JTA: Mission Accomplished

Today’s my last day at JTA.

After two years of making my mark and proving my worth to “the establishment,” I’m moving on to a new position with Repair the World, a recently launched Jewish service initiative that aims to make doing community service as ubiquitous as having a bar or bat mitzvah.

Though I’m very excited to begin my new job, I am also very grateful to both JTA’s board of directors and its executive director, Mark Joffe, for taking a risk with this punchy blogger and giving me an opportunity to make a truly valuable contribution to both the field of Jewish journalism and the American Jewish community itself.

And while, of course, none of these were solo efforts — I couldn’t have accomplished any of this without a great team, great content, and a great web design & development firm — here’s just a smattering of what I’ve achieved during my tenure:

• Moved from the god-awful, custom content management solution (CMS) considered all but entirely useless by the editorial staff to a state-of-the-art, quasi-custom Expression Engine installation now considered a massive time saver.
• Moved from a fugly table-based HTML layout to a sexy, standards-compliant XHTML/CSS layout with accessibility features.
• Created The Telegraph, Fundermentalist and Capital J (formerly Election Central) blogs, including concepts and brand identities.
• Conceptualized and integrated various user generated content (UGC) features including the Jewish Digg-clone Kavod, the JBlogs aggregator, and Readers Report channel.
• Added working RSS feeds for all sections.
• Employed extensive search engine optimization, which increased JTA’s profile on Google News ten-fold.
• Developed a multimedia content strategy, including podcasts and web video. Commissioned and edited the first 3 dozen JTA news videos.
• Developed and deployed an extensive social media strategy including presences on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, beating every Jewish newspaper on the planet to the punch.
• Improved overall traffic/statistics tracking.
• Improved JTA’s custom products, including a complete redesign of its newsletter generation software and the creation of a custom news ticker generator.
• Integrated a constituent relations management (CRM) suite for newsletter distribution and donor management, whereas there had been none previously.
• Increased advertising revenue with greater real estate, better advertisers, and a more effective sales team.
• Developed a plan for the integration of JTA’s 92 years worth of archival data, including advanced interactive features, coming in 2010.
• Developed an advanced asset management system for the distribution and archiving of syndicated content, replacing an outdated system of manual distribution and archiving employed for over a decade.
• Most importantly: Developed the digital media strategy that will define JTA’s role in the online market for the coming decade. Based upon my ShulShopper concept, the forthcoming initiative (codenamed JMetros) will set the standard for Jewish content and interactivity online.

The bottom line? From the day I started to the day of my departure, JTA’s website traffic has increased 1½ times over. Ie., the number of visitors to JTA’s website today is more than double what it was when I began two years ago.

That’s what I call “mission accomplished.”

Best of luck to my colleagues. I look forward to seeing what comes next from JTA.

Tags: design, development, journalism, web