Reuters

Overview

Reuters is the news agency other news is built on — literally so on this site. Two FactsLedger profiles rest substantially on its scoops: the April 2025 firing of the U.S. admiral representing America at NATO, first reported by Reuters, and the September 2025 investigation that revealed 1789 Capital had quietly crossed $1 billion in assets. It is an international wire service founded in 1850–51, today the news division of Thomson Reuters Corporation, whose journalists — about 2,500 in nearly 200 locations, reporting in 16 languages — produce news read or seen by more than a billion people every day (Reuters fact sheet).

The reporting engine, up close

On April 7, 2025, Reuters broke the story that U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Shoshana Chatfield — the U.S. military representative to the NATO Military Committee and the first woman to lead the Naval War College — had been fired in what three sources described as an expanding national-security purge by the Trump administration (Reuters). The Pentagon did not immediately confirm it, but allies had been formally notified of the removal (Reuters). The firing followed the removals of NSA and Cyber Command chief Gen. Timothy Haugh and Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti days and weeks earlier; one source suggested the motive may have been tied to the Pentagon’s crackdown on diversity initiatives, though no official reason was ever given (Reuters). Senate Armed Services ranking Democrat Jack Reed called the dismissal “disgraceful” (Reuters).

Five months later, Reuters reporters Alexandra Ulmer and Joseph Tanfani published the investigation that put 1789 Capital on the map: through interviews with people close to the firm and financial records, they revealed the Trump-linked venture fund had crossed $1 billion in assets — a previously unreported figure, up from $150 million — after Donald Trump Jr. joined as a partner in November 2024 (Reuters). The piece traced previously unreported investments in SpaceX, xAI, Neuralink, Perplexity AI, Juul Labs and the defense startup Hadrian, and documented co-founder Chris Buskirk’s court-recorded debt history and Omeed Malik’s FINRA-documented Bank of America exit (Reuters). It closed with a characteristic Reuters move: “Reuters has no evidence that 1789 Capital has violated any laws or received preferential treatment” — stated in the same breath as quoting four ethics specialists on the conflict-of-interest structure (Reuters).

The takeover defense wired into its constitution

What most profiles of Reuters skip is the machinery that keeps it independent — and it is literal machinery, written into corporate law. In 1941, when Reuters was owned by Britain’s Press Association and wartime censorship and propaganda threats were mounting, the owners adopted the Reuters Trust Principles: obligations on Reuters and its employees to act at all times with integrity, independence and freedom from bias, and a bar on any single interest, group or faction dominating the company (Thomson Reuters Founders Share Company).

When Reuters listed publicly in 1984, the owners built a defense for the Principles: a new company, the Reuters Founders Share Company, was formed to hold a special “Founders Share” that capped any shareholding at 15% and could veto changes to Reuters’ constitution (Thomson Reuters Founders Share Company). The defense was tested — there were attacks on Reuters’ independence after the listing, “thwarted by the Trustees’ absolute refusal to relax the 15% limit,” with excess holdings stripped of voting rights until sold down (Thomson Reuters Founders Share Company).

The 2007–08 acquisition by Canada’s Thomson group closed only on the Principles’ terms: the Thomson family’s Woodbridge investment company agreed the Principles would apply to the entire combined Thomson Reuters business, agreed not to transfer its majority stake to anyone who had not pledged to support the Principles without the Founders Share Board’s consent, and accepted that if its holding ever fell to 35% or below, the old Founders Share rights would spring back to life (Thomson Reuters Founders Share Company). Today the renamed Thomson Reuters Founders Share Company can vote to negate any unapproved holder crossing 15%, or anyone attempting control at 30% (Thomson Reuters Founders Share Company). Its 14 to 18 trustees — drawn from politics, diplomacy, media, public service and business — are chosen by a nomination committee that includes two judges from the European Court of Human Rights alongside press-association representatives from the UK, Australia and New Zealand (Thomson Reuters Founders Share Company).

Pigeons, Lincoln, and the 10% oddity

Julius Reuter started in business in 1850 in Aachen, Prussia, combining telegraph cables with a fleet of carrier pigeons (Thomson Reuters Founders Share Company). After moving headquarters to London, his reputation leapt in April 1865 when he used the telegraph station at Greencastle, Northern Ireland, to become the first to break the news of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination — an early demonstration of the speed advantage that has defined the agency ever since (Thomson Reuters Founders Share Company).

Here is the oddity general profiles rarely quantify: Reuters News — the famous brand — is just under 10% of Thomson Reuters’ revenue (ICE House). The rest comes from the “big three” professional segments serving legal, tax and accounting, and risk, fraud and compliance professionals, plus governments and court systems (ICE House). The wire service the world knows is a small division of a content-driven technology company — which is why every Reuters story still carries the footer: “Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles” (Reuters).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not assert a motive for the Chatfield firing — the DEI link was single-sourced and no official reason was given. It does not independently verify the $1 billion 1789 Capital figure beyond Reuters’ reporting. The “world’s largest international multimedia news provider” description is the company’s own claim. Founding-year references vary between 1850 and 1851; both are stated here in sequence. Scale figures are the company’s own published numbers.