WSJ’s Dahl hired to run Ozy

Jonathan Dahl, editor-in-chief of WSJ.Money magazine and executive director of page one at The Wall Street Journal, has been hired to run Ozy, a digital news startup aimed at young readers.

Shannon Bond of The Financial Times writes, “This week, Ozy will also add Jonathan Dahl, editor-in-chief of WSJ.Money and executive director of page one at the Wall Street Journal, as managing editor. He will oversee the group’s editorial staff of about a dozen full-time employees and 20 regular freelancers, and increase Ozy’s editorial output. This will include a bigger push into video and data visualisation, two areas that are hallmarks of competitors including Vice, Vox and Quartz, Atlantic Media’s business news site.

“The site started carrying advertising in September, with Emirates Airline, Deutsche Bank and Hyatt among its initial clients.

“Mr Watson has described Ozy’s audience to marketers as ‘heavily millennial and Gen X – a lot of people in their 20s, 30s and 40s – disproportionately college educated and with a strong income profile’.

“But unlike Vice and BuzzFeed, which have invested heavily in native advertising, Ozy has steered clear of creating “branded content” for advertisers that looks similar to its editorial output.

“Ozy will launch its first non-English language edition early next year to widen its international reach. About a quarter of its readers today live outside the US.”

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