UK / Global · Bias: Wire service
Thomson Reuters (Thomson family ~70%)
Who owns Reuters? Thomson Reuters — and behind that name, one very quiet Canadian family: the Thomsons. The newsroom is fenced off by the Trust Principles, a 1941 charter obliging the company to keep Reuters independent and free from bias — the closest thing a for-profit wire has to a constitution. Paul Reuter founded it in London in 1851 using, among other things, carrier pigeons to relay stock prices between Brussels and Aachen faster than the mail. Today it runs about 2,500 journalists and 600 photojournalists across 200 locations in 165 countries. Because Reuters sells its raw wire copy to thousands of outlets rather than chasing its own mass audience, it has less incentive to spin a headline than almost anyone else in this guide — which makes it a useful baseline: read the plain Reuters version, then see how much 'flavor' your favorite outlet added on top. OWNERSHIP AS OF OCTOBER 2026 Reuters is owned by Thomson Reuters Corporation, headquartered in Toronto. The controlling shareholder is The Woodbridge Company, the private holding company of Canada's Thomson family. In its latest Schedule 13D amendment, the Thomson family group reported beneficial ownership of 312,518,088 common shares — 70.56% of the company — as of 31 March 2026, with Woodbridge itself holding 67.91% (SEC Schedule 13D/A, Amendment No. 24, April 2026). The company's own annual filing puts it more plainly: Woodbridge and its affiliates owned "approximately 70%" of the common shares as of 2 March 2026 and are "the principal and controlling shareholder" (Thomson Reuters Form 40-F, March 2026). Everything else trades publicly, which answers the popular search "who owns Reuters, BlackRock?": index funds hold slices of the remaining 30%, and none of them outvote a shareholder with 70%. One thing moved since our last review. On 4 May 2026 Thomson Reuters handed US$605 million back to shareholders through a "return of capital," paid with money from its 2024 sale of London Stock Exchange Group shares: US$1.435518 per share, with every 100 shares consolidated into roughly 98.5 (company press release, 1 May 2026). Because the family group owns about seven shares in ten, about seven dollars in ten of that payout was due to the family group — that is arithmetic, not an accusation; it is simply how majority ownership works. The company also agreed to sell 51% of its Global Print business to the private-equity firm KKR for about US$500 million, a deal it expects to close by the end of 2026 (company second-quarter results, August 2026). None of this touches the newsroom: Reuters News remains wholly inside Thomson Reuters. Steve Hasker is president and chief executive of Thomson Reuters; the company's 29 September 2026 notice for its third-quarter results names him and chief financial officer Gary Bischoping as hosts of the 3 November earnings call. The newsroom is run separately by editor-in-chief Alessandra Galloni, appointed in April 2021 — the first woman in the job in what was then Reuters' 170-year history — and still in the chair as of mid-2026, when her staff memo named Mike Williams global managing editor for publishing (June 2026). The bridge between the family money and the newsroom is the Thomson Reuters Founders Share Company, whose trustees enforce the Trust Principles, including the one requiring that "the integrity, independence, and freedom from bias of Thomson Reuters shall at all times be fully preserved" (Thomson Reuters, Trust Principles). IS REUTERS LEFT OR RIGHT? Our read: neither, and that is exactly what to watch. Reuters doesn't lean the way a tabloid leans. Its habit, in our reading, is to lean toward calm — to pick the quietest available verb and let the loudest facts sit in paragraph three. That's an editorial choice, not a political one, but it still changes what you come away believing. Eight dated examples from our own archive: On 13 July 2026, Reuters' dispatch from a Spanish wildfire that had killed at least twelve people ran under "British couple saved from Spanish ravine after deadly wildfire." The rescued couple got the verb; the twelve dead became the adjective "deadly." On 4 August 2026, after video showed an FPV drone pursuing a 52-year-old vegetable seller around his van in Kherson, the Reuters headline was "Ukraine accuses Russia of war crime after video shows drone attacking vegetable seller in Kherson." The subject of the sentence was the accusation; the drone on camera belonged to nobody. On 22 August 2026, Reuters headlined a 95-page Postal Service rule as an effort "to tighten mail-in voting if court gives OK." Reuters' own third paragraph said USPS "would not deliver ballots in states that do not comply." On 26 August 2026, after Judge Indira Talwani found the Postal Service had violated her standing order, Reuters wrote "Judge chides US Postal Service over mail-in voting rule but will not block it." The phrase in the ruling, quoted inside Reuters' own story, was "feigned compliance." On 4 September 2026, when the president posted an all-caps threat to stop trading with countries the US runs deficits with, Reuters filed it as "Trump says if the Fed doesn't cut rates, he'll stop trading with some nations." "Some nations" covered about $1.2 trillion of deficit. On 8 September 2026, after a map relabelling Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Mexico and Central America as US territory prompted Iceland to summon the US ambassador, the Reuters headline said the map was "showing" the island under an American