the publisher
Janet Hasson
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Photo by Stefan Radtke |
Owned by the Gannett Co., Inc., the Journal News newspaper goes out to 85,000 households on weekdays and 105,000 on Sundays. Its website, LoHud.com, has 1.3 million unique visitors each month and offers daily news updates and more than 40 blogs. The woman who is in charge of the entire operation, known as The Journal News Media Group, is 53-year-old President and Publisher Janet Hasson.
Hasson, a four-time winner of the Gannett President’s Ring award (a corporate award recognizing superior executive achievement) was named publisher in June 2011 and immediately set out to accelerate the process of taking the company into the digital era. In September, she moved the offices, formerly in Harrison, where they’d been since 1973, across I-287 to Westchester Avenue in White Plains to a newly designed, digitally optimized space.
Hasson understands that more and more consumers want their news digitally, so she outsourced the paper’s printing and is concentrating on the new digital center, where 250 reporters, editors, website producers, salespeople, and marketing staff today work to create multi-platform journalism. In early May, the Journal News launched a new subscription model that allows full access to the site on multiple platforms, including smartphone and tablet applications. “Westchester is the most complex market I’ve lived and worked in,” says Hasson, “but it is also a fulfilling news market.”
Under her watch, LoHud.com was the No. 1 digital site in the region for news coverage of Hurricane Irene, and it broke site visitor records with coverage of a local fire in Carmel. The Journal News also won an award in the Best of Gannett 2011 Watchdog Reporting category for its investigation into the troubled reconstruction of I-287.
“I am horrible at maintaining,” Hasson says. “If someone wanted me to come in and just keep doing what had been done before, I couldn’t.”
