News Limited merges Fox Sports and metro online sports desks
Campbell Reid
News Limited is merging its digital sports reporting teams from its metropolitan newspaper network with Fox Sports to create one division based at Fox Sports’ Sydney headquarters.
In an email sent to staff today, editorial director Campbell Reid said the move would see the teams merge into a “single sports editorial team”, led by Alex Brown, and “a single product team, led by Ben Kimber”.
Reid’s statement said: “News’ acquisition of Fox Sports gives us a tremendous opportunity to combine the sporting expertise from across the teams and turbo-charge quality content for consumers across mobile, tablet and web.
“This is significant step as News and Fox Sports work together to build and deliver the integrated future of sports coverage in Australia.
“Our masthead websites will benefit particularly from Fox Sports’ broadcast expertise, with the potential for video to become a cornerstone of our masthead sports verticals.”
Encore yesterday revealed that centralisation moves were causing redundancies within the Fox Sports division.
In the email Reid that editors at the mastheads would continue to retain editorial control on their individual websites and mobile sites.
“Our mastheads will control the sports editorial content they run on their web and mobile sites, but will have real depth and breadth of great journalism to choose,” Reid said.
“Fox Sports’ broadcast content will be supplemented through live crosses to our agenda-setting journalists to cover and interpret breaking news.”
Encore also revealed yesterday that News Limited had been considering plans to move sports editorial staff from their Holt St and Southbank offices to their Fox Sports counterparts.
The plan was to have been led by then HWT editor-in-chief Phil Gardner. Gardner left the company last week but elements of the original plan appear to now have been implemented.
The appointments of Brown and Kimber are effective from July 1.
in other words- get ready for redundancies.
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