THE frightening thing about the decline of Reuters is that its bosses did not do anything terribly wrong. Certainly, they paid insufficient attention to a new company called Bloomberg and they made a few decisions which with hindsight turned out to be wrong. It could have happened to any company, which is what gives an everyman quality to the tale of how Reuters lost £20 billion of market value in a little over three years.

Paul Julius Reuter's first triumph was to devise a clever way of closing the gap in the telegraph system between Brussels and Aachen, a city on Germany's western border. In 1849 he invested in carrier pigeons which could carry news on their legs in less than half the time of a train. Next came a famous scoop when Reuters sent the first news to London of the relief of British troops besieged at Mafeking during the Boer war. It was reporting that created Reuters's reputation. But something far less glamorous made its fortune: selling prices and the ability to trade them on a screen to merchant banks. In the 1970s and 1980s, Reuters profited from growth in foreign-exchange and money-market trading with a new product called Monitor.

Brian Mooney and Barry Simpson, both former Reuters journalists, are at their best describing the quirks and failures of the people who led the company from triumph into decline. David Ure, a top executive, used to scratch incessantly in meetings. Philip Green, a recent chief operating officer, would ask colleagues how often they went to church. But it is the former chief executive, the dictatorial and other worldly Peter Job, who gets most of the blame for Reuters's troubles.

Michael Bloomberg, founder of Reuters's competitor, came from Salomon Brothers, and understood what traders wanted better than journalists. His product has always been easier to use. Reuters has struggled to rival the depth of historic data contained in a Bloomberg machine. To cap it all, Reuters had to endure an FBI investigation into whether it had stolen competitive information from its new rival. The case was dropped in 1999, but it left morale badly damaged.

Events easily outstrip a book about a newswire, and Messrs Mooney and Simpson missed out on Reuters's recent sacking of Stephen Jukes, its global head of news, and several other top editorial staff. Until then, the editorial side of the company seemed protected from the restructuring and cuts that had been imposed on the rest of the business. The book has little to say about the future; from Bloomberg, Reuters has finally learned to put its customers first when designing new products, and that could eventually bring recovery.

For readers familiar with recent American corporate misdeeds, Reuters's tale of gradual British decline may seem tame. There is a brief, glorious flash of Enron in the account of the Reuters man who overdosed on cocaine and alcohol in a New York hotel room while wearing women's underwear. But however arrogant and foolish Mr Job and his senior colleagues were, they never went as far as looting their company and faking the numbers.