Alex Millson

I am currently on the Bloomberg global news desk team, helping set the daily news agenda, prioritising coverage across platforms and liaising with teams around the Asia Pacific region. In addition I work on the digital team, where I was one of the founding members of the Bloomberg Asia website.

As Deputy Editor of the South China Morning Post’s website, scmp.com, I focused on the day-to-day running of the site, overseeing breaking news, ensuring the homepages were fresh, managing the web team, commissioning content and editing copy. I was at the centre of the newspaper’s efforts to switch to a digital-first approach, working with reporters and editors to change the mindset of what was, until recently, very much a print-focused operation. Results were excellent, with page views up 46 per cent on-year in 2014, an increase in both the average engagement time and number of articles consumed, and a growth in subscriber numbers. In 2014 the number of people following scmp.com on Facebook and Twitter increased by 370 percent and 155 percent respectively. I was instrumental in promoting the importance of web analytics in the newsroom, in particular tracking metrics using Chartbeat, Outbrain and Google Analytics. One highlight was leading scmp.com’s coverage of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests which made headlines around the globe, including a hugely successful 19-day live blog that drew some four million page views and was being followed around the world.

At AFP I was based in the Asia-Pacific regional hub in Hong Kong, where I was one of a small team of highly proficient editors responsible for liaising with bureaux throughout the region, coordinating copy flow, editing text and publishing stories to the newswire on a 24-hour basis. The role demanded a wide knowledge of current affairs across the region, the ability to turn around raw copy quickly and 100 per cent accuracy at all times. During this time I was also called upon to run the Hong Kong bureau on a rota basis and spent time working on the multimedia desk, publishing stories online, live blogging and posting stories on social media.

As News Editor of Mail Online I managed a large team of journalists, covering major events, politics and human interest stories in the UK and around the world. When I started at MailOnline the site attracted about 19 million unique users a month. When I left six years later, four of which were on the news desk, it had become one of the most popular newspaper websites in the world, reaching almost 100 million unique users a month, according to ABCe figures. The previous month comScore had reported that MailOnline had overtaken the New York Times as the world’s most visited English language newspaper website.   In addition to producing an extensive rolling news list each morning and managing a team of some 25-30 writers, section heads and production staff throughout the day, it was my role to ensure MailOnline broke and updated major stories faster, in more depth and with more colour than the opposition. We were bold with our splashes and headlines, illustrated our stories with multiple images and aggressively pushed our content across social media platforms. The layout of the homepage was determined by a combination of old-fashioned news sense, the real-time results of analytics programs Intellitracker and Omniture, and the contents of that day’s Daily Mail. At the weekends I was on the editing rota where I was responsible for the overall running of the site, having the final say on which stories were covered, how they were presented on the homepage and how they would be promoted on social media. It was a fast-paced, high pressure environment and one which demanded a level head, an understanding of the online audience and the ability to multitask at breakneck speed. It was down to me to ensure that when a major story broke, all angles were covered, often leading to the commissioning of related stories, sidebars, analyses, comment pieces and picture galleries in order to maximise page views and reader engagement time.

See above for similar duties.

Wrote news stories for the website and, on a rota basis, edited the homepage on night shifts.

At INS News Agency, over a period of 20 months, I filled the roles of Senior Reporter, Chief Reporter and News Editor. While reporting I brought in exclusive stories for the national press and worked on commissions for individual titles. As News Editor I ran the busy news desk, juggling the diary, covering breaking news across the south of England and standing in for the Editor in his absence.

Over a six-year period I worked my way up from Trainee, to Senior Reporter, Chief Reporter and finally News Editor - a position which I held for almost three years.