Big news from Down East as Lisa DeSisto, the CEO and publisher of the Maine Trust for Local News, has announced that she’s resigning. The Maine Trust is a nonprofit that owns the state’s largest daily paper, the Portland Press Herald, as well as three other daily papers and a number of weeklies. The papers themselves are for-profit entities.
According to Press Herald reporter Hannah LaClaire, DeSisto will leave by the end of the year. She’ll be replaced by Stefanie Manning, a Maine Trust executive who will assume the title of managing director. DeSisto said in a statement:
I have cherished my time leading this organization and working alongside such dedicated and talented colleagues. Serving our readers and supporting this incredible team has been a privilege. Representing the Maine Trust for Local News in the community has been an honor I will carry with me.
DeSisto leaves amid a time of transition at the Maine Trust. Longtime executive editor Steve Greenlee took a position at Boston University earlier this year and was replaced by Carolyn Fox, who had previously been managing editor of the Tampa Bay Times.
DeSisto hosted Ellen Clegg and me for a talk about our book, “What Works in Community News,” back in October. Ellen and I both have previous connections with Lisa — she and I were colleagues in the 1990s at The Boston Phoenix, where she was an executive in the advertising department, and Ellen worked with her after she moved to a top business-side position at The Boston Globe.
Lisa has been in Portland for 12 years and has been through several ownership changes. I visited the Press Herald in late 2015 to talk with her and others about a failed attempt by Boston-area entrepreneur Aaron Kushner to buy the paper in 2012; Kushner, who later bought the Orange County Register in Southern California, was one of the wealthy newspaper owners I profiled in “The Return of the Moguls.”
After Kushner’s bid in Maine fell apart, the paper was acquired by a wealthy Maine businessman named Donald Sussman, who in turn sold it to Reade Brower, a printer, in 2015. Brower sold the Press Herald and other papers he had accumulated to the nonprofit National Trust for Local News in 2023. The Maine Trust is a subsidiary of the National Trust.
Through it all, Lisa has been a source of stability and continuity. There’s no question that she’ll be deeply missed.
The former headquarters of the Portland Press Herald is now a hotel. Photo (cc) 2023 by Dan Kennedy.
News publishers like sponsored content for a variety of reasons. In a sea of nearly worthless programmatic ads, sponsored content — also known as native advertising — commands a premium price. The articles, if they are well-done, attract eyeballs. They evade ad-blockers, too. At worst, they can be confused with actual editorial content, but with proper disclosure they raise no more in the way of ethical issues than does a standard banner ad.
Earlier this week, a conservative website called the Maine Wire reported the existence of a $117,000 deal cut by the Maine Trust for Local News to publish sponsored content from the state’s Department of Education. The nonprofit Trust owns the Portland Press Herald and a number of smaller daily and weekly papers. The Maine Wire article says in part:
The payment will cover the publication and promotion of six articles portraying the Maine DOE in a flattering light. It’s unclear whether the state-sponsored “news” content will be written by someone from the Maine DOE or employees of the Maine Trust for Local News newspapers.
The taxpayer-funded “marketing campaign” will highlight the Maine DOE’s “use of federal emergency relief funding,” and will aim to “promote the best learning opportunities for all Maine students” and to “inspire ‘trust in our schools,’” according to the document.
Scare quotes aside, though, this is just garden-variety sponsored content. Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute looked into it (scroll down to “Sponsored content controversy in Maine”) and found the deal to be pretty unremarkable, writing:
The Wire chose to ignore that article-style pieces became a staple of digital advertising more than a decade ago. The Federal Trade Commission has taken the position that as long as sponsorship is disclosed, it’s not deception (though violations, especially among influencers, are not uncommon).
The format is typically employed by companies burnishing their image, but there is no obvious reason the door should be slammed shut on a self-promoting government placement.
In fact, the first of six such sponsored ads that the Trust will be running says “Sponsored” and “Content provided by Maine Department of Education” right at the top. The article, which appeared in the Press Herald, is also in a different typeface from what the paper normally uses. Edmonds passed along a statement from Trust chief executive Lisa DeSisto as well:
Branded content is a growing piece of our advertising product offerings. We’ve attracted new customers to the Maine Trust by offering branded content products, and we think they’re an important part of our revenue goals. In developing these products, nothing has been more important to us than creating a clear distinction between branded content advertising and our journalism.
