Envisioning a Canadian Reuters

The FT's Alphaville is doing a good job of moving the Reuters takeover story along, giving not only details of Reuters' "Founders Share", which prevents hostile takeover bids, but also a plausible description of who's saying what: apparently Canada's Thomson offered 600p per share, and Reuters replied they would only start talking at 750p per share.

The bid can be seen as some kind of vindication for Reuters CEO Tom Glocer, who has made his company more attractive than it was only a couple of years ago. On the other hand, the share price has hardly taken off – until today – and the venerable Reuters, mortifyingly, continues to have a smaller share of the market for financial data than the upstart Bloomberg.

Reuters is a news company by brand, but a financial-data company by revenue. Both sides of the company have a reputation of being very high quality, if slightly boring. Being owned by Thomson, which is also a little on the boring side, wouldn't be such a bad thing, although I'm not sure how the UK hacks will take the news.

My guess is that if Thomson does bag Reuters, it'll actually change its name to Reuters as well: one could argue that it's the world's strongest brand in the business of news.