Though the Fox Business Network has seen a "modest improvement" in its ratings since the channel launched in October — up from an average of 6,000 daytime viewers to 8,000 — it's not exactly a true competitor to CNBC yet. So what makes another upstart think it can take on the business TV king? Chutzpah, money, and a leap of faith. Thomson Reuters appears to have all three.

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Thanks to the convenient doubling up of jobs that always happens when two companies merge, Thomson Reuters will be letting go of 140 of journalism's finest by the end of the year, with more than half the cuts going down in Europe. [Guardian]

When Thomson bought Reuters last month for $15.6 billion, they wasted no time in replacing the wire agency's jellyfish-y logo with a bland orange starburst. They really screwed us over when we had to be at the Reuters building for a meeting and COULD NOT FIND IT because it was missing its big blue sign. (An address like "3 Times Square" means nothing to us.) But now that the two mega info services are in a sexless marriage, it's time to analyze what happens when your market capitalization now stands at $28 billion, or more than double your closest competitor, Bloomberg.

On the plus side, there's smarts: Thomson, which grew from a single newspaper in Ontario in 1930 before fiddling with plenty of others, saw the declining revenues of the industry farther ahead than its rivals, and sold off most of its broadsheet stakes and going digital. Whodathunk.

But Bloomberg, argues Business Week, "has more cachet—every trader wants one of its terminals—and a sterling reputation for service. And customers say Thomson's financial offerings are a hodgepodge of acquisitions that don't always work together."

Perhaps, but guess who's not weathering a PR crisis launched by a bunch of pregnant ladies?

The Thomson Corporation, the finance-health-research info mega company, is quite proud of its just-completed $16 billion takeover of news giant Reuters. That's why it's spending another large sum to throw the new name of its company, Thomson Reuters, in your face: It's taking over subway stations in New York, Toronto, and London, as well as the buildings of the stock exchanges there. And if you make your way through Times Square today, perhaps you'll catch even more inundation as the digital displays force the logo upon you. This will be different than your normal Times Square, where you can at least eat, drink, or drive the usual marketing messages.