publisher / By Judy Hodgson

Chron Staffer Named Editor

PRESS RELEASE - Jan. 26, 2011

(Jan. 27, 2011) EUREKA, Calif. - The North Coast Journal has tapped veteran San Francisco Chronicle reporter Tom Abate to lead an ambitious expansion that will fuse the paper’s weekly print edition with its continuous online coverage. The goal is to develop a hybrid form of journalism to better serve readers and advertisers in Humboldt County and perhaps become a model for other alternative papers.

Hank Sims, who has been the Journal’s editor for nearly six years and created its cutting-edge web site, will play a crucial role in this evolutionary process by working with Abate as web editor and senior staff writer while also continuing his popular weekly column, the Town Dandy.
Abate, a daily newspaper reporter since 1992, is returning to Humboldt County where he lived during the 1980s and co-founded the Journal in 1990.

Journal Publisher Judy Hodgson said the new hire represents a major reinvestment in the newspaper and its nascent website.

“While newspapers across the country have been cutting staff and downsizing, the Journal has continued to grow and gain market share. We’ve doubled in size in the last six years,” she said. “To separate the duties of editor and web editor is a natural progression of growth for the paper.”

Abate and his wife, Mia Ousley, founded the North Coast Journal in January 1990 as a monthly. But shortly after they launched the paper Abate, bitten by the daily journalism bug, accepted a series of scholarships to the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. After producing just six editions, Abate and Ousley sold the fledgling monthly to a trio of businesswomen — Hodgson, Carolyn Fernandez and Rose Welsh — who at the time owned an advertising agency called Adworks.

Within two years, that company split. Welsh continued with the ad agency and Hodgson and Fernandez became co-owners of the Journal. In 1998, the monthly was successfully converted to a weekly covering all of Humboldt County. The paper currently has a circulation of 21,000.

Just last year the newspaper celebrated its 20th anniversary and announced that three key employees had become stockholders. They are Sims, Arts and Entertainment Editor Bob Doran and Sales Manager Mike Herring.

The Journal is a member of the California Newspaper Publishers Association and has won more than three dozen awards in the past 10 years. It is also a member of the national Association of Alternative Newsweeklies based in Washington, D.C.

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