flag — and news sites worldwide ran it near-verbatim. Now the other side, because it's the same newsroom. On 1 September 2026, when the FTC and 22 state attorneys general sued Amazon over its ad auctions, the Reuters wire summarised what the complaint alleged without sanding the edges off it, while outlets running that identical copy softened it to "practices" in the headline above. And on 16 September 2026, Reuters reported finding more than 20 skin-bleaching creams and soaps from regulators' banned lists on sale on major online marketplaces. Its reporters in London and New York bought some, so the story wasn't "we saw a listing" but "it arrived at our door." That's the wire at its best — and why the flat verbs are worth flagging rather than shrugging at. IS REUTERS RELIABLE? CAN YOU CITE IT? Yes, with the usual reader's caution. Reuters publishes its rules where you can read them: the Reuters Handbook of Journalism sets out ten "absolutes," one of which is to always correct an error openly. Its accountability runs through the Trust Principles, the Founders Share trustees and its own published corrections rather than a national press complaints body. One episode is worth knowing. Reuters published an investigation into an Indian hack-for-hire firm in November 2023, took it offline that December to comply with a preliminary takedown order from a New Delhi district court, and restored it in October 2024 once the court lifted the order. Nothing was retracted for accuracy — but a wire operating in 165 countries can be reached by courts in any of them. Two more recent episodes, both from July 2026, show how Reuters handles its own mistakes — and that the handling happens in public. On 16 July 2026, during renewed US–Iran hostilities, Reuters flashed a story headlined "Booms heard in UAE's downtown Dubai, witnesses say." The Dubai Media Office said no explosions had occurred. Reuters withdrew the story the same night and later said it "regrets" a report that "did not meet its standards," because its reporters could not tell where the sounds came from or what they meant and did not say so (Reuters statement, reported by Khaleej Times, 17 July 2026). UAE prosecutors said the withdrawal and apology "does not preclude the continuation of the investigation" into how the report was published (The National, 18 July 2026). Then on 23 July 2026 the Hamburg Higher Regional Court issued a preliminary injunction (case no. 7 W 94/26) barring Reuters from repeating that an open letter about the International Fencing Federation had been signed by "almost 3,000 athletes and coaches," a figure from a 5 May 2026 Reuters report. According to the federation's own press release of 29 July 2026, the court treated the number as an unverified statement of fact because the signatures had been collected through an open online form and never checked, and Reuters had already corrected the article to remove the figure. We could not find a Reuters statement on the ruling, and a preliminary injunction is not a final judgment — so read that one as the federation's account, not ours. To be clear: our bias note is our own reading of Reuters' headlines against its own copy, not a scientific score. We date every example so you can disagree with us. WHAT PEOPLE ACTUALLY ASK Is Reuters left or right? Not in the party sense. Our criticism is almost never about which side it favours — it's about verbs that undersell the event, which flattens everyone equally. Is Reuters Canadian? The parent company is: Thomson Reuters is headquartered in Toronto and controlled by a Canadian family. The news agency was founded in London in 1851 and reports from everywhere. Who owns Reuters — BlackRock? No. Woodbridge, the Thomson family's holding company, reported 70.56% of the shares in March 2026. Institutional investors share what's left. Is Reuters reliable enough to cite in an essay? Yes — it's one of the better primary citations available, because wire copy is written to be resold to outlets with opposite politics. Cite the Reuters story, not a paraphrase of it. Why do so many news sites sound identical? Because thousands of them buy the same wire copy. When you see the same sentence in ten places, you're usually reading one Reuters reporter, ten times. WHAT CHANGED Last reviewed 9 October 2026: ownership re-checked against the April 2026 Schedule 13D (70.56%, unchanged) and the March 2026 annual filing; added the May 2026 US$605 million return of capital and the KKR print deal; added two July 2026 accountability episodes — the withdrawn Dubai "booms" story and the Hamburg court's preliminary injunction — to the reliability section. Previous full review: 17 September 2026.
Reuters sends its journalists into the exact places most news organizations pull back from — and pays for it in the most literal way possible. In October 2023, Reuters videographer Issam Abdallah, a veteran of conflicts in Syria, Iraq, and Ukraine, was killed by Israeli shelling while covering clashes on the Lebanon border. In 2025, Reuters cameraman Hussam al-Masri was among several journalists killed in an Israeli strike on Gaza's Nasser hospital. The purpose behind putting reporters in that much danger is the entire Reuters business model: raw, first-hand, wire-service facts from the actual front line, not a studio thousands of miles away. Israel has killed more journalists than any government on record since the Committee to Protect Journalists began counting in 1992, making the current conflict the deadliest era for war correspondents in modern history — Reuters staff included.