Digital First Media Appoints New Engagement Team Members

New York, N.Y.-- Digital First Media has appointed four journalists with strong digital experience to its engagement team to help newsrooms quickly transition to the digital strategy and engage with their communities.

The new engagement team members are:

Mandy Jenkins, former social news editor for the Huffington Post, who joins Digital First Media as digital projects editor.

Martin G. Reynolds, former editor of the Oakland Tribune, is engagement editor in the Digital First West Region, with newsrooms throughout California.

Dan Petty, social media editor of the Denver Post, is engagement editor for the Digital First Central region, with newsrooms in Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio, Texas and Utah.

Ivan Lajara, life editor of the Daily Freeman in Kingston, N.Y., is engagement editor for the Digital First East Region, which includes newsrooms in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont and West Virginia.

They will report on engagement matters in all MediaNews Group and Journal Register Company newsrooms to Steve Buttry, Digital First Media’s Director of Community Engagement and Social Media.

Jenkins will work on a variety of projects across the company to help newsrooms speed the Digital First transition, improve their journalism and execute Digital First Media’s digital strategy. Each of the regional engagement editors will remain based in his current newsroom, with a mix of local and regional duties, reporting to their local editors, as well as Buttry. They will work with local news staffs throughout their regions to advance their recruitment of local bloggers into Community Media Labs, launching community newsrooms, use of social media and other efforts to engage communities.

Jenkins led social strategy and community engagement for political content for Huffington Post beginning in 2011. In 2010, she became social media editor for TBD, a local news startup covering the Washington metro area. She held a similar position with the Cincinnati Enquirer from 2007 to 2010. Jenkins also worked as an online news producer for nearly three years beginning in 2004 for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. She taught journalism at the graduate level at Georgetown University and has trained journalists in digital skills in Russia, Egypt and at various conferences and seminars in the United States.

Reynolds was named in December as senior editor for community engagement for MediaNews Group’s Bay Area News Group. He began his career at the Oakland Tribune as a Chips Quinn Scholar intern in 1995 and worked his way through the ranks, serving as editor-in-chief from 2007 to 2011. He was one of the lead editors on the award-winning Chauncey Bailey Project investigating the assassination of the former Oakland Post editor and Tribune reporter. Reynolds was among the lead editors for the "Not Just a Number" project examining youth violence in Oakland, which won the Knight Award for Public Service from the Online News Association in 2006. He is co-founder of the Tribune's Oakland Voices project, a community journalism program run in partnership with the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. He is an at-large board member of the Associated Press Media Editors.

Lajara, a native of Peru, has worked at Journal Register Company’s Daily Freeman 11 years. He leads the Daily Freeman’s digital efforts, which have included award-winning live-tweeting of murder trials and livestreams of political debates and musical and cultural events. Lajara is editor of the weekly Preview entertainment magazine. He was named Editor of the Year in 2006 by the Suburban Newspapers Association of America and was named one of the top 25 young journalists in the nation by Editor & Publisher in 2011. He is a member of the Journal Register Company’s ideaLab and hosts the weekly #DFMchat (formerly #JRCchat) on Twitter.

Petty started his journalism career at the Pennington Post, a Journal Register Company weekly newspaper covering parts of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. He has interned with the Associated Press in Richmond, Va., and Stateline.org in Washington, D.C. After an internship at MediaNews Group’s Denver Post, Petty joined the organization full-time in 2009 as social media editor. He has trained journalists in use of social media, blogging, search-engine optimization and other digital media tools at the Post and other MediaNews Group newsrooms. He oversees social media use by the Post staff and works with a team to manage the newsroom’s Facebook, Twitter and other social media accounts.