Shoring up our platforms

Two months ago, in May, I introduced WORLD’s three new cross-platform content teams: News, Features, and Commentary. As I said at the time, those teams will provide content to our three distribution platforms, WORLD Magazine, WORLD Digital, and WORLD Radio.

What I didn’t tell you then is that, in addition to the new cross-platform teams, we’re planning big changes to the platforms themselves as well.

For starters: Lynn Vincent will be the new Executive Editor of WORLD Magazine, and Daniel James Devine will be the new Editor.

Prior to taking on his role at WORLD Digital about a year ago, Daniel was the longtime Managing Editor of the magazine. He’s happy to be back at the magazine, and we’re happy to have him back.

We’re happy to have Lynn back, too. By “back,” I mean Lynn was features editor of the magazine when she left in 2009 to pursue a career as a best-selling author. She returned last year as producer and host of WORLD Radio’s true-crime podcast Lawless, and brings with her 24 years of experience in long-form and investigative journalism.

So she’ll be leading both the features team and the magazine team. Lynn will be moving toward longer-form, features-driven coverage. The idea is that with the pace of news, we will be relying on our digital platforms to deliver breaking news, while the magazine will go broader and deeper, with analysis and packages that provide 360-degree coverage of topics of special interest to you.

Mickey McLean will return to the WORLD Digital platform, which he originated back in the early 2000s and led for over a decade. He’s been our Executive Editor for Audience Engagement for the past two years, and he’ll retain that role as he also retakes the reins at WORLD Digital.

Paul Butler isn’t new at WORLD Radio—he’s been leading that team for several years. But he’s planning a lot of new things for the platform, including a major new initiative in conjunction with the cross-platform news team (which I’ll share with you later—that’ll take its own column).

Really, the work of all of our platform leaders will rely on and coordinate with the work of our cross-platform teams. That’s by design. Having access to all of the content of those production teams will allow our platform leaders to put together packages of news and analysis that best suit their platforms.

To recap: three platform teams, led by Lynn Vincent, Mickey McLean, and Paul Butler; three cross-platform teams, led by Lynde Langdon (News), Lynn Vincent (Features), and Tim Lamer (Commentary). Those five editors make up our editorial council, along with Nick Eicher, our Chief Content Officer.

Those council members, and the teams they lead, have a lot of plans for the new fiscal year. I’ll let you know about each of them before they happen, when possible.