Fusion Cues Up a VP of Digital Operations

One of the recommendations on Jigar Mehta’s LinkedIn page (pictured) comes from Sree Sreenivasan, chief digital officer for New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Sreenivasan writes that he's had his eye on Mehta since the latter was a graduate journalism student at UC Berkeley and praises the structure of Mehta's feature documentary 18 Days in Egypt. Today comes news of Mehta's newest career chapter. Per Fusion chief digital officer Daniel Eilemberg, Mehta will has joined the company as vice president of digital operations. Here's the full memo: Hola FUSION, The past 12 months have been incredibly exciting and constructive for FUSION. It was last February that we launched the new FUSION.netand the site has seen over 305% growth in audience, now reaching 10 million uniques a month — and last month delivered over 25 million video views across platforms. I am pleased to see that over 85% of our traffic is coming from A18-34, which is a higher composition than many of the larger sites targeting this generation, we’re over-indexing with a multicultural audience. I believe that is a true testament to the fact that we are a media company built on diversity as Isaac noted earlier this month. All that said, as a fully-integrated media company we need to think beyond just uniques or traditional TV ratings because our multi-platform strategy spans OTT, digital, social, and television. The FUSION brand now reaches more than 27 million people a month across all platforms and is continuing to grow as you saw with the Amazon Fire announcement last week. As we look to continue to expand these efforts, especially with platform-native content, I am excited to announce that Jigar Mehta is joining FUSION as Vice President of Digital Operations. In this new role he will oversee our social, audience development and analytics teams. He will also help us continue to improve communication and integration across teams and refine some of our cross-platform processes. Passionate about the intersection of media and entrepreneurship, Jigar understands the importance of experimentation - especially when it comes to engaging with this connected generation on social. As we look to ramp up our digital video production, specifically platform-native video, Jigar’s background and experience will be a great asset to our team. As the leader of engagement at AJ+ he helped guide the strategy that made them one of the most-popular video publishers on Facebook -- netting over 2.2 billion video views last year. Prior to AJ+, Jigar was a founding team member of Matter Ventures, a start-up accelerator and early stage venture capital firm that supports media entrepreneurs. He got his start in documentary films before joining The New York Times as one of their first video journalists. Jigar has a strong passion for new forms of storytelling, as a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford he co-created the interactive documentary “18 Days in Egypt” a community-based media project about the Egyptian Revolution that was funded by the Tribeca Film Institute’s New Media Fund and Sundance Institute's New Frontier Program. Jigar will be based in the Oakland office working closely with [editor in chief] Alexis [Madrigal] there, but you will see him often in New York and Miami as well. In fact, he is starting this week in the New York office. Please join me in welcoming him to the team. Mehta, who started Wednesday, will be based primarily in Oakland but spend a fair amount of time with his designated teams in New York, Los Angeles and Miami. He will also no doubt be involved, in a fashion, with Fusion's great new California Fellowship program, which we wrote about earlier this week. Previously on FishbowlNY: Quartz Grabs Veteran New York Times Video Journalist Erik Olsen

Fishbowl

Fusion Cues Up a VP of Digital Operations

Jigar Mehta moves over from AJ+.

Richard Horgan

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Richard Horgan