Trinity Mirror has announced the creation of a digital journalism unit responsible for "developing engaging content ideas for our websites and print publications".
Here's the announcement in full from Trinity Mirror:
Trinity Mirror today announced the creation of a new digital journalism unit.
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The unit, to be led by David Ottewell, currently a hub news editor at the Manchester Evening News, will be responsible for developing engaging content ideas for our websites and print publications
A number of data journalism tests in recent years have demonstrated the potential value of data, such as the Race for a School Place series in Birmingham which tells readers how likely their child is to get into their chosen secondary school.
The unit will pilot ideas through several regional titles before rolling projects out to all titles.
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Joining David in the data team will be Claire Miller, currently a reporter in Cardiff who has made a name for herself as an expert in finding data and creating compelling stories and visualisations. She has been responsible for developing the WalesOnline datastore.
Neil Benson, editorial director regionals, said: “We are responding to the challenges facing the industry by fundamentally redefining our approach to content creation, and the new data unit is the latest piece in the jigsaw.
“Data journalism has been an area of growing importance for us over the past two years, and the new unit will enable us to progress much faster, across all our newsrooms.”
The unit will report to David Higgerson, digital publishing director for Trinity Mirror’s regional digital platforms.
Higgerson, said: “There has been an explosion of freely available data from various sources over the past few years.
“We need to go through that data, identify which of it is of interest to our readers and then turn it into compelling content which gives people context as well as the ability to search the data for information which will appeal to them.
“I am delighted David has agreed to head up the team. He has been one of our pioneers of data journalism in recent years and I believe is the best possible person to make our ideas a reality. In Claire, we also have someone who has shown time and again that there are fascinating stories to be found within data which appeal to a wide audience.”
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