Social Impact and ESG Report 2023

Advancing Transformational Governance with the United Nations Global Compact

Thomson Reuters has been a proud member of the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) working group on Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16 – Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions – since 2019. SDG 16 is dedicated to the promotion of peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, the provision of justice for all, and the building of effective, accountable, and inclusive institutions at all levels. It is also the foundation and key to upholding the Ten Principles of the United Nations Global Compact - across human rights, labor, environment, and anti-corruption - and implementing all the SDGs. We convene regularly with our UNGC and corporate partners, focusing our efforts on developing a plan to build stronger societies.

In 2021, the UNGC released the SDG 16 Business Framework | Inspiring Transformational Governance, a reference tool that translates the targets of SDG 16 for businesses as it relates to their internal and external activities. It is a tool for businesses, developed by businesses, to inspire transformational governance (TG). The framework demonstrates why and how businesses can support and strengthen peace, justice, and strong institutions as essential pillars of governance. Building on the release of the SDG 16 Business Framework, a group of 20 leading UNGC participants from across global regions, including Thomson Reuters, were invited to join a “TG Think Lab” to deliver a corporate toolkit for businesses to socialize, mobilize and contextualize transformational governance within their respective organizations.  

Thomson Reuters team members provided pro bono support, assembling a team of cross-functional consultants to assist with product marketing, communications, client relations, and content design for the launch of the Transformational Governance Toolkit. The project resulted in tangible deliverables, including key messages for the launch campaign, landscape research analysis outcomes, and detailed audience personas. Reflecting on the experience, team members expressed pride in their contributions and confidence in the project's impact on facilitating transformational governance, particularly in areas such as ESG considerations.

Fellowship for equal justice

Thomson Reuters celebrated its eighth year working with Equal Justice Works, a nonprofit organization that mobilizes over 300 lawyers each year through a fellowship program focused on addressing a wide range of unmet needs. This year, we were proud to fund the work of three amazing fellows who devoted considerable time and resources to the pursuit of equal justice for underserved communities across the country.

Among the highlights, a fellow working in Alabama developed the Veterans Law Project, an initiative focused on providing direct representation and legal services for veterans and their families who often do not meet the threshold for traditional legal services. Over the two-year fellowship, more than 200 veterans received legal guidance, making vital inroads toward more national recognition for this underserved population. Another of our fellows completed a major project on bail reform initiatives in Minnesota, and our newest fellow began work on a project to support absentee ballot access for incarcerated voters. 

Modernizing the justice system

Access to justice is the basic principle of the rule of law. In a just society, citizens must have an equal opportunity to advocate for themselves through the legal system. Far too often, however, that process is delayed as courts wade through growing backlogs of cases, some of which have been building since the pandemic. According to our 2023 State of the Courts Report, some 79% of judges and court professionals say they are experiencing delays in their hearings.

Some progressive court systems are starting to defy that trend, with the help of Thomson Reuters. Thanks to new digital evidence management solutions offered through our Case Center solution, some court systems have been able to eliminate their backlogs by incorporating digital evidence and remote hearings into their processes. By cutting down on administrative delays and making court appearances far more accessible, these modernized courts are dramatically improving access to justice in their communities.

Recognizing the Thomson Reuters legal pro bono connection

The origins of legal pro bono service—pro bono publico meaning "for the public good" in Latin—can be traced back to the legal profession's tradition of ensuring access to justice for those unable to afford legal representation. 

During Thomson Reuters Global Pro Bono Month, our employees volunteered their legal expertise on issues ranging from fair elections to gun safety to nonprofit governance. In addition, teams across the Americas, EMEA, and APAC regions worked with Baker McKenzie to support human rights and access to justice through legal research sprints. Projects included creating guides to empower young people to understand their rights during encounters with police, identifying state resources that help combat trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation of LGBTQ+ youth, and analyzing legal structures impacting children's environmental rights. These pro bono sprints allowed our employees to harness their skills to foster change and support those in often-marginalized communities.

Those efforts were recognized by the Pro Bono Institute’s 2023 Corporate Pro Bono Award, which highlighted our work with Baker McKenzie’s Justice in Action project as a “triumph of building community across industries, geographies, and cultures through pro bono.”

A roadmap to end human trafficking

Businesses, government authorities, regulators, and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) have made great strides in raising awareness and introducing safeguards to address the presence of human trafficking and forced labor in global supply chains. New legislation, such as the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), contains rigorous standards for protecting human rights and ensuring that businesses are policing their own operations and those of their suppliers for potential violations. Despite this progress, however, the trend of victimization continues to rise. Human traffickers will continue to exploit vulnerable people as long as this heinous crime remains profitable.

That was the central message of the Thomson Reuters proposal to the 67th session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, which laid out a roadmap to empowering businesses, law enforcement, governments, and NGOs to use technology to root out the profit centers of human trafficking. For our part in this global fight, Thomson Reuters has committed considerable resources to raising public awareness, including working with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Blue Campaign to help educate employees on how to spot risks, and through our network to provide technology and expertise to law enforcement agencies around the world. We also continue to work with the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) to tackle human trafficking through the Be Safe Campaign, which is designed to help Ukrainians identify the warning signs of human traffickers, minimize the risk, and get assistance.

Even more, TRSS played an active role in a Minnesota CLE summer seminar, providing expertise on using research and data to aid in the arrest of individuals linked to human trafficking and narcotics, highlighting their contribution to significant law enforcement efforts including the NFL Super Bowl and Draft.

