Outlet profile

Reuters (via Trading Economics)

global center / international wire service

Owned byThomson Reuters Corporation, majority-owned by The Woodbridge Company Limited — the private holding vehicle of Canada's Thomson family — which controls roughly two-thirds of Thomson Reuters shares; the company is publicly traded on the NYSE and TSX

FundingSubscription and licensing fees paid by media organizations, financial firms, and businesses worldwide; Thomson Reuters is a publicly traded corporation whose revenue comes primarily from professional information services (legal, tax, financial data) and news wire licensing to thousands of subscribers

On the administrationmostly neutral

Background

Reuters was founded in London in 1851 by German-born Julius Reuter, who used telegraph lines — and initially carrier pigeons — to transmit news and commodity prices across Europe. It expanded globally over the following century, becoming one of the world's dominant wire services by pioneering computer-based financial data transmission in the 1960s and electronic currency trading in the 1980s. In 1941, during World War II, the Reuters Trust Principles were created to protect editorial independence from owner interference; a special 'Founders Share' held by the Reuters Founders Share Company Limited enforces those principles structurally to this day. Reuters was listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1984. In April 2008, Canada's Thomson Corporation acquired Reuters Group in a deal valued at roughly £8.7 billion, creating Thomson Reuters Corporation; the Thomson family's Woodbridge Company retained majority control. Major media-bias organizations consistently place Reuters among the most neutral and factually reliable mainstream outlets: AllSides rates it Center, Media Bias/Fact Check rates it Least Biased with Very High factual accuracy, and Ad Fontes Media places it near the top of its reliability scale. Reuters has faced occasional criticism from conservatives who perceive mild left-of-center framing, and from some press-freedom advocates over editorial decisions in conflict-zone coverage, but no sustained evidence of systematic political bias has emerged from independent audits.

Sources

Profile compiled 2026-06-27; refreshed when ownership, funding, or the administration changes.

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