NowPublic.com, the Vancouver-based participatory news network, named Rachel Nixon as its Global News Director in February 2008, hiring her out of BBCNews.com to run its editorial operations. The role covered correspondents in 3,600 cities across more than 140 countries.
Nixon had spent nine years at BBCNews.com, latterly as Deputy World Editor with a staff of 45, and held a Webby, a European Online Journalism Award and the BBC World Service Editor of the Year award for 2007. Leonard Brody, NowPublic’s co-founder and chief executive, said he could not imagine a more qualified person to lead the editorial side as the company worked out new ways of gathering and distributing news. Nixon’s own line was that “the NowPublic team has blazed trails from Day One and clearly mainstream media is now embracing the media model that NowPublic originated”. She holds a BA in modern languages and literature from Oxford.
The post printed the news release in full and disclosed that its author was engaged to Nixon.
The appointment mattered in 2008 for what it signalled rather than for the job itself. A senior editor leaving a large broadcaster for a citizen journalism start-up was read as evidence that authority in news was moving, and the start-up in question described itself, without much argument from anyone, as the world’s largest participatory news network.