New Haven Register newsroom employees learned Monday that they have a new editor — and that their longtime editor was laid off.
The announcement was made in the paper’s newsroom on Sargent Drive.
The paper’s new top editorial employee is 35-year-old Matt DeRienzo (pictured). He will oversee editorial operations at all three Connecticut dailies owned by the Journal Register Company (JRC): the New Haven paper, the Torrington Register Citizen, and the Middletown Press.
DeRienzo currently serves as publisher of the Torrington daily. He has overseen some dramatic experiments in refashioning that paper as a 21st century, “digital-first” enterprise. Among the experiments: Inviting the public to editorial meetings, which are also live-streamed; moving the paper to a downtown former factory building and putting a coffee shop-cum-community newsroom on the first floor, with “blogging stations” and free printable access to the paper’s archives. The Torrington experiments have been seen as a prototype for JRC’s plans to invent a new form of local news organization at its properties around the country. (Click here to read a Columbia Journalism Review story about that.) JRC owns 18 dailies and over 170 non-dailies, including Connecticut Magazine.
In New Haven, DeRienzo’s appointment was accompanied by the layoff of Editor Jack Kramer, who has worked at the Register for over 30 years. Over that time he has had to deliver the bad news about dozens of layoffs of other newsroom employees ordered by various iterations of the paper’s corporate ownership. Kramer could not immediately be reached for comment.
Asked Monday if more newsroom layoffs loom in New Haven, DeRienzo declined comment.
He told the Independent that JRC will be rethinking the definition of every newsroom job as the company continues to move toward an emphasis of starting news coverage on the web and reexamining the ways journalists tell stories in the new media age.
“The opportunity here is to look at things as a blank sheet of paper and look at the resources we have around the state to put the focus on good journalism,” DeRienzo said.
Click here, here, here for previous coverage of the Register’s corporate evolution.