Michael Socolow, a journalism professor at the University of Maine, initially raised some concerns about the arrangement on Twitter but then backed off once he saw the actual ad. “Turns out article’s labelled ‘Sponsored Content’ right at top, it’s not written by any journalists, and it’s actually a terrible piece of advertorial/propaganda [poorly written, boring + too long, and uninteresting]. So I’m less concerned,” he wrote.
Now, I do think it’s fair to ask whether a news organization ought to be accepting sponsored content from a government agency — but that horse left the barn quite a while ago. For instance, I searched the sponsored content at The Boston Globe to see if it had any similar arrangements, and it took me no time at all to find a native ad from Vermont Tourism, which a little additional searching revealed is a state agency. That said, it wouldn’t be a bad idea for the Trust to have a conversation with its journalists about what practices are and aren’t acceptable, and to listen to any concerns the newsroom might raise.
Finally, a disclosure: The Maine Trust is sponsoring an event for Ellen Clegg and me in Portland on Oct. 15 to talk about our book, “What Works in Community News.” (You can register here.) I worked with DeSisto at The Boston Phoenix and, later, Ellen and DeSisto were colleagues at The Boston Globe; we both think highly of her. You can make of that what you will. But Edmonds and Socolow have no such ties, and their conclusions are the same as mine.
The Poynter Institute has published an in-depth report on the state of journalism that’s aimed at injecting some optimism into what often seems like a dreary and depressing landscape. The report is called “OnPoynt,” and the introduction says in part:
[D]oom-and-gloom narratives that cherry pick stories of vulture capitalists, job loss statistics and print closures are incomplete or out of date, painting an inaccurate picture of a news and information ecosystem on life support.
OnPoynt aims to offer a forward-minded look at the state of journalism and the news industry that propels the story by considering trends related to creative product ideas, audience growth strategies and traction around revenue, artificial intelligence and innovation.
The entire report is worth reading, but I want to take note of two sections — one on trust, the other on local news.
The narrative that the public has lost trust in the news media overlooks the reality that people actually have a fair amount of faith in their local news outlets. For instance, a survey that Poynter conducted found that 83% of respondents believe that local news organizations “are at least somewhat important to the well-being of their local community,” and 71% say local journalists are reporting the news accurately. The numbers are only slightly lower for Republicans than they are for Democrats. The report continues:
Audiences will spend more time and money with sources of information that they “trust.” Civic participation will grow as trust in media grows. Accessible local news improves democratic participation.
This really goes to the heart of a central argument that Ellen Clegg and I explore in our book, “What Works in Community News.” National news organizations, especially the cable outlets, are contributing to polarization and to the decline of civic life. Rebuilding the local news infrastructure could help lower the temperature and help people on different sides of the political divide find common ground.
Fortunately, as Poynter says in its section on local news, there are viable alternatives to corporate-owned chain newspapers, which in too many cases are being hollowed out and leaving communities bereft. Poynter identifies local television news, public radio and the rise of philanthropy in supporting nonprofit community journalism as countervailing trends.
“The local news ecosystem is complex. The loss of traditional local news journalism jobs should not be minimized, but the battle cry of ‘saving local news’ is oversimplified,” the report says. “Hundreds of news or niche information sites have started in recent years. Many are independent, many represent new offerings from existing companies.”
Poynter’s survey also shows that people who are engaged in civic life are more likely to be local news consumers — a finding that goes back at least to Robert Putnam’s landmark 2000 book “Bowling Alone.”
There’s a lot of bad news out there, and it would be pollyannaish to pretend otherwise. But it’s crucial to look at success stories, figure out why they’re working and encourage people to emulate them in their own communities.
Transition at The Colorado Sun
The Colorado Sun, a digital startup that we profile in “What Works in Community News,” announced a major reorganization last week. Editor and co-founder Larry Ryckman will now be the publisher, with senior editor and fellow co-founder Dana Coffield moving up to the editor’s slot.
In an announcement, the Sun said the shuffle was motivated in part by the Sun’s transition from a for-profit public benefit company to a nonprofit organization, which has created “new responsibilities for its senior leadership.”
The Sun was founded six years ago by 10 journalists at The Denver Post who quit out of frustration over repeated cuts by the paper’s hedge-fund owner, Alden Global Capital. Today the Sun employs two dozen staff members.
