Dayan Candappa, Chief Strategy Officer
Dayan Candappa is a career journalist and media executive who has built award-winning editorial teams and led the transformation of publishing businesses in Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the United States. Candappa has played a key role in turning a storied print magazine into a digital powerhouse.
Candappa took the lead in executing the new CEO's strategy of "Digital First," which puts data at the heart of the newsroom, the building of new content sales, and in licensing businesses. Working with Newsweek's editors, he helped create the magazine's first new franchises in at least a decade, including "The Debate" podcast and opinion pages, and "Newsweek Next," which focuses the magazine's deep heritage of curation and analytical reporting on disruptive technologies. The rapid audience and revenue growth that resulted helped the CEO spin off Newsweek as an independent company for the first time in nearly 60 years.
Candappa began his international career as a stringer covering the civil war in his native Sri Lanka for Reuters. Over the next 16 years he reported on and directed coverage of major stories on six continents including wars, disasters, markets, financial crises and diplomacy during postings in New York, London, Singapore, Dubai and Sri Lanka. Dayan built award-winning news teams and their work has won a dozen journalism prizes, including Reuters' first ever Pulitzer Prize for print media.
When Thomson purchased Reuters in 2008, Candappa managed a key piece of the integration, restructuring content for the foreign exchange, loans and credit markets—supporting more than $2 billion in revenue—during the financial crisis. He delivered new products for consumer businesses and for professional audiences in the financial and legal markets, becoming the lead Reuters editor for Asia and then the Americas.
