Changes Galore in Wash Times’ Newsroom

A memo obtained by FBDC confirms our prediction of big changes in the Wash Times’ newsroom. See below:

As we position ourselves to take advantage of new opportunities that are emerging in 2009, we are making a few exciting changes inside the newsroom:

Joe Weber is being promoted from Metro Editor to News Editor for Continuous News. The extraordinary, rapid growth of our wire service and Web site traffic led by Jeff Birnbaum, Maria Stainer and David Eldridge is creating more opportunity for us to file stories off cycle to new audiences in new mediums. Joe will take charge of those opportunities, reporting to Maria and Jeff. He’ll be the ambassador to all news departments in urging them to file off-cycle content and use his own rapid-writing skills to keep the Web site and wire service as current as they can be.

Matt Cella is stepping in as the new Metro editor where he will supervise our coverage of DC, MD and VA, with special attention to the competitive Virginia governor’s race. We’re excited by Matt’s ideas for breaking news and owning a substantial slice of the Metro coverage pie through enterprising reporting.

Victor Morton will be the chief editor of a new National Editing desk that has been formed to pool our line editing resources and make them available to all departments. This is an innovative idea from Carleton Bryant, David Jones and Geoff Etnyre that we believe will allow us to edit more copy, more quickly and provide burst editing capacity when big stories break late.

Deb Simmons will be stepping into the newly formed role of Editor for Citizen Journalism. This is one of the most exciting projects we are taking on in 2009, marshaling an army of trained, skilled citizens who can report for us across the globe. We recently announced our first citizen journalism project of 2009 with the creation of a new Web site called BaseNews.com that will aggregate citizen journalism reports from military bases across the globe. Grace Vuoto is the editor for the site and is fast at work creating one of the most innovative new products in the Web space. We’ll be announcing more details about Deb’s ambitious projects in the days ahead.

David Sands is moving from his perch on Capitol Hill, where he successfully launched our coverage of the new Congress, to become deputy assistant manager for Politics. He’ll be working with Chris Dolan to shape our broader political coverage across the country. As part of this transition, we are also moving the supervision of Dean Honeycutt‘s economic team under Chris and David, allowing our political and economic teams to craft a more cohesive coverage of the recession.

Please join me in congratulating Joe, Matt, Victor, Deb and David on their new leadership assignments.

John

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