading in the UK.
• Sarah Cahlan, visual investigations editor yesterday, from the Washington Post; shared in a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on the January 6 insurrection.

What we try to do with enterprise is really to have a rounded team that fires on all of the Reuters cylinders, deep investigations that go from the financial and corporate all the way to human stories, on the ground, and also on spinning off, for example, on work we’ve done on Ukraine or Sudan. 

We did incredible work on Sudan. We’ve done incredible work on Nigeria that just won multiple prizes. Enterprise mirrors what we do in the overall newsroom. And we have a position open, which we’re very close to filling, which is a visual investigations editor and that is what we’re trying to do, is to do investigations that are driven by Osint or analysis of video, satellite imagery, photography, data visualization and other visual content, and in particular, leverages the visual content that we have a lot of.

It strikes me that it’s a pretty serious investment of resources at a time when we see a lot of layoffs in news, a lot of newsrooms shrinking. How do you convince people that this is the right thing to do, and it makes sense, because the payoff is not immediate? 

It’s a tough moment, but we have three very solid revenue streams.

We have the revenue stream that is the news that we provide to our biggest customer, mainly our financial news we provide to the London Stock Exchange group terminal, and that is the biggest source of our revenue. It was a 30 year deal, and that gives us a steady stream of revenue every year.  

The biggest chunk of our newsroom is devoted to that because it’s in accordance with the revenue that it brings in. 

The second stream is our agency business, the traditional news wire that we provide to all of our media customers, all the thousands of news organizations around the world that rely on us. That is a very visual business, and that’s why we have such a big visual team on the ground, about 600 visuals: photographers, VJs, editors, packagers, in that realm, because that media agency business, which is the second revenue stream, is very visual and very important. 

The third stream is our professional part of the business. That’s what encompasses our enhanced consumer business, so our app and our website and our newsletters and our events and these new verticals that we’re going into that are professionally focused.

That is small revenue compared to the other two for the moment, but it is the fastest growing, and we’re paying a lot of attention to it. 

It’s a diversified portfolio, which allows us—and I don’t want to be Pollyanna-ish here— but it does allow us to have a very balanced business model that allows us to invest in all three parts. 

When we put hiring in one direction, it doesn’t mean it’s only for one area. We then leverage it and make it a force multiplier. And the same is true with enterprise. The same is true with our investigations, the reporting that we do in the course, for example, of the fentanyl series, then breeds lots of exclusive and spot news along the way. It gives us deep expertise in an area which, by the way, right now with tariffs, fentanyl is a huge, huge story.  

The investigations that we do help us to be much better sourced, and allow us the following year, or even during the time that we’re doing the investigation, to break news that is fundamental for our financial clients or our media clients. Even though we talk in teams, all the hiring that we do is aimed at making the newsroom stronger, and that’s the business case.

But then, it is really important for us to do journalism that is in the public interest. 

When we did the Nigeria series, which we did on forced abortions of women who had been abducted by Boko Haram in Nigeria, nobody would ask us to do that. Nobody cared. Nobody asked us to do it but we did it anyway, and we put it on the front of our app.  

It helped change policy, it helped bring attention of the UK Government, of the U.S. government, in particular, to what was going on and put the spotlight on the Nigerian military, as to why they were doing these systematic, forced abortions. And then there were investigations. Nobody asked us for that, and nobody probably would have wanted it if we hadn’t done it. And that’s part of being a public mission oriented company and newsroom.

It’s a balance. That’s how when I talk to my bosses about this, and I’m about to talk to them in my next call, I say, it’s all part of the package. And then there’s a talent issue.

Journalists love to be part of a news organization that embarks upon really ambitious reporting that stands up to power, that is not afraid of reporting in areas that could be tricky or could get you into hot water. Talent loves that kind of reporting. It’s about intelligence and insight and sourcing. 

We’re more of a 360 degree newsroom, perhaps, than any other, because we do nitty gritty financial and markets news every single day that moves markets that is so important to traders, to investors. We have people in conflict zones in Ukraine, we had our own staff in Gaza, one of the few news organizations that reported from Gaza for the duration of the conflict. 

We have data journalism, visual verification, we have packaging, we have newsletters, so we’re really a 360 degree newsroom and, yes, of course, you want specialization. You want a photographer to win the Pulitzer Prize, of which we’ve done many. But if that photographer is out and hears something or sees something, they’re going to call it in and say, this just happened. And we’re working more to bring the newsroom together. 

Let’s change the subject and talk about events. What’s going on in events?

Five years ago, we bought an events business. It was right back to before COVID, because then we had to do them online. 

Reuters Events is a lot of events that are very specialized in different sectors and so specifically for pharmaceuticals or for energy or for sustainability. And we have very specific conferences on that that are very useful to people in that industry. Then what we did is we created Reuters Next, which are broader conferences, more akin to the conferences that other news organizations do. 

The focus of Reuters Next is to look at what’s next across geopolitics, across economics, across politics, across financial markets, science, diplomacy, and so they’re broader conferences, and the crucial thing of Reuters Next is they are editorial conferences. 

The panels are moderated by our journalists, so when the people come on stage, they know that they can get asked anything. That’s a real strength, obviously, because it speaks to the trusted newsroom that we are. 

Is it the easiest business? No. There’s a lot of competition, but we are getting a lot of traction with our events. We have great people come. We stream them, there’s a lot of articles around them that we put on our website—it speaks to that 360 degrees.

It’s still pretty fledgling as a business, if you consider where others have been.

We revamped breaking news, which is our commentary division, and then we just launched ROI, Return on Investment, is columns that give you insight, that are a little more developed and that give you commentary on financial markets, on economics, on different sectors.

We’re a news organization. And we see that when there’s breaking news, people flock to us, whether it be LSEG, our agency customers, but also our consumer audience flock to us. We do lives and constant updates of what is happening. But then everybody is looking for, okay, well, what does this mean? Give me a deeper insight, give me something that I can chew on, give me a different perspective. And so basically, ROI is that.  

One of the things that is new is that the people who write them are in-house columnists with decades of expertise, but also we’re bringing in outside experts.