Media Watch

AP's Jane Seagrave takes the helm at The Vineyard Gazette

Associated Press Digital News Executive named Publisher of Vineyard Gazette
Jane Seagrave has wide ranging newspaper experience

By Walter Brooks

When Jerome and Nancy Kohlberg bought the venerable Vineyard Gazette for $2 million last November, we wondered who would be the next publisher. After all, whoever was named would be filling some very big shoes walking in the footsteps of Dick and Jodie Reston as well as Henry Beetle Hough who even managed to stop a bridge being built to the island in 1966.

Jane Seagrave will become publisher in April. Mark Lovewell photo with ex post facto permission.

That shoe has now dropped with the announcement of the appointment of Jane R. Seagrave as the new publisher of the 164-year-old newspaper on Martha's Vineyard.

She is a native of New England and graduated cum laude from Bowdoin College.  Seagrave was a reporter for the AP in Boston for six years and is currently senior vice president and chief revenue officer for The Associated Press in New York City, where she has worked in a series of executive roles since 2003. In 1987 she went to work for Lawyers Weekly Publications, launching weekly newspapers, also enrolling at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where she obtained a master's degree in public  administration in 1989.

That's a pretty heady C.V. for a small island with a winter population estimated at about 15,000 residents. But this vacation mecca for the literate well-off swells to over 75,000 people in July and August, and over half of the Vineyard's 14,621 homes are occupied only in those months.

Retired Gazette publisher Dick Reston came from a newspaper family. Both he and his brother are journalists, and his late father, "Scotty" Reston, was the famous and highly respected Bureau Chief and columnist for the New York Times.

The Gazette has fought against the growing commercialism of the Vineyard and even was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of Hurricane Bob in 1991.

Who is Jane Seagrave?

Jane Seagrave may be just the person to follow these giants. At 56 she's had a long career in the inky trade on both the editorial and business sides, and according to the press release, she has focused heavily on the emerging world of electronic journalism lately.

Jerome Kohlberg is one of the Ks in KKR as in Kohlberg, Kravis & Roberts, one of the world's largest private equity firms specializing in leveraged buyouts. Although he ceased an active role in the business he founded, as recently as 2008 he popped up on Forbes' list of billionaires.

It was difficult for us to imagine Mr. and Mrs. Kohlberg hunkering down in Dick's old office in Edgertown any time soon, and we knew they would find a highly competent newspaper person to run it for them with a superb staff of writers already in place.

It looks like they have found such in Jane Seagrave who will take over the helm at the Gazette in early April. She will need all her skills because this small island has another good weekly newspaper in The Martha's Vineyard Times which is formidable competition. The battle has been between a sort of  'town vs. gown' melee with the Times making significant inroads with the year-round residents while the Gazette has a large off-island circulation.

The Gazette release said that her work has covered a wide range, spanning both print and digital publishing on the news and business sides. She was president and publisher of Philadelphia's daily legal newspaper, The Legal Intelligencer, chief executive officer of localbusiness.com and chief online strategy consultant for American Lawyer Media in New York.

For the past seven years she has been at the Associated Press in New York, as a vice president and director in new media markets and then as a senior vice president in global product development which included introduction of AP Mobile, online video and other digital products. She was named chief revenue officer last year.

Ms. Seagrave is married to John H. Kennedy, a former Boston Globe reporter who is now a journalism professor at La Salle University. They have a daughter in college. They will relocate permanently to the Vineyard from their home outside of Philadelphia, PA.

How did he find her?

An indication of Mr. Kohlberg's level of interest in finding the best possible publisher for the Gazette can be found in the search committee to find his new publisher. The committee was led by Cristine Russell, a senior fellow at the Belfer Center at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and included:

• Alex Jones, former reporter for the New York Times, NPR's 'On The Media', and current director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School;
• Peter Osnos, founder and editor-at-large of PublicAffairs Books, and former reporter and editor for the Washington Post; and
• Geoffrey Cowan, president of the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands and dean emeritus of USC's Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism.

That probably cost him more than the entire year's editorial budgets here at CapeCodTODAY and PlymouthDailyNEWS.