Announcement from POLITICO Europe Editor-in-Chief Jamil Anderlini, POLITICO Global Editor-in-Chief John Harris, POLITICO Europe Deputy Editor-in-Chief Kate Day, POLITICO Europe Head of News Christian Oliver, and POLITICO Head of News Alex Burns:
We are excited to announce that Alistair Walker, one of the key news editors in POLITICO’s European operation, is taking on a greatly expanded role leading a transatlantic news team as Editor, Global Breaking News. This new position will help position POLITICO to deliver a sharper, livelier, more competitive report in every arena of coverage, and represents an important step toward integrating our global newsroom.
Ali is already an essential engine of POLITICO’s news report. Managing breaking news in Brussels, he leads fast-attack coverage of stories from Vladimir Putin’s nuclear threats to the politics of the Olympic games; and from afar he has dipped into the U.S. presidential campaign and even American college sports. Editors across our teams — including in Washington — know he has a gift for balancing the hardest of hard news with subplots from the fun side of politics. And Ali moves with a velocity and precision we should all aspire to emulate.
For these reasons and more, we have asked him to take on a far broader mandate in the coming weeks, redesigning our breaking news coverage across all geographies and reporting to Christian Oliver, our Head of News in Europe.
This is a signal moment in POLITICO’s evolution as an international news organization. We have all talked about — and heard and thought a lot about — our company’s global future. The creation of a Global Breaking News operation will mark a decisive advance on that ambition, and show how we can take editorial resources that are dispersed across national lines and redeploy them to gird our whole report.
At the moment, U.S. breaking news coverage is housed within our campaign reporting team, and it sits apart from the breaking news report in Brussels, London and other geographies. This results in awkward asymmetries in our editorial structure: Our European newsroom has 24-hour editing coverage, employing trusted editors in Australia, but cannot assign stories to reporters in North America. Our American newsroom has many more reporters at its disposal, but the website is unstaffed or thinly staffed for hours overnight.
This approach to breaking news will begin to change when the 2024 election is over. We will draw on talents in every time zone to implement a new editorial workflow that makes full use of POLITICO’s international reach and serves our audience with more intentional discipline. This will build on the work of our Global Audience team, which in just a few months has left a deep mark on POLITICO’s editorial strategy and performance.
This transition will not happen instantaneously. We want to move with speed but not in haste, with the goal of building a structure that will succeed and endure.
Ali is ideally suited for this challenging assignment. A native of Scotland, he joined POLITICO in 2016 as a digital producer and print designer in Brussels, then becoming deputy production editor before moving into news editing. Few people grasp the mechanics of POLITICO’s newsgathering and news presentation as thoroughly as Ali does. Editors and reporters in
America who already know Ali as an engaging presence in our morning meetings can expect to work with him more extensively in the months ahead.
Please congratulate Ali Walker on this important new role.
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