Reuters Connect Wins Company of the Year at the FOCAL Awards

Reuters Connect has been named Company of the Year at the 2026 FOCAL International Awards, marking a major milestone for the platform and the teams behind it. The award recognises outstanding achievement in the use of archival footage and celebrates the organisations shaping the future of storytelling across film, television and digital media.

The FOCAL Awards, hosted by FOCAL International, highlight innovation, creativity, and excellence in the archival space. Winning Company of the Year

is a testament to the collective effort across Reuters teams, whose work continues to position Reuters Connect as a leading platform for licensing editorial visuals worldwide.

Driving Innovation in Archival Preservation and Access

Central to the award-winning submission was Reuters Connect’s commitment to transforming how archival content is preserved, discovered, and used.

In 2025, Reuters Connect reached a significant milestone: digitising over 7,000 hours of video from 16 news bureaus worldwide. This achievement builds on longstanding efforts to unlock valuable tape archives and make them accessible to a new generation of content creators.

A key development has been the launch of the Reuters Media Ingest Hub: - a permanent, end-to-end facility for digitisation, metadata enrichment, and media management. Designed with flexibility in mind, portable hardware enables on-site digitisation in locations where media cannot be shipped easily, opening up access to archives from bureaus such as Cairo and Baghdad.

Together, these innovations ensure that irreplaceable material is not only preserved, but made searchable, usable, and relevant in today’s fast-moving content landscape.

By creating a complete cycle, rescuing archival material, making it easily discoverable, and enabling future storytellers to use it, Reuters Connect is not only preserving the past, but actively shaping the future of the media industry.