Well, that didn’t take long.
Less than a week after Jim Roberts announced he was stepping down as the executive editor of Reuters Digital, Thomson Reuters has announced that Dan Colarusso will be given the role.
Reuters columnist Felix Salmon tweeted the news on Tuesday that Colarusso, currently Thomson Reuters’ head of global programming, would be his “new boss.”
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Roberts decided to leave Reuters after it scrapped plans for its “Next” project, which would make Reuters a consumer-facing news source in addition to its wire service. He’d been in the role just seven months after leaving his longtime New York Times home in January.
“When the decision was made to change course and not continue work on the platforms, then that wasn’t the mission I was hired to do,” Roberts told TheWrap last week.
Roberts added that he was “really really blessed to have worked and continue to work with some really talented digital journalists” at Reuters. “It’s been a lot of fun working here.”
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Jim Impoco, Newsweek’s new editor-in-chief, had the role before Roberts. He left at the end of January.
Roberts told TheWrap that he wasn’t sure how much longer he’d be at Reuters. “I’ve pledged to help them with the transition to their new plan,” he said last week. “I’m sure I’ll be here for a number of additional weeks.”
But Colarusso’s new position is effective immediately, according to an internal memo obtained by Capital New York. A spokeswoman for Reuters told TheWrap that she was not yet aware when Roberts’ last day would be, but it was definitely “not today.”
Colarusso has been at Reuters since late 2011. Before that, he worked for Bloomberg Television, Portfolio.com and the New York Post.