Veteran editor and correspondent Ted Anthony named assistant managing editor for AP

Ted Anthony named AP assistant managing editor

NEW YORK — Ted Anthony, a veteran editor and correspondent for The Associated Press who has helped develop social media strategies and new storytelling techniques in AP newsrooms, has been named an assistant managing editor for the news cooperative.

Anthony, 41, will help oversee the new AP News Center. He will work with regional editors on the global enterprise report and focus on sharpening AP’s worldwide coverage of breaking news during the weekends.

“Ted is a gifted storyteller and leader who will help deepen our engagement with news consumers around the globe,” Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll said.

Anthony will report to Deputy Managing Editor Sally Buzbee, who oversees the News Center, a new global headquarters operation in New York that will work closely with AP’s regional and department leaders to deliver the most comprehensive, competitive coverage of the day’s top stories in all formats.

During his 18-year AP career, Anthony has reported from more than 20 countries, including three years in China, where he was news editor and supervised coverage of China’s economic growth and generational leadership change. He has covered stories from the Oklahoma City bombing to Princess Diana’s death to the Olympic Games. During the 2008 presidential election, he co-wrote and led a yearlong multimedia effort to chronicle the intersection of politics and American culture.

After the Sept. 11 terror attacks, Anthony spent extended periods reporting in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In 2003, he reopened AP’s Iraq bureau immediately after the U.S. invasion and supervised wartime coverage there for two months.

From 2004 to 2007, Anthony was the founding editor of asap, an AP department formed to produce multimedia storytelling across formats and push the skills out to AP journalists around the world.

Most recently, Anthony has overseen AP social media experiments aimed at engaging readers with the news on online platforms. He led an interactive blog around the confirmation hearing of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor last summer, and helped oversee a Facebook-based project in December that united 11 of the world’s news agencies to cover the Copenhagen global climate conference in a blog format.

Anthony, a graduate of Penn State University, began his career at The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa. A frequent writer about American culture and society, he is the author of an award-winning 2007 book, “Chasing the Rising Sun: The Journey of an American Song,” based on an AP story that was part of a package that won the 2001 National Headliner Award for feature writing.

While there has always been supervision of AP’s news coverage from headquarters, the News Center is a new concept intended to help support field leaders who are directing coverage. It also will be a place to experiment with new kinds of storytelling and fresh ways to engage readers and viewers.

The News Center is one of four components of the new headquarters Nerve Center. The others are standards oversight, social networks and mobile and online filing.