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Village Voice Media is pleased to announce that its new director of Web and digital operations is Bill Jensen, the now-former editor of the Boston Phoenix and a friend of the company since he wrote the spectacular true-crime story “Hardcore and Bleeding” for Miami New Times in 2004.
Bill assumes his new role immediately, and his arrival coincides with a major expansion of staffing as VVM moves to hire a new group of dedicated Web editors and designers. Those editors and designers will report to Jensen, and will provide a huge shot of forward momentum in VVM’S Web strategy as the company moves to make its award-winning editorial content more easily available through a multimedia spectrum including mobile technology and ground-level video production.
“Village Voice Media has the best storytellers in journalism on the ground in seventeen cities,” said Jensen. “The opportunity to enhance the stories they tell each week in new ways, with new media tools, while at the same time providing compelling hourly content, is my charge.”
Jensen’s “Hardcore and Bleeding” was named “Best in Print” in the 2005 Green Eyeshade Awards. It was only one of many award-winning stories he has written or edited, including “My Dad Kicked Your Ass at Shea Stadium: A Baseball Memoir,” which received a “notable mention” in the 1999 version of Houghton Mifflin’s Best American Sportswriting anthology.
Jensen started his working life as a professional roller hockey player with the New York Riot, but it was as a journalist that he cut his teeth, starting as a writer and editor at the Long Island Voice. After the Voice folded, he contributed stories to Newsday and The New York Times, and edited two pop-culture magazines before being hired as managing editor of the weekly Long Island Press. Wooed away by the Phoenix last year, he quickly ascended to the lead editor’s role, and during his tenure oversaw a rebuild of thephoenix.com that added seven new blogs, next-day concert reviews, narrated slide shows, and enhanced audio and visual content.
Jensen also pushed the Phoenix into new media frontiers including original video production, a key example of which is the paper’s cutting-edge coverage of an underground nighttime bicycle race in Boston. Under his leadership, the Phoenix saw the biggest increase in readership in its history, a 26 percent gain over six months. More to the point, page views on its Web site jumped from 1 million to 1.6 million per month.
Village Voice Media publishes alternative weeklies in seventeen major American markets and through its Ruxton Group agency handles national ad sales for 35 weeklies and more than 1,500 college newspapers. To learn more about the company or any of its publications, please visit www.villagevoicemedia.com.
