Eric Barton Hired as VVM's Broward Editor

Village Voice Media is pleased to announce that Eric Barton is the new editor of New Times Broward-Palm Beach.

Barton will take the reins in Ft. Lauderdale on September 22.

Barton grew up in New Hampshire, but he has spent enough time in the Sunshine State to consider himself a Floridian. He got a journalism degree from Florida Southern College in 1995. After a short stint as a reporter in the bayous of Louisiana, he returned to Florida to work as an education reporter for the Fort Pierce Tribune. He covered the courthouse for the Stuart News and worked on the special projects team at the Sarasota Herald-Tribune before joining New Times Broward-Palm Beach as a staff writer in 2002.

As a writer, Barton won awards from the Florida Press Club, the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors, the Education Writers Association, the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies and the Society of Professional Journalists. In 2005, the International Center for Journalists selected him as a World Affairs Journalism Fellow, and Barton traveled to Haiti to report on a Florida man who had used his salary as a golf caddy to open orphanages in Port-au-Prince.

Later in 2005, Barton moved to Kansas City to become managing editor of VVM’s The Pitch. There he edited several award-winning projects, including articles that appeared in the Best Food Writing and Best Sports Writing anthologies, and was closely involved in the growth of The Pitch’s website. In the past three years, Pitch.com went from simply an extension of the weekly newspaper to one of the city’s top Internet portals, and Barton has helped the site double its traffic by adding blogs, video, audio, podcasts and slideshows.

To mark his return to Florida, Barton plans to continue his disdain of Jimmy Buffet music, to cheer for the Buccaneers, to dive on shipwrecks and to complete a 10K run — when the humidity is low.