A few weeks ago I stood at the back of the studio while our new team ran through their onboarding day, and I found myself doing something I have not done in nine years of running this place. I counted the chairs. Not the people in them, the chairs, because for the first time each one belonged to somebody whose role had a name, a remit and a reason to still be there next year.

Common Sense Network has never been short of talent. Dozens of brilliant people have made this thing what it is, writers, producers, editors and organisers who gave us their best work and then went on to newsrooms and agencies and companies you would recognise. I am proud of that record. What I was quietly less proud of is that so much of it ran on goodwill, on people squeezing us into evenings and weekends around jobs that were paying their rent.

Goodwill builds something real. It does not build something permanent. This year we stopped calling ourselves a news company and started calling ourselves what we actually are, a media and insights company, and that repositioning needed a team with the room to think in years rather than in favours. So we hired properly. Four of them started this month, and I want you to meet them.

Okiki is our Chief of Staff.

He has built and run his own business, done marketing at Nike and spent time at Far Fetch, so he arrives understanding both the ambition and the operations that have to sit underneath it. He is the one who turns a good idea into a dated plan with owners attached. Since he joined I have started finding out what is in my own diary in advance, which is a novel and slightly unsettling experience.

Tomi is our Head of Content.

He joins from Global with over a decade in the music industry, an arena where attention is the only currency that clears and nobody is polite about whether your work landed. He knows the difference between something that gets made and something that gets heard. Watching him take a rough idea and see the shape of the finished thing straight away has been one of the quiet pleasures of the last few weeks.

James is our Head of Social and Community Engagement.

He comes from 9Bills with a serious record of growing social platforms, though what won me over was that he talks about community before he talks about numbers. Anyone can chase a follower count. Building something people actually want to belong to is a harder and far more useful skill, and it happens to be the one we need most right now.

Klaudijus is our Founder’s Associate, working across growth and partnerships.

He joins straight out of university with a first-class degree in mathematics, and it shows in how he works. Hand him a vague, badly framed problem and he returns with it structured, sized and broken into parts you can act on by Friday. Growth and partnerships is a role where instinct gets you moving but only the numbers tell you whether you are moving in the right direction, and he reads them

Four people, four very different sets of instincts, one shared assumption that this audience deserves better than it usually gets. I have hired before and got it wrong before, so I am not treating any of this as guaranteed. I am confident all the same, and slightly nervous in the way you only get when something matters.

You will start seeing their work soon, across the newsletter, our channels and the shows we are building. If you have thoughts on what you want more of from us, reply to this email. They will read it, which is the whole point of having them.

To everyone who has built this with us over the years, from the earliest contributors to the ones still here, thank you. The chairs are full because you made them worth sitting in.

M.T Omoniyi

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