Ryckman was a guest on our “What Works” podcast in July. Coffield, who came from a background of small newspapers in the rural parts of Colorado, told us for our book that she was proud of the Sun’s role in reporting stories from across the state that can be republished for free in smaller newspapers.
“We’ve been able to provide quality journalism to some of the smallest outlets in the state,” she said. “I like being able to contribute to a healthy ecosystem for smaller newspapers, since I came from that heritage.”
A new editor in Maine
The Maine Trust for Local News, a nonprofit organization that publishes the for-profit Portland Press Herald and about a dozen other daily and weekly newspapers, has named an executive editor to oversee the trust’s holdings.
Carolyn Fox, currently managing editor of the Tampa Bay Times, will start her new position on Oct. 7. Her appointment was announced by Lisa DeSisto, the trust’s publisher and CEO.
Like the Maine papers, the Tampa Bay Times is a for-profit paper owned by a nonprofit — the Poynter Institute.
“The nonprofit model is so exciting in part because you can make that pitch to people that the journalism matters — what we do matters — and then sell that,” Fox told Eric Russell of the Press Herald. (I’m quoted as well.)
Fox will succeed Steve Greenlee, who’s moved on to a faculty position at Boston University. The organizational structure will be different in that Greenlee was the editor of just the Press Herald, whereas Fox will oversee all of the trust’s holdings.
Recently Max Tani of Semafor and Richard J. Tofel, who writes the newsletter Second Rough Draft, have raised questions about whether the folks involved in the purchase of the Portland Press Herald and its affiliated Maine papers from the retiring publisher, Reade Brower, have been sufficiently transparent in disclosing who the funders are.
The papers were bought during the summer by the National Trust for Local News, a nonprofit that has been involved in several acquisitions aimed at preventing legacy newspapers from falling into the hands of corporate chain ownership. In Maine, Tani and Tofel argue, the billionaire George Soros may have been more deeply involved than was previously known, while the involvement of another billionaire who was reportedly part of the purchase, Hansjörg Wyss, hasn’t been disclosed at all.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this is essentially a non-issue. Tofel himself notes that the previous management of the papers remains in place and that “invocations of Soros as a sort of bogeyman have long since become a principal way to dog whistle anti-Semitism; it ranks right up there with ‘globalist’ in this rhetoric.”
More to the point, the Press Herald itself followed up on Tani’s reporting, and it sounds like the full story behind the purchase will be revealed soon. (I was interviewed for the piece, written by reporter Rachel Ohm.) Longtime Press Herald publisher Lisa DeSisto, now the CEO and publisher of the Maine Trust for Local News, the nonprofit that has been set up to own the papers, is quoted as saying, “We want to make more of a splash and have a more comprehensive introduction to the Maine Trust rather than just [putting things out in] pieces. We’re really waiting to announce a broader vision.”
Added Will Nelligan, who’s the Maine project lead for the National Trust: “We will announce that coalition of Maine funders when we announce the Maine Trust.”
No, the announcement didn’t come in September, as had been originally promised. But is that really a big deal as long as disclosure is on its way? The papers themselves, by the way, remain for-profit entities, so it seems unlikely that either the National Trust or the Maine Trust will be looking for ongoing support to prop them up.
If you take a look at the National Trust’s funders, you’ll see that, in addition to Soros’ Open Society Foundations, they include a number of respected journalism funders, including the Knight Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Democracy Fund and the Lenfest Institute, which owns The Philadelphia Inquirer. The Gates Family Foundation, by the way, is a Colorado-based philanthropy that has nothing to do with Bill or Melinda Gates.
When I asked University of Maine journalism professor Michael Socolow to weigh in, he emailed me comments he had previously posted on X/Twitter, noting that Tani and Tofel had emphasized Soros’ and Wyss’ liberal politics but adding they had been unable to back up whether that was relevant. (To be fair, Tofel seemed less impressed with that angle than Tani.) Socolow said:
I’m not sure there’s a story here. Neither Tani nor Tofel specify the ways the new ownership has altered editorial content. They’re seemingly insinuating that the new ownership purchased the newspapers to shape news content for partisan political reasons. But how much disclosure and transparency about Reade Brower and his business interests did these publications publish before the sale? It’s not clear to me why there needs to be a new, and apparently higher, standard simply because the ownership is now non-profit versus commercial. If evidence emerges that the sort of meddling Tani and Tofel insinuate begins occurring, then I agree we have an important story. But we’re not there yet.
