Three appointed to Digital News team

I am delighted to announce three important internal appointments that will help us refocus our efforts in digital across the news department, and across our formats.  

• Jaime Holguin takes on the role of director of original programming and will continue to lead the digital team for now, reporting to me. Jaime will explore new opportunities to expand our content offerings, working closely with journalists across the company, and will work to find new customers and sources of revenue. He will seek to develop connections with the most innovative of our customers, partnering with colleagues in sales and products to find and evaluate opportunities, and to pitch ideas to potential new partners. He will be looking at exciting new avenues for our journalism to reach audiences, and more details of this will come. 

• Ted Anthony is our new director of digital innovation. Ted’s role will be wide-ranging. We have a remarkable amount of experimentation underway and Ted will work to encourage these efforts, and also focus them in a way that we can measure and understand what’s working. We will define these experiments so we know what we can adopt, adapt or abandon – and critically, how we ultimately include this content in our offering to members and customers. Ted will report to me, and work with staffers from around the globe, including heavy involvement in executing innovative content on the fly in the daily news report. He also will work closely with colleagues in sales and products. As Sally has noted, we need your most forward-thinking creative ideas, and we want to test and implement the best of them. Ted will also be engaged in innovations in newsroom workflow and other matters, and he will continue to write for the wire.

• Darrell Allen is appointed deputy director of digital design and tools, reporting to Jaime. Darrell will head a small team of designers and developers who will build tools and templates to help our global staff tell stories, visualize data and use graphics to best effect. This will elevate the type and amount of content we produce, and make it significantly easier for our teams to find visual ways to add value to stories, using tools and templates to generate everything from maps and quote cards, to before-and-after photo sliders, to whatever comes next. Darrell has been engaged in doing this successfully for some time and with this job we want to formalize and boost those efforts.

These jobs are the result of an effort last year led by Jaime to look deeply at both the organization and operations of our interactives team. I want to thank Jaime for working closely with his colleagues over the last year to think of ways to enable both greater innovation in AP’s digital storytelling, and more revenue opportunities. These jobs are aimed at more fully integrating digital presentation and storytelling into our global newsgathering, while also maintaining distinct teams for innovation and design. There are a few elements of this yet to come, including efforts to refocus the top story desk to tell each day’s biggest stories in both traditional and cutting-edge ways.  Please join me in congratulating Jaime, Ted and Darrell.  Derl