I’m happy to announce that Andrew Beaujon will join The Poynter Institute later this month as Senior Online Reporter. Andrew comes to the Institute from TBD, where he has been arts editor since May 2010. Before that he was managing editor of Washington City Paper for four and a half years. He worked as a freelance writer and copy editor, including some time at Spin magazine, prior to City Paper.
What Andrew will do for Poynter
“I want to cover media as a beat in every sense of the term — an obsession, a tempo, a flow,” Andrew wrote to me in December. “In my experience, narratives tend to reveal themselves as you’re reading the work of others; curating reactions and drawing connections is one way journalism might find itself traveling.”
Andrew will guide us through the day’s media news in his new role. Like others who contribute to MediaWire and Poynter.org, he will filter for readers the most interesting and important stories about journalism from The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, the Associated Press, Mediabistro, The New Yorker, “The Daily Show,” Reuters, Ad Age, PressThink, Columbia Journalism Review and Nieman Journalism Lab (our most frequently cited sources in January) and other sites that cover media.
But Andrew aims to “get off the coastal media cowpath and comb smaller papers, tech sites, and ethnic media for stories,” he said by email Tuesday. “As a journalist at smaller outlets, I certainly appreciated how generous Jim Romenesko and Poynter were with their spotlight, and I hope to keep that tradition going.” Andrew will spend most of his time seeking out and sharing information you won’t find anywhere else and offering new perspectives on stories you’ve already discovered.
Andrew’s arrival follows a candidate search that was announced late last summer and intensified with Jim’s November departure.
Where Poynter.org goes next
The team Andrew joins now includes Craig Silverman, who brought his “Regret the Error” blog to Poynter.org as 2011 ended. With its focus on accuracy and verification, “Regret the Error” bridges the site’s two areas of focus: news and how to’s.
That dual focus brought 483,000 unique visitors to Poynter.org in January, more than any month we’ve tracked, other than May 2011 when Osama bin Laden died. That’s a 76 percent increase in unique visitors over the website’s audience in January 2011. And 25 percent of last month’s audience came between 9 and 201 times, a loyal core of visitors. The stories those visitors read the most feature ethical dilemmas, technological changes, and/or fundamental skills gone awry: How misinformation spread about Joe Paterno’s death; Why The Washington Post used a composite photo on its front page; How Google beat the Associated Press with Iowa Caucus results; Halifax Media’s controversial noncompete agreement (since dropped); and the always popular, regrettable errors.
We don’t know yet what stories February and the months to follow will bring, but I’m grateful that Andrew will be among those writing them for you and for Poynter.