Let me end with a couple of disclosures: Ellen Clegg and I interviewed National Trust co-founder and CEO Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro on our podcast, “What Works: The Future of Local News,” and we wrote about the National Trust’s successful effort to save two dozen community newspapers in the Denver suburbs in our forthcoming book, “What Works in Community News.” I worked with DeSisto at The Boston Phoenix and Ellen later got to know her at The Boston Globe, and we both consider her to be a first-rate, ethical news executive.
The purchase of the Press Herald papers by the National Trust was unalloyed good news, and it sounds like the questions that Tani and Tofel have raised will be answered soon.
The news about the news doesn’t get much better than this: The National Trust for Local News will acquire Maine’s Portland Press Herald and its affiliated four daily newspapers and 17 weeklies. The deal was announced earlier today. Although not all details of the sale are known, early indications are that the papers will remain for-profit entities under nonprofit ownership. The papers, known collectively as Masthead Maine, will continue to be managed by chief executive officer Lisa DeSisto.
According to Rachel Ohm of the Press Herald, the National Trust emerged as the buyer after the recently formed Maine Journalism Foundation, or MaineJF, fell short in its efforts to raise enough money to buy the papers on its own. MaineJF, also a nonprofit, then started working with the National Trust. Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, the co-founder and CEO of the National Trust, told the Press Herald that the two organizations are continuing to work together, although it was unclear what ongoing role the foundation might have. The foundation, by the way, would have reorganized the papers as nonprofits; based on Ohm’s story, it sounds like that’s no longer on the table.
The papers were purchased in 2018 by Reade Brower, a printer who acquired them from billionaire owner Donald Sussman. Brower built a reputation as a solid steward who nevertheless was not averse to making cuts in order to stave off losses. Hansen Shapiro would not disclose what the National Trust paid, but it’s likely that Brower could have gotten more from a corporate chain looking to swoop in, gut newsrooms and squeeze out revenues. If that’s the case, then Brower deserves credit for putting his legacy above making every possible dollar.
The independently owned Bangor Daily News remains the only daily in the state that isn’t part of Masthead Maine.
The governance structure of the new ownership has yet to be announced, and maybe even the principals don’t quite know what it will look like yet. The National Trust is best known for rescuing a group of weekly and monthly papers in suburban Denver back in 2021, and now owns them in conjunction with The Colorado Sun, a well-regarded for-profit digital startup.
The Boston Globe will partner with the Portland Press Herald on an unspecified investigative reporting project, according to the trade publication Editor & Publisher. The partnership will produce “a multi-part investigative report that will be published by both organizations this fall.”
The project will be funded by the Spotlight Investigative Journalism Fellowship, established by the Globe and Participant Media, the producers of the movie “Spotlight.” Grants of up to $100,000 are awarded to reporters or teams of reporters. This is the first time the Globe has partnered with another news organization. The series will be published by both papers.
Scott Allen, the Globe’s assistant managing editor for projects, declined in an email to say what the topic of the reporting would be — but when I noted that the Press Herald reporter who’ll be working on the project, Penelope Overton, covers the lobster industry, Allen said that “we expect to take full advantage of her considerable expertise.”
There are some interesting intersections between the Globe and the Press Herald. The E&P story points out that Press Herald managing editor Steve Greenlee worked at the Globe for 12 years. But it goes beyond that. Lisa DeSisto, who is chief executive officer of the Press Herald and its sister papers, was previously a high-ranking business-side executive at the Globe (and, before that, a colleague of mine at The Boston Phoenix).
The two papers also have the distinction of having been pursued by Boston-area businessman Aaron Kushner, who tried to buy the Globe in 2010 and nearly succeeded in buying the Press Herald in 2012. Kushner and a team of investors ended up purchasing the Orange County Register in Southern California later in 2012. They spent considerable resources in building up the Register and acquiring and launching other papers — only to tear it all down in short order when the hoped-for revenues failed to materialize. Today the Register is owned by the notorious hedge fund Alden Global Capital. (I tell the story of Kushner’s newspaper adventures in my book “The Return of the Moguls.”)
