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 Martin Newland has stepped aside as editor of The National, he officially announced today at a newsroom meeting at the Abu Dhabi paper, according to posts on Twitter by journalists at the paper.
The former Telegraph editor will remain at the paper as editorial director. Hassan Fattah, currently deputy editor, will take on the Big Chair, and Bob Cowan will become deputy in his place.
The news leaked out last week, it seems, judging by a snippet in UK paper The Independent’s media gossip column, posted yesterday on the web.
The paper's Jen Gerson narrowly pipped her colleagues to breaking the news, by tweeting: “Newland standing aside as editor in ‘worst kept secret in Abu Dhabi’. Wants to move into business side.”
She then confirmed the new batting order above, which was swiftly echoed by Asa Fitch
and David George-Cosh, among others.
As all of this has literally happened in the last few minutes, at time of writing, it does rather demonstrate the awesome power of social media. Or else just the fact that people can’t keep off their phones in meetings these days.
There's lots of discussion on Twitter about the new shift - one quote, apparently from Hassan Fattah, doing the rounds is "When you're a journalist, you're no longer an Arab" (courtesy of Kareem Shaheen, from a talk by Fattah at the American University of Sharjah, talking about covering the Israeli-Lebanon war for the New York Times - original blog post is here).
And another quote from Fattah, this time via Tom Gara: "We're not a startup anymore, this is an institution."
From the same source, from Newland: "This newspaper is bigger than any one person..."
Gerson tweets: "Newsroom seems
optimistic. Hassan is a great guy and Newland isn't going far. Still. I
have seen too many management shuffles in my time."
This seems to reflect a generally positive reception to the news, which sees Newland leave the post just over a year after launching The National, to a largely receptive audience.
Once we receive any more official information, we’ll post it here.
UPDATE: Well it seems, as fast as we were on the official announcement, Maktoob Business had the news this morning
- along with some comments from spokespeople and the like.
Nothing radically different at Maktoob, but looks like it really was not a well-kept secret...
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