Nico Mele is joining the Los Angeles Times as Deputy Publisher

SOURCE: Brett Levy

From: Beutner, Austin M
Sent: Monday, November 17, 2014 7:54 PM
To: AllLosAngelesTimesEmployees
Subject: Nicco Mele

Colleagues –

I am pleased to announce Nicco Mele is joining the Los Angeles Times as Deputy Publisher, reporting to me. He will help lead our efforts to become a world-class digital news and information company.

For more than 132 years, The Times has served our community, our state and our nation with essential news and information. The principal way we reached our customers was, and still is to a great degree, through the physical delivery of a newspaper.

While the paper remains a very important part of our franchise, the next 133 years will be built on the foundation of our digital capabilities. We start from a position of strength, with the largest staff of journalists in the West, a loyal and committee customer base, and a brand known around the world for quality and integrity.

More than ever, as we go forward we will have to find our customers each and every day, tell compelling stories with words, pictures, graphics and video – and do so across an increasing number of digital platforms. We need to grow our digital revenue by offering products and services which provide great value to our subscribers, sponsors and advertisers.

Nicco brings the ideal set of skills and experience to help us meet this challenge. He first rose to prominence as webmaster for Gov. Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign. In the words of Esquire magazine, which named him one of America’s “Best and Brightest,” Nicco and his team “changed presidential politics forever by building a national movement, a campaign community, using [digital] technology.”

Later, Nicco co-founded Echo & Co., now one of the country’s leading digital consulting firms.

He teaches graduate-level courses on the Internet and politics at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and he serves on the board of the Nieman Foundation. He is a co-founder of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival.

Born to Foreign Service parents, Nicco spent his early years in Asia and Africa before graduating from the College of William and Mary in Virginia with a bachelor’s degree in government. Importantly, Nicco is deeply committed to the role journalism plays as a civic conscience in our society.

Please join me in welcoming him.

Austin