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Felix Salmon to Take On Web-Based Role at Fusion

Felix Salmon, a prominent writer on finance and other topics who announced this week that he was leaving Reuters, will join the cable network Fusion on Monday in a web-based role that runs across multiple media.

“The reason why I am going to Fusion,” he said in an interview Wednesday, “is that they have the ability to help me communicate in the ways that people are going to consume information in the future. Which is not 1,500-word blocks of text.”

Though his title will be senior editor, Mr. Salmon plans to use the strengths of the network, which is owned by ABC and Univision, and is aimed at a younger audience, to produce “animations, videos, data visualization stuff, ways of using other platforms to convey information and tell stories.”

Fusion, which gets the bulk of its revenue from cable fees, is not focused on building an audience for its website “that it can then sell to advertisers,” he said. Freed from the constraints of having to attract people directly to a website, he said, “you can have a lot of fun.”

The network, said Daniel Eilemberg, its chief digital officer, aims to be a “multiplatform, digital-first cable network, which is trying to reach an audience that is digital-native.”

“We’re trying to become a place that is innovative, and find new ways of telling stories,” he said.

Mr. Salmon, 42, who is British, moved to the United States in 1997 and began his career with the first wave of web journalists, starting a blog in 1999. He joined Reuters in 2009 from Condé Nast’s short-lived financial magazine, Portfolio.

In 2012, Mr. Salmon won a prestigious Loeb award for business journalism in the blogging category for his Felix Salmon’s Blog at Reuters. In his acceptance speech, Mr. Salmon said that he thought the category was a silly one and that the Loeb committee should not distinguish between bloggers and other financial writers. The Loeb committee has since eliminated the blogging category.

Mr. Salmon said he planned to use multiple platforms — such as Facebook, Instagram and even competing news organizations — to spread his work, and thus raise awareness of Fusion. Though no formal arrangement has been made, he said, there has been talk that he may work alongside Nate Silver, the data journalist behind the website fivethirtyeight.com, which, like Fusion’s parent company ABC, is owned by Disney.

One reason he left Reuters after five years, he said, was the end of a plan called Reuters Next to build a consumer-directed news operation to go with its news wires and financial terminals. Though he still believes Reuters does impeccable journalism, he said, “when Reuters Next died, my opportunity to do fun Internet stuff died with it.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: Journalist at Reuters Joins Fusion in Web Role. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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