Moving on

As with many things on this site, it’s taken me a little while to get around to posting this note.

In February, after a very successful stint at the Herald News–which included helping to lead it to win the award for best small daily in the state from the New Jersey Press Association–I left to join a start-up newsroom. (Alas, I also left behind my neglected soccer blog) Now I am one of the news editors at the New Jersey Local News Service. Owned by Advance Publications, we have a team of 15 reporters who cover municipal beats across six counties here in the Garden State.

On top of that, as part of my fellowship at Fairleigh Dickinson, I’ve been taking a course this spring on Web programming, specifically with ASP.net. I’ve also been lucky enough to play a good amount of soccer and DJ a couple of times with friends.

At a time when many newspapers are convulsing or collapsing, working for LNS has been a really unique opportunity to help build a news gathering outfit from the ground up. We provide all of our stories to the Newark Star-Ledger and its Web site NJ.com. So far, we’ve been having a blast. I have a feeling that we’re going to see more news organizations following this model: start an outside company to focus intensely on local news and provide content for print and online. It’ll be great to set the precedent for how it can be done.

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