Roberts named executive editor of Reuters digital

Chrystia Freeland,  Digital Editor of Reuters, sent out the following staff hire announcement on Tuesday:

I am delighted to announce that Jim Roberts will join us on February 25th as Executive Editor, Reuters Digital. In this newly created role, Jim will report to me and oversee the editorial work of Reuters.com and our global family of Reuters websites, our opinion team and our online video operation. Jim, who was a masthead editor at the New York Times, brings to this role a unique and ideal combination of new and traditional media skills and experience.

Since 2006, Jim has been the Times’s chief digital editor and evangelist, first in the role of Editor of Digital News, and most recently as an Assistant Managing Editor. He led a vast expansion of NYTimes.com from 2006 to 2009, and helped build and lead a team of multimedia experts that has two Emmy Awards and one Peabody to its credit. His passion for news brought energy and urgency to the homepage of NYTimes.com, through breaking news stories like the financial meltdown and recession, the Haiti earthquake and the Arab Spring uprisings, as well as the Times’s ongoing digital coverage of the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns.

Jim was an early champion of social media. Jim was a strong advocate for the development and promotion of New York Times video and helped lead the buildout of live video coverage of the 2012 campaign.

Before joining the Times’s digital team, Jim was National Editor of the New York  Times and the paper’s national political editor during the 2000 campaign. He also worked as an editor on the Times’s metropolitan and sports desks. Before joining the Times, he worked in a variety of reporting and editing jobs in Richmond, Va., Baltimore and Dallas.

Please join me in welcoming Jim to Reuters and if you’d like you can join his more than 80,000 Twitter followers @nycjim.