Tom Berman named news director for US Central region

The Associated Press has named Tom Berman as regional news director for the central United States, a new position overseeing AP's journalism and news operations across media formats in 14 states stretching from Texas to the upper Midwest.

The appointment was announced Tuesday by Managing Editor Brian Carovillano. Berman will be based in Chicago, AP's Central regional hub, where he has been regional editor since August 2014.

AP is in the process of merging the management of its text, photo, video and interactive journalism at regional desks around the world. The Central region will now be managed by a single management team in which every format is represented, and will include multimedia journalists and an integrated editing desk that emphasizes video, photos and social media.

"Tom Berman has long been a newsroom leader at AP and has helped lead coverage of defining stories on two continents," Carovillano said. "He's one of the smartest editors I know and has been a driver of innovations in how we cover news around the world. We will see more of the same from Tom in this new role."

As regional editor, leading a team of AP reporters and editors, Berman has managed stories such as Hurricane Harvey, the protests against the Dakota Access pipeline and the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. AP won the 2014 Sigma Delta Chi Award for deadline reporting on that shooting and the protests that followed.

Prior to becoming regional editor, Berman served as deputy Europe editor, based in London.

A native of New York City and a graduate of New York University, Berman joined AP in 1997 in Boston after working as a reporter at newspapers in New York and Massachusetts. In Boston, he worked as a supervising editor, helping direct coverage of the death of John F. Kennedy Jr.

He later served as Pennsylvania news editor, and from 2003 to 2012 was a director of state news, a role in which he worked to help strengthen the cooperative's state news reports and helped lead the restructuring of the AP in the United States along regional lines.