Pros
Decent pay, good job security and when you are green it can give you great insight and experience into commodity trading. You might learn how to be a journalist too. For editorial staff it is a v important role in the market place that can give access to senior figures. Solid on the CV, but only if you want to be a junior analyst in Switzerland at a commodity trading house or work for a competitor. If you are lucky you get in to an exchange. You do make friends for life though. A good place to start your career and certainly no easier sales place to be than here. Big marketing budget.
Cons
Bureaucracy - layers of it and no one understands the roles, rules or functions. Compliance functions staffed with people that (mostly) have no experience of the business and haven't done the job (apologise to those that have). Get them working a content job to understand the pressure and pain of systems they design. Content - front line roles have no sense of meaning, autonomy and the compliance rules mean staff are treated like children. Necessary for compliance? It may be, but it doesn't feel like it is YOUR job. Millennials will find this the hardest bit as Platts' graduate recruitment plan shows. Strategy - sales strategy is to exercise Platts' power in a de facto monopoly. Client base for price reports is going down. So the general practice has been to squeeze the biggest clients for more money and offer them some analytics or price reports they don't need. This creates client distaste for the organisation as many many people have commented on here. Great for shareholders. Not great for customer facing roles. Only going to get worse as sales try and force Analytics offerings that the company has purchased down Platts' clients throats. Product management - paralysed. Haven't launched a new revenue-generating product for years and the technology from the companies that were bought was left to wither on the vine. Generally they are hamstrung by a decision-making process that no one understands and crippled by fear of losing revenue. Marketing - Excellent, but (as noted by many in the organisation) they end up marketing products the company doesn't sell. That's because the products the company does sell (PDFs) look dreary. Management - Micromanagement is high with senior to middle managers left with little authority bar being a conduit for minor decisions(big decisions don't get made). Too many times do people ask for guidance only for managers to kick decisions upstairs. There is an uncomfortable succession-planning process where every employee is rated on an overly simplistic scale of 1-4. Managers with little knowledge of employees often have a big say in a rating process that can harm careers long after that manager has departed. Feels underhand. Ask your manager what yours is if you work there. Career prospects - Like any corporate beast it is good if you pick up the lingo, curry favour and don't challenge the status quo. Listening to the colourful tall stories farmed out by senior management, (which I guess is meant to be inspirational) can be torturous though so a rhino skin and a sense of humour is important. Culture - too many people with not enough work to do in some areas leads to gossip and office politics. As many have noted in here, the politics is really really bad. That's partly due to a complicated reporting line structure that very few people understand and causes distraction.