Beyond the Wire-Agency Age: Does “Reuters Next” signal changes for WestlawNext and, if so, what sort of changes?

I was disappointed by the launch of WLN, not for the marketing nonsense about WestSearch, but because content integration with Reuters news was not embedded within WLN. Perhaps the Coding Demigods were unable to make that work (assuming that anyone in the Land of 10,000 Invoices was thinking about adding Reuters content like BLaw was doing with Bloomberg news content). Joe Pompeo reports on a major tech overhaul underway for Reuters. From Pomeo's Reuters gutting web infrastructure for 'Reuters Next,' its big online retooling (Capital): 

At a glance, Reuters.com looks as prolific and well-designed as the homepage of any news orgnization with resources as its disposal. But fundamental inefficiencies lurk beneath the surface.

The most egregious of these is the difficulty of inserting hyperlinks, people who know their way around the back-end told Capital.

"The current site was built on a legacy system conceived in the wire-agency age," said one of them.

Nor are video embeds a piece of cake. And with the exception of the homepage, live-blogs and other special features, content ends up where it does as a result of automation rather than human intervention.

But Reuters is working on a sweeping web relaunch that's expected to debut sometime in the first quarter of 2013, according to people familiar with the plans.

Known internally as "Reuters Next," the new reuters.com will be a "state of the art" offering with a redesigned front-end and a proprietary content management system built from scratch, said our sources, who described the site as being remodeled into editor-curated, stream-based channels such as world news, politics, business and tech.

Time to wait 'n see if "Reuters Next" content will be repurposed into WLN for a 21st century content delivery system like BLaw incorporated multi-format resources from Bloomberg News and then built upon the readily available IT back-end. Perhaps it will even go beyond Reuters content. Could this "state of the art" ground-up CMS be ported over to WLN for in-house editor curation for secondary sources via WLN and eBook formats? For updating them without being tied to print publication cycles?

Hat tip to Jason Wilson. Perhaps he also is thinking about the CMS implications. See his The “Next” Strategy: Does “Reuters Next” hint at changes for WestlawNext? [JH]