Reuters is an international financial information provider and news wire service. Reuters is the media division of the Canadian information company Thomson Reuters.

Reuters was founded in 1851 and owned by the Reuters Company until its 2008 sale to Thomson. Reuters is headquartered in London, though Thomson Reuters has headquarters in New York City.

Reuters is one of the world’s largest news organizations, but its news operation is only a small part of Thomson Reuters. Shortly after Thomson’s purchase, only 2,500 of the two companies’ combined 50,000 employees worked in Reuters’ news wire or other media businesses. (By April 2012, Reuters was reported to have 3,000 news employees, though it announced it would cut 5% of its staff in 2013.) Since the 1970s and ’80s, Reuters has moved away from strictly wire news and toward specialized financial information.

The majority of Reuters’ revenue — 90 percent, according to one April 2012 report — comes from subscription-based financial intelligence services, and the company also runs subscription-based legal, tax, and accounting units. All of its editorial content is delivered to its clients first.

Reuters has invested $7 million into the blogging company Pluck, partnered with the political news website Politico, and bought the financial commentary startup Breakingviews.

In late 2010, Reuters launched a U.S. news service called Reuters America, which is aimed at competing with the Associated Press for contracts with U.S. newspapers. As of June 2011, it had contracts with about a dozen American newspapers. Reuters also runs a semi-regular magazine.

Though Reuters once limited the web’s access to its online business stories, it has expressed more support for open-web practices since then. Reuters Media President Chris Ahearn has advocated citizen-driven journalism, news sharing, and news aggregation across the web. In 2006, the company gave a $100,000 grant to the citizen-journalism project NewAssignment.Net.

Reuters has also tried several projects in participatory journalism. In 2006, it launched a user-generated photo service called You Witness News with Yahoo. In 2008, Reuters opened up a semantic web application called OpenCalais that allows developers to sort and connect data.