Christian Science Monitor editor John Yemma‘s note
To the staff:
Most of you have heard by now. It’s true. After three years of applying his high energy and creativity to CSMonitor.com, Jimmy Orr is going to the LA Times, where he will be deputy editor for online.
As everyone in Monitor editorial and publishing knows, Jimmy has been the spark plug in our transformation to a Web-first news operation. By dint of his individual effort and his tireless pushing for us to adopt the best practices in search engine optimization, social networking, and other tools for improving our online performance, the Monitor is now a strong player among news websites.
We wouldn’t have hit 25 million page views in June without Jimmy’s leadership. We’ll see a few dips now and then, but the trend is upward. Jimmy gets much of the credit for that.
Jimmy has led by example, whether with the Vote blog, SEO, or tapping partner content. A big surge in recent traffic has come from the work he and the Prodteam have done in optimizing articles from our news wires.
He has also diversified our sources of traffic by targeting Yahoo in addition to Google. In six months, traffic from Yahoo has increased tenfold.
Jimmy’s enthusiasm and humor will be missed in the newsroom. His last day with us is July 30. He promises to give us a full download of what he knows until then.
His position remains crucial to our success. We will move rapidly to replace him.
John
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To: The [Los Angeles Times] Staff
From: Sean Gallagher, Managing Editor/Online
Colleagues:
Jimmy Orr, online editor of The Christian Science Monitor, will be joining us in mid-August as Deputy Editor, Online.
In this new position, Jimmy will coordinate our online news and features efforts, working with section editors in the early stages of events to ensure that the web is first and foremost in our coverage plans. He will run the weekly planning meeting, supervise our expanding social media efforts and keep the staff informed of traffic and other trends.
While at The Monitor, Jimmy helped convert that newsroom into a 24/7 operation and then focused on growing traffic through the creation of new blogs, search engine optimization and social networking, developing relationships with partner content providers, vastly increasing the frequency of publishing and acting as the principal liaison with leading aggregators.
The results have been quite impressive: Traffic has soared fourfold over the past year, from 6 million page views a month to more than 25 million in June and, as you know, The Monitor became the first major U.S. newspaper to stop printing on parchment in a favor of an Internet-only distribution model in 2009. Jimmy was key to those successful transformations.
Jimmy has had successful and innovative careers in both journalism and politics. Before joining The Monitor in 2007 as a blogger, he served as the chief Internet strategist for both President George W. Bush and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. In both positions, he focused on bringing government closer to the citizenry with creative uses of interactivity and video.
His groundbreaking online chats “Ask the White House” and “Ask Governor Schwarzenegger” were lauded by the media and leading government watchdog groups as examples of good government. His entertaining “Barney Cam” videos (Christmas through the eyes of the First Dog) became a holiday tradition in the Bush White House and the most watched videos on the White House website. While at the White House, Jimmy was named one of the most influential people in the world of politics and the Internet by PoliticsOnline. He has been a contributor to our “Top of The Ticket” blog since March. Jimmy hails from Cheyenne, Wyo., where as the press secretary for then Governor Jim Geringer he directed one of the first ever live webcasts of an elected official in the U.S. in 1996.
Jimmy graduated from Principia College in 1992 with a bachelor’s degree in political science. He will report to me.
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>> Kevin Roderick questions LATimes.com’s “increasingly controversial strategy of going partisan Republican – and only Republican.”
