Reuters reorganizes leadership to focus on speed

Reuters editor in chief Alessandra Galloni sent out the following announcement on Monday:

Dear Colleagues,

I am pleased to announce important changes to our editorial leadership team. Tiffany Wu and Mark Bendeich will become Global Managing Editors for News Gathering. Simon Robinson will become Global Managing Editor for News Publishing. These new appointments will help drive the new Reuters newsroom: speedy and smart, leveraging a global footprint with local expertise to deliver coverage of the most important stories in the world, for the world, without bias, both in real time and in depth, and with sophistication and insight. How do we do this? With a rigorous focus on breaking news and beat reporting.

Tiffany’s role will be Global Managing Editor for Business News. She will oversee our financial, corporate, commodities and markets news gathering operations around the world. In this role, she will ensure that we are delivering news and insight for the Eikon/Workspace terminal–the platform of Refinitiv, our biggest customer; for our Agency customers who rely on us for the top global business stories of the day; and for our new professional audience on Reuters.com and elsewhere. The Companies; Commodities; Climate; Finance and Speed Editors will report to Tiffany.

A key part of her role will be to ensure that our teams in bureaus are coordinating with colleagues in Bangalore and Gdansk so that we deliver seamless news-to-initiative coverage on all the top stories. Tiffany is brilliantly placed for this new role: she has held roles including Americas Companies Editor, Top News Editor and Americas Editor. Most recently as Global Managing Editor for Curation, Editing and Publishing, she oversaw the relaunch of Reuters.com and the push into professional audiences.

Mark’s role will be Global Managing Editor for Politics, Economics and World News. Mark will oversee our political, economic and general news gathering, by supervising our regions, which run our bureaus and our new Breaking News Hubs around the world. This coverage is crucial for our Refinitiv, Agency and Reuters.com audiences. Mark will be charged with finding smarter ways to serve our Agency customers, whose needs are clearer than ever. Working with John Pullman, who remains GME for Visuals, Mark will ensure that text and visuals reporters and editors are working hand-in-hand in real time. Mark and John will also get to work right away to integrate text and visuals reporters into unified teams. Mark is a natural for this job, having worked as a reporter, bureau chief and desk editor for Reuters across Asia and Europe and serving most recently as Regional Editor, Europe.

Simon will step into the role of Global Managing Editor, News Publishing. He will also oversee the newsroom when I am absent. His new role will bring together our editing, curation and production desks, including our main digital platform, Reuters.com. This will allow us to capture a greater slice of the professional market by thinking about Reuters Professional as an integrated whole across our digital properties, newsletters, events and more. In his new role, Simon will continue to shape our editorial vision for digital and work with our commercial and product colleagues to deliver our news to consumers. In particular, we aim to capture a greater slice of the professional market by offering the most relevant content via our website, newsletters, events and more. Simon joined us in 2010 after 15 years reporting and editing at Time magazine; at Reuters he has edited enterprise, led our EMEA region and, for the past two years, overseen talent, training and diversity as Global Managing Editor for Newsroom.

Other senior leadership roles remain unchanged: Gina Chua as Executive Editor; Jane Barrett as Global Editor, Media News Strategy; Jonathan Leff as Global Editor, Financial News and Strategic Operations; Michael Williams as Enterprise Editor; Rob Cox as Breakingviews Editor and Alix Freedman as Global Editor, Ethics and Standards.

In addition to these three new appointments, we have decided to split Asia and create two news leadership roles after Kevin Krolicki returns to a reporting role: a Regional News Editor for South Asia and a Regional News Editor for North Asia and Australia.

As a result of all these changes, we will be posting both the Asia roles, the position of Regional News Editor for Europe and the Global Managing Editor, Newsroom role.

What these new positions above have in common is that they aim to bring our news-gathering leaders – those who oversee the heart of our reporting newsroom – closer to those on the ground; closer to the story and, therefore, more responsible and accountable than was possible before. With two editors who are focused on the two main areas of our file – the world and business arenas – the newsroom will have greater direction and focus. This is crucial, because we have a clearer understanding than ever of what’s needed by our customers: Refinitiv, Agency clients and Professionals.

This new structure also dovetails with the other big shift underway in our newsroom: the creation of Breaking News Hubs that will ensure we cover the most important breaking news stories in real time – snaps to urgents to compelling, fast-moving coverage across all media – of what the world needs to know now. These hubs will work in parallel with the beat reporters in the bureaus and our global industry teams, where our local and sector expertise will lead to exclusives, fast analysis and insight off of breaking news. These stories will enable us to develop key sources at ground level, positioning us to deliver deeply reported initiative pieces and to dominate the subjects we stake out.

We will be holding sessions for the new teams to hear from their new leaders (and me) in early September. Details and invites will follow in the next two weeks.

Thank you,
Alessandra