Newspaper & Mailroom

South China Morning Post Strengthens Newsroom With Top Editorial Hires

Tuesday 18. September 2012 - Hong Kong's premier English language newspaper South China Morning Post (HKSE: 583) announced today the much anticipated hire of two seasoned editorial heavyweights to boost its newsroom.

Supporting the print newsroom, 16-year Reuters veteran Brian Rhoads has been hired to take over as Managing Editor, reporting to Editor-in-Chief Wang Xiangwei. Mr. Rhoads previously held various senior positions at Reuters, including a 7 year stint as Bureau Chief, China, based in Beijing. He also held the position of Managing Editor, Americas, based in New York and Managing Editor, Asia, leading a multimedia team of over 700 staff. Most recently, he was Bureau Chief, Greater China, based in Hong Kong.
Mr. Rhoads is a Stanford University graduate in Political Science and speaks fluent Mandarin.
Supporting the digital newsroom, ex-Daily Mail Online Managing Editor Sarah Graham joins the South China Morning Post team as Managing Editor, SCMP.com to support the newly relaunched site and other digital products. Under Ms. Graham’s management, Daily Mail Online underwent a successful transformation in 2008 to become the world’s most popular news website, attracting over 45 million viewers a month.
Ms. Graham began her 14-year career in a range of UK-based newspapers, and joined the Daily Mail in 2006. At the South China Morning Post, she will assist Online Editor Wang Feng to manage the digital news team.
Both the South China Morning Post and its subscription-access site SCMP.com have been revamped in the past eighteen months to reflect the needs of today’s newsreader.
SCMP.com was rebuilt, redesigned and relaunched in late August, with significant improvements to speed, content, stability, functionality and mobile accessibility. User feedback to the new site has been extremely positive, and site visits have consistently more than doubled the levels achieved prior to the relaunch.
The print edition of the South China Morning Post maintains a loyal readership of 399,000* and a stable circulation of 108,000**. The newspaper also recently added a mobile website edition at m.scmp.com, filling out its digital portfolio, which also includes a native iPad app.
Wang Xiangwei, the SCMP’s Editor-in-Chief, remarked, “The South China Morning Post not only has a greatly valued past heritage; we also have an exciting future ahead of us. Our passion is to deliver the highest quality content, in the most reader friendly formats across all platforms. That means having the right systems, the right technology etc, but most importantly, the right people. I think our ability to attract such world class talent demonstrates the strength of our brand globally, and enables us to continue to build the SCMP legacy for many decades to come.”
The South China Morning Post is widely recognized as the most trustworthy and insightful source of information in the Hong Kong and China region. Winning 55 global, regional and local news excellence awards in the past year, the SCMP has a reputation for exposing hidden stories on Hong Kong and China issues, from being the first newspaper to print excerpts of the controversial Li Peng diaries, to exposing the scandal behind China hospitals profiting from stem cells harvested from induced abortions, an article that won a globally coveted journalism award.