New editor for mobile and tablets
Since the start of the year, our mobile and tablet audience has regularly outnumbered those of you visiting BBC News Online on desktop, so the timing is right to increase our editorial focus significantly on these platforms. To do this, I have appointed Nathalie Malinarich to the new role of Editor, Mobile and New Formats.
The role will help us meet the needs of our rapidly growing mobile audience. We've averaged 53.2 million weekly global browsers across January and February this year. I've talked before on this blog about the efforts we've made to provide the best possible service on mobile, so it's great to see that in this time, half of our global browsers have been on a mobile or tablet and at weekends this figure grows to 60%,.
Nathalie, who was previously the World Editor of News Online, has been working successfully on our mobile platforms for the past few months, helping us to sharpen our understanding of what works best as BBC News Online goes through a number of changes. Last week I wrote about the work under way on a new responsive tablet and desktop site which will mean changes to the existing desktop site. It is designed to be simpler than our existing desktop site and, of course, optimised for different screen sizes.