Washington Post taps Davis as senior product editor for the homepage

The following announcement was sent out from newsroom product director Greg Barber:

We’re delighted to announce that Robert Davis, who has served a stellar four-year tour of duty as a news editor on the Universal News Desk, has joined the Newsroom Product team as senior product editor for the homepage. His first day was Monday.

In this new role, Robert will own the newsroom side of developing the tools and workflows that power the homepage, one of our most important products for subscribers and new readers. He will ensure communication among editors on the UND and the Product and Engineering teams who build our homepage and the tools that power it, speeding our curation and improving the form and function of the page. He will help to identify and implement improvements and lead training and adoption of new tools and features.

Robert’s reputation as a steady guide through the daily maelstrom of the UND has been earned through countless rounds of breaking news, as he shepherded alerts and delivered spur-of-the-moment layout changes to better fit the page to the contours of a breaking story — including on election nights. In his spare time, he has built some tech of his own: a web form to expedite alerts and a tool that formats photo URLs for use in PageBuilder.

Before joining the UND, Robert was a news designer on the Design team, working on the front page, designing special projects for print and digital, commissioning illustrations and designing bespoke share images for use on mobile and social media. His design work won more than a dozen awards over 12 years from the Society for News Design.

Robert came to The Post in 2014 from The Boston Globe, where he started as a designer and copy editor, working his way up to assistant design director for news, designing the front page and special projects. Before that, he worked as a designer and copy editor for the Florida Times-Union and as an assistant editor at the Jacksonville Business Journal. He got his start as a reporter and photographer at The Mandarin News, a community paper in Jacksonville.

Robert grew up in Jacksonville and graduated from the University of North Florida with a degree in communications and print journalism. He’s based in St. Louis, where he’ll remain even after we return to our Washington newsroom.

Please join me in congratulating Robert on his new role.