Today the Press Herald is owned by Reade Brower, a printer, who’s built a small chain of Maine newspapers and gets generally high marks for his stewardship. The Globe, of course, is owned by billionaires John and Linda Henry.
Those of us who have followed the transition of newspapers from print to free digital and, now, to paid digital have long predicted that seven-day print will eventually morph into one weekend print edition supplemented by digital the rest of the week.
Last week the Portland Press Herald announced it would take a step in that direction, eliminating its Monday print edition starting in March. Like many papers, the Press Herald has been emphasizing paid digital, so a cutback on print should be seen as an inevitable next step rather than the beginning of the end.
Still, I was curious about the decision to cut print on Monday. Among those of us who follow such things, the speculation usually involves eliminating the Saturday paper, or publishing the big Sunday paper on Saturday as an all-weekend edition. (The Sunday edition of the Press Herald is called the Maine Sunday Telegram.)
According to the Press Herald’s latest filing with the Alliance for Audited Media, the Saturday print edition is slightly larger than the Monday edition (25,450 to 25,358). The Saturday edition, though, gets an artificial boost — the Press Herald offers a four-day Thursday-through-Sunday print subscription as a cheaper alternative to seven-day (soon to be six-day) print. Paid Sunday print circulation is 40,091.
Still, anyone who’s paged through the Monday edition of a local daily newspaper knows that advertising on that day is virtually non-existent. So, for a variety of reasons, the Press Herald probably made the right choice.
Also, Kris Olson offers this:
Monday editions mean employees working on Sundays, which means time-and-a-half, right? If so, from a payroll perspective, eliminating a Monday issue gives you the biggest bang for your buck.
The Press Herald isn’t the first daily paper to cut print days. It’s worth watching, though, because the owner, Reade Brower (who also owns most of the daily newspapers in Maine as well as a few weeklies), seems committed to coming up with a long-term strategy for economic sustainability. Press Herald publisher Lisa DeSisto tells her paper that the Monday move will enable the paper to avoid cutting staff.
Perhaps he might consider emulating the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, which last year eliminated print except on Sundays and gave its paid subscribers free iPads so they could continue to read the paper online.
The crisis in local news won’t be solved all at once. Rather, it will be solved community by community as entrepreneurial-minded journalists seek to fill the gaps left behind by corporate-owned chain newspapers. Here are three new reasons to be optimistic.
In Maine, the Portland Phoenix, the last of the great Phoenix alternative weeklies, is scheduled to relaunch this coming Wednesday under new ownership after ceasing publication earlier this year. The free paper and website are part of New Portland Publishing Co., headed by Marian McCue and Karen Wood.
The relaunch was announced Oct. 22 by Marian McCue and Karen Wood, principals of New Portland Publishing Co. McCue will serve as the editor and Mo Mehlsak, most recently executive editor of The Forecaster, American Journal and Lakes Region Weekly newspapers, will be managing editor.
“While we always admired the energy of the Phoenix, and the strong entertainment coverage, our focus will be more on news and analysis, and in-depth investigative stories that explore the challenges facing this area,” McCue said in a press release announcing the new venture.
Added Wood: “We’ve had a very positive response from early conversations with advertisers and people in the community. We are convinced that a free distribution newspaper will be successful, and provide an effective forum for our advertisers.”
The new Portland Phoenix has a stiff challenge ahead of it in the form of the daily Portland Press Herald, the flagship of a Maine-based chain. The Press Herald is considerably more robust than papers owned by the national chains, and the publisher — Lisa DeSisto — is an alumnus of The Boston Phoenix who knows how to put out a paper oriented toward arts and entertainment. (Note: I worked with Lisa at the Phoenix for several years.)
Still, it’s fantastic news that someone is going to try to revive the Phoenix in Portland, which is the sort of smaller city that ought to be able to support an alt-weekly.
***
Bill Wasserman is one of Eastern Massachusetts’ legendary local newspaper owners. Founder of the Ipswich Chronicle, he built that into a chain of about a dozen North Shore papers and sold them in 1986. Those papers eventually were acquired by GateHouse Media, and Wasserman has been grousing about what happened to them ever since. Earlier this year, GateHouse got rid of the Ipswich Chronicle as a standalone title, merging it with two other papers.
