Jennifer Orsi Named Executive Editor of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune

From a post on heraldtribune.com by Zac Anderson headlined “Jennifer Orsi named executive editor of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and Florida regional editor”:

Veteran Florida newspaper editor Jennifer Orsi is joining the USA TODAY Network as executive editor of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and Florida regional editor, overseeing 18 Gannett-owned daily newspapers in the state.

Orsi, 54, spent three decades at the Tampa Bay Times, starting as a reporter in the Brandon bureau and rising to become the first woman appointed the newspaper’s sole managing editor….

In addition to leading the Herald-Tribune, Orsi will coordinate news coverage for all of Gannett’s Florida newspapers in communities ranging from Pensacola to Tallahassee, Jacksonville, Palm Beach and Naples….

Orsi moved to the Tampa Bay area from Connecticut as a young child…. A seventh-grade journalism class sparked Orsi’s interest in the profession….

While at Indiana University, Orsi had two internships at the Tampa Bay Times, then known as the St. Petersburg Times. She landed a reporting job at the Times  out of college covering the Tampa suburbs and went on to cover county government, local politics and other local news. She later held a variety of editing jobs, including running a suburban bureau and the Tampa bureau, serving as night city editor and as a deputy managing editor over local and business news….

During Orsi’s long tenure with the Times, she coordinated coverage of everything from the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa to Hurricane Irma. The newspaper won many awards, including multiple Pulitzer prizes.

Orsi said she is especially proud that two recent Pulitzers for stories about failing schools and squalid housing conditions for the homeless grew out of local news coverage that she supervised….

Orsi plans to keep pushing for journalism with impact in her new jobs overseeing the Sarasota newsroom and Gannett newsrooms statewide. Gannett also owns newspapers in Daytona Beach, Fort Myers, Gainesville, Ocala, Lakeland, Fort Walton Beach, Panama City, Melbourne, St. Augustine, Port St. Lucie, Winter Haven and Leesburg….

Orsi also is excited to be back in an industry that she views as providing an important public service.

“I feel like the extraordinary circumstances of the past year or so have shown us how vitally important it is to have a reliable credible source of news and information in our communities,” she said. “To be able to continue to build on a legacy that the Sarasota paper already has for doing that, and to join such a talented team whose members are dedicated to that, it was just an opportunity I couldn’t really turn down.”