Guardian Me­dia Lim­it­ed's Man­ag­ing Di­rec­tor, Lu­cio Mesqui­ta, an­nounced a num­ber of struc­tur­al changes to the busi­ness to­day.

In an ad­dress to all staff from the floor of the Guardian news­room, an ad­dress that linked staff in Ch­agua­nas, San Fer­nan­do, Port-of-Spain, To­ba­go and the group's ra­dio sta­tion in Guyana, Mesqui­ta said the new struc­ture is de­signed to make the most of the dig­i­tal rev­o­lu­tion sweep­ing the me­dia sec­tor by mov­ing to­wards a "dig­i­tal first" strat­e­gy and away from tra­di­tion­al plat­form-based di­vi­sions.

From now on, Guardian Me­dia will have Con­tent, News, Sales and Pro­duc­tion de­part­ments in­stead of its pre­vi­ous Ra­dio, Tele­vi­sion and Print di­vi­sions.

Gen­er­al Man­ag­er for Tele­vi­sion, Nicholas Sab­ga, be­comes the new Head of Con­tent, re­spon­si­ble for all con­tent across the busi­ness, in­clud­ing an emerg­ing new dig­i­tal op­er­a­tion.

A new mul­ti­me­dia Sales de­part­ment will be head­ed by cur­rent Ra­dio GM, Steve Dip­nar­ine, and a new Pro­duc­tion de­part­ment, bring­ing to­geth­er en­gi­neer­ing and print op­er­a­tions, will be man­aged by An­tho­ny See­gob­in, the com­pa­ny's cur­rent Chief Tech­nol­o­gy Of­fi­cer.

A re­con­fig­ured News de­part­ment will bring to­geth­er all Guardian Me­dia's news and cur­rent af­fairs, un­der the lead­er­ship of TV Head of Con­tent and jour­nal­ist Shelly Dass. She will have ul­ti­mate re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for the ed­i­to­r­i­al con­tent of the Guardian and To­ba­go To­day news­pa­pers, CNC3 News, ra­dio news and the com­pa­ny's grow­ing dig­i­tal news pres­ence.

Orin Gor­don, ap­point­ed Ed­i­tor-in-Chief of the Guardian news­pa­per in Feb­ru­ary last year de­cid­ed to leave Guardian Me­dia at the end of this month. Gor­don said he is leav­ing jour­nal­ism af­ter 25 years in the busi­ness, to pur­sue oth­er pro­fes­sion­al in­ter­ests. GM Print Cyn­tra Achong has opt­ed for a new role in the ANSA McAl group.

Mesqui­ta said that the changes were need­ed to make sure Guardian Me­dia had a strong fu­ture at times of con­sid­er­able chal­lenges to the me­dia in­dus­try as the dig­i­tal rev­o­lu­tion dis­rupts tra­di­tion­al rev­enue mod­els. Glob­al­ly, news­pa­pers in par­tic­u­lar have been suf­fer­ing with a steep fall in ad­ver­tis­ing rev­enue with ad dol­lars al­so mi­grat­ing away from ra­dio and tele­vi­sion to dig­i­tal plat­forms.

He promised a "dig­i­tal first" ap­proach to Guardian Me­dia with more mul­ti­me­dia con­tent to users and ad­ver­tis­ers.

Guardian Me­dia owns the Guardian and To­ba­go To­day news­pa­pers, six ra­dio sta­tions in T&T un­der the TBC net­work ban­ner, a sta­tion in Guyana and CNC3 tele­vi­sion. It is al­so rolling out a num­ber of elec­tron­ic ad­ver­tis­ing bill­boards un­der the Big Board Com­pa­ny.

In the first six months of the year, Guardian Me­dia Ltd saw a drop in rev­enue due to a re­duc­tion in ad­ver­tis­ing, with a sig­nif­i­cant fall in prof­it as a re­sult. The changes an­nounced will al­so re­duce over­all se­nior man­age­ment costs as part of the com­pa­ny's dri­ve to in­crease ef­fi­cien­cies and con­trol costs.