How Jane Barrett Turns Gaps Into Transformation
November 21, 2025
LONDON – Reuters’ Jane Barrett joined MTC months after confronting a newsroom-wide disconnect during the 2015 migrant-caravan story.
“I was absolutely shocked that our text editors and journalists did not seem to understand what our video journalists and photographers were seeing,” she recalled onstage at last week’s MTC London Leadership Forum. “They weren’t speaking to each other. I was saying to an editor, ‘Let’s have a map, and then we can have pins in the map with all of the different bylines… to show that we are truly covering every single part of it.’ And he literally laughed at me and said, ‘Yeah, wouldn’t that be nice, Jane?’ And I thought, My God — if we can’t be flexible enough to do this, then what business are we in?
That realization led to a new role: unifying Reuters’ siloed text, video, photo, and digital production workflows.
Her initial challenge was inward-facing until MTC Coach Quentin Hope pushed her toward a more ambitious frame. “If all you do is reorganize the spaghetti on the plate, you’re not going to have impact,” he told her.
Barrett shifted her focus from internal process to external audiences: who Reuters served, what those clients’ audiences needed, and how a single integrated newsroom could meet those needs more coherently.
Early wins helped build momentum. Workshops where photographers taught colleagues how to shoot with their phones sparked unexpected momentum. When a market reporter captured the first publishable image of an attack near a London mosque—an image the BBC used—skeptics quickly became converts.
“If the guy from the markets team can get his iPhone, lean out a window, and shoot a photo that leads the BBC homepage, everyone can do it,” Barrett said.
Barrett applied the same MTC tools when AI arrived. Early proofs-of-concept, including what became Reuters’ Fact Genie tool, delivered fast evidence that AI could strengthen—not compromise—newsroom standards.
“I expected fear,” Barrett said. “Instead, people said, ‘Thank God, I don’t have to do that anymore. I can do something more interesting further up the scale.’”
Adoption, she emphasized, requires both rigor and play. Hackathons, workshops, and short design–do cycles help reduce anxiety and shift the newsroom mindset from perfection-before-execution to experimentation.
“People are happy to see their kids play, but nervous to play themselves,” she said. “But when you get them to take a beat, to try something, to explore, creativity opens up.”
For Barrett, MTC remains the throughline that connects all of this work: a framework for human-centered change, grounded in clarity about what won’t change.
“AI isn’t the strategy,” she said. “It serves the strategy. And the strategy is still accurate, fast, unbiased journalism. Everything ladders back to that.”
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