Reuters has just engaged Sir Harold Evans as “editor-at-large” in a “roving role” to widen the appeal of the news agency in face of tough competition from Bloomberg.

Is it amazing that in an era of social networks, a supposedly tuned-in organisation such as Reuters should place so much faith in old boy networks?

Or do opinion-formers such as Evans still have such wide-ranging appeal? My concern is, the answer is: not as much as they once did.

Interestingly, the Bank of England is heading in exactly the opposite direction, and are using data from Google search terms to establish economic trends. They are finding that data from consumer searches on terms such as “estate agents” can be more reliable than trend data from traditional established sources, such as… banks.