In an interview for CommonWealth Magazine in 2008, Wasserman told me the main problem with corporate ownership was a failure to understand that, even in the best of times, community journalism is little more than a break-even proposition. “I was paid a salary, which was modest,” said Wasserman. “The reward was not in the profit. The reward was having a lot of fun putting out a community paper.”
Now Wasserman has gone back to the future, lending his expertise as a consultant and ad salesman to a start-up called Ipswich Local News — a free paper and website that is seeking nonprofit status. The editor and publisher is John Muldoon.
Jenn Lord Paluzzi holds the distinction of being laid off by two national chains — GateHouse (at The MetroWest Daily News) and MediaNews Group (at The Sun of Lowell). Now she’s launched a community news site in her hometown of Grafton called Grafton Common that is loaded with local news.
Some years back, Lord Paluzzi was involved in a startup called Greater Grafton. But that venture ended up getting sold to a chain of local websites that ended up going out of business. Best of luck to her as she goes off on her own once again.
Stephen King is no longer singing the local-book-review blues. Photo (cc) 2013 by the USO.
This is a hoot. After the Portland Press Herald made it known that it would drop freelance-written reviews of local books as a cost-saving measure, Maine’s favorite author, Stephen King, lodged a protest on Twitter and urged his followers to do the same.
The Press Herald responded that if King could persuade at least 100 people to buy digital subscriptions, they would restore the reviews to the Sunday edition, known as the Maine Sunday Telegram:
These are challenging times for newspapers. But here’s an offer: If you can get 100 of your followers to buy digital subscriptions to the @PressHerald, we will reinstate the local book reviews immediately. Use the promo code KING. Deal? https://t.co/5eoqjQ2psVhttps://t.co/8QfGJOXdjP
It worked, and the book reviews will return next Sunday. “It’s a Stephen King story with a happy ending,” publisher Lisa DeSisto told The New York Times. (I worked with DeSisto at The Boston Phoenix many years ago, and she makes a cameo in “The Return of the Moguls.”)
Let me pour just a small amount of lukewarm water on all this. First, cutting local book reviews without consulting readers makes as little sense as, oh, slashing the Sunday funnies. Second, I hope this doesn’t become a habit. Hey, let’s tell everyone we’re going to stop covering restaurants unless we can sell 1,000 more subscriptions.
Still, this is a great story. I’m glad King’s influence did the trick.
Clarification: There was no public announcement that the Press Herald was planning to drop local reviews, but freelance contributors were made aware of it. I’ve rewritten the top to reflect that.
Monday update: Publishers Weekly has an especially detailed account of what went down. Also, King’s gambit did not save jobs elsewhere at the Press Herald:
Some related news: book reviews may be saved, but local data journalism is not. The Press Herald gave me (and several others in the newsroom) a pink slip on Friday. https://t.co/Arw56EnBZy
Big news coming out of the Boston Globe today: Lisa DeSisto, chief advertising officer of Boston Globe Media and general manager of Boston.com, is leaving to become chief executive officer of MaineToday Media and publisher of the Portland Press Herald.
I worked with Lisa at the Phoenix back in the 1990s, and I think I can safely say that the Globe will miss her. Just recently, Lisa came up with the idea of launching an online radio station at Boston.com, RadioBDC, featuring several folks who had been laid off when the Phoenix sold WFNX Radio. WFNX continues online as well, and is formally relaunching on Oct. 31.
Here’s the announcement from Globe publisher Christopher Mayer:
I’d like to update everyone on a change in the leadership of the Globe. After 17 years, Lisa DeSisto will be leaving the Globe to become chief executive officer of MaineToday Media and the publisher of the Portland Press Herald. Lisa’s contributions to the Globe and Boston.com have been enormous, and she will be missed.
Fortunately, she has a strong team in place. Jason Kissell, Jane Bowman, and Tom Cole will report to me. Jason Kissell, vice president for advertising, will take on all advertising sales responsibilities, including digital advertising operations. Jane Bowman, executive director of advertising, will retain her business development responsibilities and add oversight of marketing and RadioBDC. Tom Cole, executive director of business development, will continue in the role of strategic planning and development for advertising.
Lisa will be with us for the next two weeks. During that time, she will help with the transition. Though we will miss her creativity, enthusiasm, and friendship, this is a great opportunity for her. Please join me in wishing her well in her new role.
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