The Washington Post staffs up in Asia and Europe to relieve pressure from U.S. breaking news teams
The Washington Post promoted Josh du Lac in March to oversee a priority for the legacy publisher’s strategy this year: building a 24-hour global newsroom for live coverage of major news stories. The publisher is launching breaking news hubs in London and Seoul this summer, not as a play to cover more international news stories necessarily but to quickly cover more news. Period.
The outposts will ensure The Post has reporters in different time zones to cover breaking news stories wherever they may happen as soon as they break, as well as to relieve journalists in the U.S. from having to stay up all night to cover unfolding news events.
The strategy will grow The Post’s foreign bureaus from 22 to 26 locations including new hubs in Seoul, Sydney and Bogotá. Forty-four journalists will be added to the newsroom’s overall staff, in a move first announced in December, bringing its total number to over 1,000, its largest ever. The news hubs’ primary mission is to cover news unfolding in the U.S. and around the world while journalists in the Washington, D.C. time zone are asleep.
But there’s another big reason behind du Lac’s promotion and his responsibility to staff up these international news hubs, one that many in the news media business can likely empathize with: burnt-out journalists.
As the pandemic spread across the globe, covering the virus and its effects meant The Post’s journalists were working around the clock. Add to that a presidential election and racial justice protests across the U.S., and according to du Lac, a question would come up periodically in the last year as reporters cranked out coverage on this multitude of historic moments: Who’s going to cover all this?
Overnight editors and The Post’s overnight team, called Morning Mix, were stepping in to provide live coverage.
“Frankly, in the past year we have had people work overnight. We draw very heavily on our editors and correspondents in Asia and in Europe – but having people often work hours like that is just unsustainable,” said Douglas Jehl, foreign editor at The Washington Post.
With more staff based around the world to cover breaking news, the Morning Mix team will free up to focus on their core mission, which is general interest stories and second-day stories from the news, according to du Lac.
“Among the many merits of this approach is letting people work during their daytime when they’re fresh on their time zone, without going to the kind of lengths we did last year,” Jehl said.
As the new director of global live news, du Lac is being charged with helping to oversee, hire and train staff for the news hubs. The role is an expansion of his previous responsibilities as live news editor, a position he’s held since 2018. Nineteen jobs will be added between the two hubs: nine in London and ten in Seoul, likely by this summer, Jehl said. Sara Sorcher was tapped as the London hub editor in March. Previously deputy editor of PowerPost, which covers decision …read more
Source:: Digiday