In a note to newsroom staff senior vice president for news and editorial director Nancy Barnes announced the following update:
Dear all,
I'm delighted to announce that Tony Cavin, a lifelong journalist who has spent the last 20 years at CBS News, will be our new Managing Editor for Standards and Practices. He will join us on Dec. 6
Tony emerged as the top candidate after a lengthy national search; we believe he is a great fit for our newsroom.
Tony is currently serving CBS as the acting director of standards and practices and has had a broad mandate to support and enforce standards across the organization. For most of the past few years, he also jointly held the title of Foreign Editor Hard News.
Prior to those senior leadership roles, he was a deputy foreign editor, and senior producer of CBS Newspath, and assignment manager at CBS Telenoticias in Miami, which broadcast to Latin America.
Before joining CBS, Tony held several roles at Reuters in D.C., Miami, and LA, including as Senior Producer for Latin America in charge of all television coverage of the region. He has also been a bureau manager for TV 3 Television of Catalonia, and for five years early in his career he was a freelance producer, reporter and fixer in Managua, Nicaragua. He is fluent in Spanish.
During his distinguished career, he has worked on an extraordinary array of major national and foreign stories from 9/11 to Hurricane Katrina to presidential campaigns and summits, to international crises such as the 1997 hostage crises in the Japanese Embassy in Peru. His experience and language skills make him particularly well suited to guide NPR's journalists on standards and practices.
In applying for this role, Cavin wrote: "At the heart of any discussion of standards are three core values, fairness, honesty and transparency. We need to treat our subjects fairly no matter how they might treat us. That doesn't mean that we necessarily treat them all the same, it means we try to fairly reflect their positions. We need to be honest with the people we are covering and with our viewers. And we need to be transparent, we need to let everyone know what we're doing and how we're doing it. When we make mistakes, we need to admit them and correct them...
Standards are what distinguishes a serious news organization and makes it stand out from the ever louder din of competing voices on the internet. Standards are how we maintain the trust of our audience and trust is something we cannot afford to squander. "
We couldn't say it any better.
Nancy
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