Anthony Gimino, respected, award-winning sports journalist, hired by TucsonCitizen.com to head-up sports blogging network

Anthony Gimino

TUCSON – Anthony Gimino has been hired by TucsonCitizen.com to oversee the site’s growing sports blogging network and to assist in the overall administration of the citizen journalism and community blogging website.

Gimino has been administering the sports network since September 2009 through a grant from American University’s J-Lab project. The grant funding expires in December and Gimino will become a full-time employee of TucsonCitizen.com Jan. 3.

Gimino has 20 years experience as a sports reporter in Arizona including eight years at the Arizona Daily Star and four years at the Tucson Citizen. He was the Citizen’s sports columnist when the print version of the Citizen ceased in 2009 but returned to write for the new TucsonCitizen.com a few months later through the J-Lab grant.

Also in January, TucsonCitizen.com will hire a part-time social media editor to help with the site’s social media efforts and to grow TucsonCitizen.com’s audience.

Social media is becoming as important for news and information websites as search engines in connecting readers to content they want to read.

The social media position became necessary due to the rise in prominence of social sites and the increasing audience of TucsonCitizen.com.

In October and December, more people visited TucsonCitizen.com than had been visiting the newspaper’s website in 2008 and 2009 before end of the print version in May 2009. TucsonCitizen.com had more than 430,000 unique visitors in October and more than 520,000 unique visitors and just shy of 1 million page views in November. The newspaper version of the Tucson Citizen averaged about 400,000 unique visitors a month in 2008 and 2009 through May.

Gimino replaces Ryn Gargulinski who had been a reporter for the Tucson Citizen from January 2007 to May 2009 and a site administrator and blogger for TucsonCitizen.com from May 2009 until she resigned last week.

TucsonCitizen.com, a publication of Gannett Co, Inc., is a compendium of blogs that serves as The Voice of Tucson, written by Tucsonans for Tucsonans. The site’s 65 bloggers and citizen journalists provide news, information, opinion, commentary and perspective on the issues, interests and events that affect daily life in the Old Pueblo

This entry was posted on Monday, December 6th, 2010 at 2:47 pm and is filed under Site changes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.