Thomson Reuters will launch an on-demand, customisable financial web video service for its paid subscribers, called "Reuters Insider" tomorrow, paidContent reported. The new product will include specially produced video programming by Reuters, as well as 150 of its content partners, including CNBC.

The video platform was created to help hedge funds, traders, research analysts, banks and brokers communicate with clients, as well as to transform "financial programming from a passive one-way broadcast into a highly collaborative and personalised medium," according to the Financial Times. Subscribers pay as much as $2,000 a year.
Taking the video and online social networking revolution into the financial sector indicates the increasing reliance by traders on videos with data, graphs and charts embedded within for trading decisions.

The service is much like a Youtube for the financially interested, David Carr wrote in an article for The New York Times. It has a main window called Channel One, which enables subscribers to navigate and search for videos by sector, date, markets or region, and facilitates application of filters to create personalised channels.

U.S. newspapers continue to receive better financial news.

Moody's Investor Services on Friday announced industry earnings are improving, prompting the firm to change its outlook for the U.S. newspaper industry from "negative" to "stable." Moody's said the change reflects expectations that advertising revenue will recover over the next 12 to 18 months, but still expects ad sales to decline 5 to 10 percent this year. Ad revenue should be closer to flat at the end of the year and around a 3 to 2 percent decline in 2011, according to the announcement.

"Newspapers will benefit from the recovery in national advertising as well as broad based improvement in advertising across most categories that is expected to accompany a decline in the unemployment rate and recovery in consumer spending," the report states.

The investment firm also stated it expects furloughs, incentive compensation and other temporary cost-cutting measures will be reversed as revenues improve. The majority of costs that have already been cut, though, will likely remain permanent.

Last week, JP Morgan said U.S. newspaper likely did better than expected during the first quarter of 2010.

Gannett Co. also announced last week that cost-cutting measures and improved ad sales boosted first-quarter earnings, according to The Associated Press.

Bloomberg is rumoured to be focusing more on its core business of financial news, and less on general news, having disbanded its World News team last week, Gawker reported Friday, citing an anonymous source.

"Tom Secunda, one of Mike Bloomberg's earliest associates, and Dan Doctoroff, sent from City Hall to oversee the company, have been campaigning for much of the past year for Bloomberg to concentrate solely on business news and leave the rest to others. None of this stopped Winkler, in interview after interview, to insist [sic] that Bloomberg planned to expand its general news coverage to compete on all levels with Reuters," the Web site reported the tipster as saying.
Meanwhile, the Carolina Business News Initiative reported three Bloomberg News employees have confirmed Gawker's report, stating that Bloomberg is closing its World News section at the end of this year.

The World News team has not been cut, but are expected to be placed in other departments, according to a source.

A recent post on Alan Mutter's Reflections of a Newsosaur blog has rasied concerns over the potentially devasting impact the current financial crisis in the newspaper industry could have on the willingness of students to choose journalism as a profession.

Mutter argues that in a time where employment opportunities are shrinking and those who do manage to secure jobs are paid a pittance, a 'substantial percentage of the next generation of professional journalists' could be wiped out in a movement he dubs 'journicide.'

"Journicide has been under way since newspapers and other mainstream media began losing their formidable revenue-generating juju in 2006. The elimination of full-time professional journalism jobs since then has been so relentless that it has become remarkably, depressingly commonplace," he writes.

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