Memo to Staff: An Exciting Future For Mashable

Earlier today we announced a big milestone at Mashable - bringing on Jim Roberts as our Executive Editor and Chief Content Officer. Jim will be instrumental in growing Mashable’s audience, as well as our newsroom team. I wanted to share my message to the team about what this means for Mashable, but even more so, where we see media going. It is also a good time to mention that we will be hiring soon…!

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Team Mashable,

Today we are announcing an important and exciting addition to our family – Jim Roberts. Jim joins our team as Executive Editor and Chief Content Officer.

Many of you may know Jim from Twitter as @nycjim, from his work as Executive Editor of Reuters Digital, and from his years at The New York Times where he was most recently Assistant Managing Editor, overseeing the digital newsroom including video, social media and breaking news.

Jim is a journalism giant and social media star. He deeply understands the intersection of news, culture and the social web. He was early in the space and has continued to be a steady and authoritative voice on media innovation.

He will grow our editorial operation, including expansion into new coverage areas, storytelling formats and ways of interacting with our community. Working alongside Lance Ulanoff, he will also push Mashable deeper and broader into its existing areas of award winning coverage, including technology, business and web culture.

Mashable is always about what’s next.

Eight years ago when this all started out, ‘what’s next’ was the exciting promises of the new consumer internet. Today understanding ‘what’s next’ means bringing our audience content about the coming trends in social media, technology, culture, business, entertainment and society.

It’s an incredibly exciting time to be where we are and doing what we do.

Now more than ever, we have a deep commitment to our mission of empowering and inspiring people around the world by telling highly sharable, inspirational and informative stories that define the importance of digital innovation, in all forms.

In the last year Mashable has grown our community and the ways we connect with them. Our edit team has charted the birth of wearable tech, chronicled deep debate about the future of online privacy, and connected with our community members in Egypt, India and Brazil to share stories.

What’s next in our world is coming faster than ever, and it has never been more important to be great at what we do. We are entering a new era.

This is a time when journalism is needed more than ever; when community curation is no longer a luxury, and verification is critical. Mashable has always played a role in interpreting what’s next, and now we have both a huge opportunity and responsibility to report on this next era of innovation.

Jim joins our already incredible team, which deeply understands what it means to build a company that creates real value for its community. He has been pushing these goals for a long time.

Just a few of his accomplishments:

• Jim presided over rapid expansion of NYTimes.com, helping build and lead a staff of interactive and multimedia specialists, placing aggressive emphasis on real-time news response, and aggressively growing the audience.
• He was the top editor of NYTimes.com with responsibility for day-to-day and (minute-to-minute) presentation of news on nytimes.com and long-term planning of digital coverage of major news events and long-term reporting projects.
• Jim was a vocal advocate of The Times’ video strategy, and helped lead the build-out of live video coverage of the 2012 Presidential campaign.
• He encouraged innovative digital storytelling and news-presentation techniques, including dynamic data-driven graphics, multimedia, social media and user-generated content.

Jim is an ideal editorial leader for what’s next at Mashable. He will join us in November.

Here is his first byline on Mashable where he shares his excitement for our future: https://mashable.com/2013/10/30/jim-roberts-mashable/

Please join me in giving Jim a proper social media welcome to the Mashable team!

-Pete