International Business Times has appointed the Wall Street Journal’s Europe, Middle East and Africa digital editor John Crowley as its UK editor-in-chief.
Crowley, who has been at the Wall Street Journal for five years, will join IBT’s staff of more than 50 UK journalists at its Canary Wharf HQ at the end of March. In total, the the company employs 600 journalists worldwide.
Crowley said his focus would be on helping the site break exclusives, in-depth storytelling and new forms of digital journalism. He said IBT was putting together a UK business desk and hiring an audience team.
“We are not a wire service or so-called paper of record ... but I have a vision of where I want to take a site,” he said. “It’s like the Tower of Babel out there, with people screaming at you to read their copy. We’ve got to have a USP ... make ourselves distinctive in journalistic terms.”
IBT global editor-in-chief Peter Goodman said Crowley was the “ideal leader” for the site’s UK operation. He added: “His deep experience in overseeing old-school reporting, his web savvy and dedication to exploring stories using all the digital tools, plus his truly global perspective will yield terrific and engrossing journalism.”
Crowley’s hiring is part of an expansion in Europe for owner IBT Media, which has been aggressively hiring for the European arm of Newsweek, the formerly struggling magazine it bought from Barry Diller’s IAC and other shareholders in 2013. Last month, Newsweek appointed its first European chief operating officer, Greg Witham, who joined from Hearst UK where he was group publishing director for Cosmopolitan, Digital Spy and Sugarscape.
