• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, May 20, 2008

The Thomson Reuters Corp., formed by the acquisition of Reuters by Thomson on April 17, plans to cut about 1,500 jobs--including positions at the company's new merged financial information division, called Thomson Markets. The move will eliminate redundancies between the two companies to achieve savings; the cut represents about 3% of 50,000 positions at the company.

The company did not return calls seeking to confirm the news, which was first reported by the Associated Press, citing an anonymous source said to be familiar with the matter.

The jobs to be eliminated include roughly 140 editorial positions, according to the same report, but it's unclear where the bulk of the 1,500 cuts will fall. However, according to emails sent by Thomson Reuters management and obtained by Bloomberg News, the reductions include 140 news positions, as many as 650 jobs in content, technology and operations, and 45 posts in sales and service. Not all regions and departments are covered.

Reuters had about 15,500 employees before it merged with Thomson Financial's 9,300 employees to form Thomson Markets. The combined division represents roughly half of the company's total. Thomson also has divisions covering legal, health care, media, scientific and tax and accounting news.

The news of cuts at Thomson Reuters comes shortly after other shakeups in the business information category. Last week, Bloomberg L.P. named Norman Pearlstine its chief content officer, a new position at the company. Pearlstine will be in charge of finding growth opportunities for Bloomberg's multi-platform content, including television, radio, magazine and online news products.

According to recent estimates, Thomson Reuters provides about 34% of the world's financial data, versus 33% for Bloomberg.

Both companies also face renewed competition from Dow Jones, now owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. The Australian media titan has said he plans to integrate content from The Wall Street Journal into a new Fox Business News channel. Dow Jones owns several business news services, including Dow Jones Newswires, Factiva, Dow Jones Indexes, and Dow Jones Financial Information Services.