Nick Davies addresses a parliamentary select committee on phone hacking. Image: PA

Guardian investigative journalist Nick Davies, the driving force behind the recent phone hacking revelations, is to join the paper’s fledgling US operation, Yahoo’s Cutline blog reports.

Davies has been in the US for the past week or so, ostensibly to work on the US dimension of the phone hacking scandal. Earlier this month, the FBI launched an investigation into allegations that the mobile phones of 9/11 victims had been hacked by people working for News Corp.

Davies told the Cutline blog:

“The Guardian have asked me to join a group of journalists who they are sending from London to the U.S. to increase our coverage of U.S. stories. So, apart from looking at the hacking story here, the other purpose of the trip is to make decisions about exactly where I would be based if I were to come here. I’m still exploring that, too.”

“My job here would be to do investigations,” he added.

The Guardian announced the new US operation in April, naming former guardian.co.uk editor Janine Gibson as its editor. It coincides with the Guardian’s shift towards a new “digital first” strategy. According to the Guardian it has an online audience of around eight million unique users in the US, based on statistics from Comscore for February 2011. Recent reports from the Audit Bureau of Circulations suggest that 60 per cent of traffic to the Guardian site is from outside the UK.

Full story on the Cutline blog at this link.