Tag Archives: The Cutline

The Cutline: Guardian working on ‘significant US expansion’

Yahoo media blog the Cutline reports that the Guardian is busy building a new US digital operation which “will be significantly larger” than the Guardian’s previous work in the US.

Vague details around the plans were revealed in a Cutline interview with Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger.

He said the liberal English broadsheet is building a new US digital operation that will be based in New York rather than Washington, D.C. (The paper’s roughly 10 stateside reporters are currently based in both cities.) Pressed for additional details, Rusbridger demurred, but said the venture “will be significantly larger than anything we’ve done in the states before.” He was presumably referring to the Guardian’s previous attempts to crack the American news market, the most recent being GuardianAmerica.com, which had a short run between 2007 and 2009.

The Guardian began laying the groundwork for this expansion of its American shop last week with the addition of a New York-based chief revenue officer, whose job will be “to plot a fresh course in the US,” according to paidContent’s Robert Andrews.

A spokesperson for the Guardian had no further comment.

New York Times considers creating own in-house WikiLeaks

The New York Times is considering setting up its own in-house version of WikiLeaks, according to editor Bill Keller.

Keller told Yahoo’s The Cutline blog that he is “looking at something along the lines” of Al Jazeera’s Transparency Unit, which was instrumental in the recent publication of the Palestine Papers by Al Jazeera and the Guardian.

“Nothing is nailed down”, according to Keller, but he has sketched out the idea behind the possible division:

A small group from computer-assisted reporting and interactive news, with advice from the investigative unit and the legal department, has been discussing options for creating a kind of EZ Pass lane for leakers.

The New York Times was one of three media partners – including the Guardian and der Spiegel – that worked with WikiLeaks on the release of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs.

The NYT was also one of five newspapers that had advanced access to WikiLeaks’ next release, the US embassy cables. It was subsequently revealed however that the NYT was forced to obtain its copy of the cable from the Guardian, having been cut out of the loop by WikiLeaks.

Given the difficulty Keller had in obtaining advanced access to the embassy cables, and the general risks of relying on organisations such as WikiLeaks, we may yet see many more national news organisations following suit and establishing their own sections to deal directly with leaks.

Full story on The Cutline at this link.

The Cutline: NYT to bring together print and online in newsroom restructure

New US media blog The Cutline, from Yahoo’s The Upshot, reported yesterday that the New York Times was restructuring its web newsroom as part of plans to bring together its print and online operations.

According to a memo from executive editor Bill Keller obtained by The Cutline, it was announced internally that digital news editor Jim Roberts will become the assistant managing editor for news, while web newsroom editor Fiona Spruill is named editor for emerging platforms.

Read more on this here…