Outlet profile

Reuters (via Business Recorder)

international center / wire service

Owned byThomson Reuters Corporation, itself majority-owned (70.56% of shares as of March 2026) by The Woodbridge Company, the private holding company of the Canadian Thomson family

FundingCommercial subscription model: Reuters News sells wire feeds to newspapers, broadcasters, and financial institutions worldwide; parent company Thomson Reuters earns roughly 81% of its ~$7.5 billion annual revenue from recurring professional subscriptions in legal research, financial data, and tax/accounting software

On the administrationmostly neutral

Background

Paul Julius Reuter founded the agency in London in 1851, initially using telegraph lines and carrier pigeons to distribute financial and commercial news across Europe. The agency quickly grew into one of the world's dominant wire services; it was the first to bring news of President Abraham Lincoln's assassination to European audiences in 1865. Reuters expanded to the Far East by 1872 and South America by 1874, and in the late 19th century signed territorial agreements with French agency Havas and German agency Wolff to divide global news coverage among themselves. The agency went public in 1984, at which point the Reuters Trust Principles—first codified in 1941 to guard editorial independence—were entrenched in corporate structure through the Thomson Reuters Founders Share Company, a special voting entity that can block any ownership concentration threatening impartiality. In 2008, Reuters merged with the Canadian Thomson Corporation in a deal valued at roughly $17.6 billion, creating Thomson Reuters; the Thomson family's Woodbridge holding company has retained majority control ever since. Thomson Reuters now earns most of its revenue from legal research tools, financial data terminals, and enterprise software, with Reuters News functioning as the wire-service arm of the business. Major bias-rating organizations—including Media Bias/Fact Check, AllSides, and Ad Fontes Media—consistently place Reuters at or near the center of the political spectrum, citing its adherence to factual reporting and multi-source attribution, though some conservative observers view its story selection as occasionally tilting left.

Sources

Profile compiled 2026-07-15; refreshed when ownership, funding, or the administration changes.

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