We launched a new Human Trafficking Resource Center, which allows public authorities to access specialized online resources to help fight human trafficking in their communities. Working closely with the City of Houston, Texas, which has developed a worldclass set of anti-trafficking tool kits, we took stewardship of the toolkits and made them widely available to government, communities, NGOs, and educators working in the effort to combat human trafficking. The materials within the toolkits contain best practices and guidance on how to identify signs of illicit behavior, mobilize community-based resources, provide support around major public events through media and advertising campaigns and via social media, and assist local businesses in overall increased awareness and action again human trafficking activity in the area. The toolkits have been accessed globally, and as viewership rises so do the number of assets added to the Resource Center.

We also launched a new initiative with an organization in Dallas called New Friends New Life, which restores and empowers trafficked and sexually exploited girls, women, and their children, and drives awareness of the issue and its prevalence. Local, community-based efforts like this, and others, such as the numerous educational seminars we conducted with law enforcement officials, human rights advocates, and big businesses across the U.S., continue to help raise awareness and share critical insights to help in the fight against human trafficking.

Reporting from the front lines of global conflict

The common bond across the work we do at Thomson Reuters is meticulous detail – ensuring we capture the critical facts, the essential context, and the precise nuances that inform complex concepts and important issues. Nowhere is that mission clearer than in the reporting Reuters journalists have been doing from the front lines of the Israel-Hamas war and the Russia-Ukraine war. Our courageous journalists continue to share intense, personal stories and powerful visuals of people living through these horrific events with the world.

We were reminded of the high stakes of this type of work in October when Reuters visual journalist Issam Abdallah was killed in Lebanon. An Israeli tank killed Issam on October 13, 2023, when he was hit by a shell while filming cross-border fire between Israel and Lebanon. Thaer Al-Sudani and Maher Nazeh, two other Reuters journalists, and colleagues from AFP and Al Jazeera, were also injured in the shelling.

The enormous risk associated with this type of reporting is impossible to ignore and the frequency with which devastating global conflicts have flared up in recent years is a grave concern for our global community. We remain enormously proud of the bravery and dedication our journalists display every day. To view more Reuters images from the Israel-Hamas war, visit: 100 days of war in Israel and Gaza.

Reuters outstanding journalism recognized with more than 150 award honors

Reuters received more than 150 journalism award recognitions for its outstanding work in 2023, across multiple different formats. Reuters coverage of the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, by Tom Wilson, Angus Berwick, Chris Prentice, Hannah Lang, Koh Gui Qing, Jasper Ward, Luc Cohen, Elizabeth Howcroft, Lawrence Delevingne, Anirban Sen, Greg Roumeliotis, and team, won a prestigious Gerald Loeb Award in the breaking news category, highlighting Reuters’ excellence in financial reporting.

Reuters was also recognized in the Gerald Loeb Awards’ audio category for the podcast, “Who Killed Daphne?,” a collaboration between Reuters journalist Stephen Grey, Jacob Borg of the Times of Malta, and Russell Finch, Nikka Singh of the Wondery podcast studio, which has been widely credited with solving the murder of Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Calizia. Additionally, Reuters journalists Joshua Schneyer, Mica Rosenberg and Kristina Cooke received an honorable mention in the investigative news category for their feature “Undocumented and Underage,” which chronicled the proliferation of child workers in auto parts factories in the U.S. The story also won a George Polk Award and a Sidney Award and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and a Goldsmith Award.

Other notable recognitions from 2023 include 69 Best of Digital Design Awards, two World Press Photo Awards, eight Society of Publishers in Asia award recognitions, a White House Correspondents’ Association Award, five Webby Award honors, and a Human Rights Press Award.

Fact-checking and media literacy

One of the most widely seen viral images of 2023 was a rendering of Pope Francis wearing what appeared to be a long white puffer jacket designed by the luxury brand Balenciaga. In fact, the Pope had not suddenly become a fashion influencer; the viral image was manipulated using artificial intelligence to create an extremely believable-looking event that never happened. This image served as an example of the value of reliable fact-checking.

As consumers have moved deeper into the echo chamber of social media and AI-generated content has gone mainstream, Thomson Reuters continues to relentlessly focus on fact-checking, continually monitoring digital platforms for misinformation linked to news events and to subjects that are being discussed by the communities we serve, and setting the record straight with hard facts. For example, in the wake of the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel, Reuters editors immediately took to Reddit to engage with readers and correct widespread misinformation.

Thomson Reuters also hosted a Media Literacy Week event with the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE), inviting students to an informative session on how to spot deep fakes and other forms of misinformation. And, to ensure that we keep innovating on this front, Reuters also launched a pilot program with Canon to demonstrate how news organizations can certify the authenticity of images.

Collaborating to tackle the big issues

The rising tide of global conflict, economic instability, a referendum on corporate sustainability, large-scale technological disruption – these are just a few of the issues global business leaders are contending with on a day-to-day basis as they attempt to navigate through this period of widespread volatility. Fortunately, they’re not alone. Thanks to Reuters Events, professionals around the world now have access to the shared insights, breakthrough ideas and burgeoning trends that are setting the agenda for today and tomorrow.

Among the dozens of professional events and crucial conversations Reuters hosted in 2023, two prime examples were Reuters MOMENTUM and Reuters NEXT conferences, which collectively brought together millions of participants and generated thousands of news articles. Reuters MOMENTUM is a tech-focused event that convenes C-suite technologists from the world's most innovative businesses, regulators, and investors to tackle the toughest questions and create the commercial roadmap for a new wave of tech innovation. Reuters NEXT is a global forum for world leaders, innovators, CEOs, and policy makers to dissect the crucial challenges facing our world today.

Reuters IMPACT, the most influential climate meeting on the planet, is covered in the Sustainable Future section of this report.

Digital news trends in 2023

The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, funded in part by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, publishes a yearly study on digital news consumption. This year's report reveals new insights about digital news consumption based on a YouGov survey of over 93,000 online news consumers in 46 markets covering half of the world's population.