The Washington Post announces the addition of 41 editing roles, including 2 masthead positions

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Announcement from Executive Editor Sally Buzbee, Managing Editor Cameron Barr, Managing Editor Tracy Grant, Managing Editor Krissah Thompson, Managing Editor Kat Downs Mulder:

Dear Colleagues,

We are delighted to announce a major expansion to accelerate our transformation into a fully 24/7 news organization and strengthen the leadership of the newsroom. The addition of 41 editing positions will grow our capacity to produce timely breaking news, revelatory enterprise and definitive investigative work; create visually rich stories that our audiences find compelling; cover topics that resonate with younger, more diverse readers; and develop innovations that will define a new era of digital journalism. The expansion will allow us to create a greater number of career paths across the newsroom and increase the number of journalists of color in editing roles.

We will add two new deputy managing editors to the masthead to work alongside Scott Vance and Barbara Vobejda in running the daily report, ensuring that a senior editor is in place to direct news coverage across our many platforms from 7 a.m. ET (when our new hub in London hands off to Washington) until late evening (when Washington hands off to Seoul). One DME will oversee the General Assignment, Morning Mix and Live Desk teams and serve as the day-to-day architect of our live-updates coverage. All four DMEs will work with other senior editors to ensure the quality and ambition of our enterprise offerings.

The expansion will create eight new positions for assignment editors — in Photo, National, Metro, Investigations, Design and Business — to strengthen coverage and reinforce colleagues who’ve been taxed by the unrelenting news cycle. We will also establish eight new positions for assistant editors, most of whom will work closely with assignment editors in overseeing coverage. We anticipate that these positions will create opportunities for people from many corners of the newsroom, with varied skills and backgrounds, to gain expertise in line editing and guiding a team of journalists. We will grow the MPE desk by hiring five multi-platform editors, in part to expand that team’s role in publishing on our digital platforms. We will create eight positions for breaking-news and weekend editors (including one supervising producer) in Video, Photo, National, Features and Business. The role of projects editor has become vital in fostering the collaboration and strategic thinking needed to execute our most ambitious journalism, so we will add two more of these positions in Design.

The initiative will establish three additional visual enterprise editors — one in Business, one who will focus on politics and one who will work with both the Health & Science and Climate & Environment teams — building on the success we have seen with this role in Foreign. That experiment has shown that adding a senior visual journalist to help lead coverage in a department can have a transformative effect.

The expansion will enable us to experiment further. We will establish a new high-level position in the Business department: audience strategy editor. Reporting to the department head, this journalist will help us deliver our coverage of business and tech in more innovative and strategic ways. We have often stressed the need for “durable” storytelling — FAQs, explainers and timelines that help readers get up to speed and stay up to date. This explanatory journalism is critical to our future, and we will create a position for an editor focused on this work in the Health & Science team as well as one for an editor who will be part of the Audience team and act as a resource throughout the newsroom.

This major investment in the newsroom will also fund new roles to carry out functions essential to a growing news organization. First, we will create two positions for standards editors who will refine and maintain newsroom policies, working closely and collaboratively with all our journalists to promote best practices and ensure that our work meets the high expectations of our audiences. And we will establish two roles devoted to recruiting — a senior editor and an assistant editor — to help us systematize the way we recruit, hire and onboard staffers. These roles are critical to the fulfillment of our strong commitment to diversity.

This expansion demonstrates anew that The Washington Post is an ascendant news organization, with boundless ambitions and a growing capacity to meet them. We hope you’ll join us in taking a moment to reflect on all we have accomplished — it is your success that enables the company to strengthen the newsroom in this way. We feel privileged to join you in the important work that lies ahead.

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