The National Geographic Society Wednesday announced it was reorganizing its media properties. Susan Goldberg is the new editor-in-chief of National Geographic magazine, the society said in a press release. Her predecessor, Chris Johns, will be chief content officer and will be charged with overseeing “the print and digital expression of National Geographic’s editorial content across platforms.”
“Our efforts need to be organized around our purpose, not our platforms,” National Geographic Society President and CEO Gary Knell said in a press release. Knell left NPR in 2013 to run NatGeo; when he was at NPR he said one of his first orders of business was to “smash together the digital and so-called audio journalists.”
Speaking at the Nieman Foundation last week, the NPR CEO said “we should eliminate these distinctions. Because, really, the audience doesn’t view news that way anymore.”
Before joining National Geographic as its executive editor for news and features earlier this year, Goldberg was executive editor at Bloomberg News. Before that, she was editor of The (Cleveland, Ohio) Plain Dealer and worked at several newspapers, including the San Jose Mercury News, the Detroit Free Press and USA Today.
