Editor & Publisher Notes My Move to Director of Information Technology

Trade-press personnel columns are the fossil record of a career. You don’t write them, you don’t get asked about them, and years later they turn out to be the only surviving proof that a job title changed on a particular date. This one is from the Oct. 5, 1996, issue of Editor & Publisher, in the weekly “Newspeople in the News” roundup, and it records my move at Phoenix Newspapers Inc. from senior editor for information technology to director of information technology.

HOWARD FINBERG, senior editor/information technology, was appointed director of information technology.

One line. But the shift in that line mattered to me: the word “editor” came out of the title. I had come to The Arizona Republic in 1987 as assistant managing editor for graphics — a newsroom job, about pages and visual journalism. By 1996 the work had moved to systems, networks and the machinery that newsrooms were going to need to publish in more than one medium. Technology was no longer something the newsroom borrowed from another department; it was becoming its own responsibility.

What’s interesting about the item is that my name sits in the middle of a long list. Editor & Publisher ran the entire Phoenix Newspapers Inc. reshuffle in one block, and it was a substantial one.

CATHY DAVIS, vice president of advertising at Phoenix Newspapers Inc., has been promoted to the position of senior vice president of marketing and development.

The rest of the list included Richard Cox moving from vice president of circulation to vice president of operations and product management; Pam Johnson going from managing editor to vice president of news and executive editor; Jon Held becoming chief financial officer, succeeding Don Zabek, who was named director of newsprint purchasing at Central Newspapers, the parent company; David Alley moving up to advertising director; Don Henninger from deputy managing editor to managing editor; and Leon Levitt arriving from the Newspaper Association of America as circulation director.

Small side-note:  Richard Cox was my mentor as I moved out of the newsroom and into the corporate boardroom.

Read as a group, it’s a company rearranging itself — news, advertising, circulation, finance and technology all moving at once. That was the mid-1990s in the newspaper business. Nobody in that list knew exactly what the web was going to do to the industry, but the org charts were already being redrawn in anticipation.

The same column has another small marker of the moment, a few inches up the page:

MELINDA GIPSON, manager of new media analysis at the Newspaper Association of America, has been promoted to director of new media business development

“New media business development” and “information technology” showing up as job titles in the same personnel column tells you where the industry’s attention was headed in the fall of 1996.