The Guardian Hires A New Business Head In The U.S.

As part of an effort to reboot its U.S. strategy, Guardian News & Media is adding a new chief revenue officer based in New York. Steve Howe, a former advertising executive at the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, joins this week and will lead the GNM’s U.S. sales effort.

Howe’s job will be to plot a fresh course in the U.S. for the UK-based GNM. In 2007, GNM launched GuardianAmerica.com to target the sizable American audience it had quietly built over the years. It hired about 10 reporters and producers, and recruited Michael Tomasky, the former editor of the American Prospect, to oversee the team in Washington, D.C. The site’s mandate was to cover the U.S. for a U.S. audience; Reuters (NYSE: TRI) handled ad sales for the site.

But starting in late 2009, GNM began to phase out the U.S. site. It got rid of most of the staff it had hired, and folded its U.S. coverage back into the paper’s main site, guardian.co.uk. GN&M said at the time that having the separate sites was confusing to readers. The decision coincided with a broader restructuring at the company.

Since then, GNM has been drawing up new plans for its U.S. business, and the hiring of Howe is the first public sign of that effort. Prior to his appointment by GNM, Howe was president of the Financial Times, The Americas, and before that, for about two decades, he was an advertising executive at the Wall Street Journal. Howe effectively replaces Caroline Little left as GNM’s U.S. CEO. Little, the former head of the Washington Post‘s digital business, stepped down from that job last fall. Earlier this month, Little also stepped down from her post as CEO of ContentNext Media, a wholly owned subsidiary of GNM and the publisher of this site.

GNM is likely over the next month or two to make additional announcements about its new U.S. strategy, which should
draw heavily on the Guardian’s current U.S.-based staff of about 10 reporters, split between New York and Washington. GNM also has three ad-sales people working out of its New York office. The Guardian’s audience in the U.S. hit a new high of 8.6 million unique users in February, according to *comScore*, which is about a third of its global traffic.

Disclosure: Our publisher, ContentNext Media, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Guardian News & Media.