One of the two major newspaper companies I can think of that have successfully made the transformation to the digital age closes its biggest deal ever today. Thomson Reuters is the name of the new organization, but it was a straight-out acquisition of Reuters by Thomson, the former owner of the Globe and Mail, the Times of London, and my employer for most of 1995 and part of 1996, American Banker.
And that’s the thing. While Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. (the other success I’m referring to above) has maintained and even expanded its presence in the newspaper business, the key to Thomson’s success was getting out, years ago. As I wrote last year:
[I]n the late 1970s, Thomson began buying into more specialized media (starting with textbook publisher Wadsworth), and getting out of the mass market. It sold the Times papers to one Rupert Murdoch in 1981, and finally got out of newspapers completely in 2003. In the meantime, it had become a dominant player in all sorts of obscure but lucrative fields like legal research, medical statistics and financial data.