I’m afraid I have to tell you that Tom — despite his lofty job title — gets diddly bupkis. Though he’s CEO of one of the world’s best-known wholesale news organisations, he has virtually no experience in the actual media business. Tom rose rapidly through the ranks as an in-house corporate lawyer, helping to sort out a bad situation in the data business in the Americas, and latterly for the company as a whole.

But I repeat — he’s got zero knowledge of the media business, and it shows. If I was still a Reuters shareholder, I’d want to know when Tom is going to show evidence that he has a vision for the media side of Reuters (which is a tiny part of the business). All he has done so far is manage the shrinkage of the company from a £20 bn business to one now worth about £6 bn. Reuters has utterly failed to “monetise” its news — most of its “media” business consists of loss-making wholesale television contracts. The print news is essentially given away to bankers to support the data feed business from which the company makes money. It has made miniscule amounts from the Internet and also gives its news away to newspapers. At the start of last year, Glocer said he recognised the company’s historic mistake of giving away news to allow the likes of CNN and Yahoo! to build strong brands. But when it came to announcing a strategy last summer there was zip.

So now, Tom’s blather about citizen journalists being like Pepys and all — it’s not even an orignal thought. But the key question is, how precisely to you expect to make meaningful money from this? He has no answer.

But in the same way if we want to best understand the plague years in London we read Defoe, future generations will turn to our bloggers to decipher current events.

This is, frankly, a steaming pile of bull. How many ‘bloggers’ generate entirely their own content, and to a high standard? And how many of those do it only as an adjunct to their ‘real’ occupation? (journalism, politics, academics)

That he’s bought into the “Web 3.0″ hype says it all. As Wolcott (I believe it was he) said the other day in relation to Pajamas Media, it looks like there are those eager to catch the last dregs of the dot-bomb.