Mark Jurkowitz was the associate director of the Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project until last month, when he left last month to buy the Outer Banks Sentinel in Nags Head, North Carolina. Reached by phone, Jurkowitz said he had for some time “been thinking about doing something like this and, frankly, living somewhere that would be a lot of fun.” (He told The Boston Globe’s Mark Shanahan and Meredith Goldstein “I have not been to work in long pants since I started“).
Jurkowitz described the change as “a lifestyle move and a career move.” He started his career at the Tab papers in the Boston suburbs, he said, where he had “some of the most fun in my life.” The Outer Banks had been a favorite vacation spot, so when he saw that the Sentinel was available he went for it.
Jurkowitz.
The Sentinel came with a four-person full-time staff, two of whom are salespeople. He’s added himself as publisher and his wife, Linda Jurkowitz, to the headcount (Linda, formerly a graphic designer at Education Week, is working at the Sentinel part-time). Jurkowitz said he didn’t have any business experience: “I’m a journalist, what do I know!” But “I certainly have a sense of the newspaper industry and newspaper economics.”
So what are his plans for the paper? A “more robust” digital presence, as well as trying “to beef up the reporting resources we have here.” Attending events, and maybe sponsoring some.
“One of the things you do very early on is you need to become a public face of the paper in the community and literally go on a listening tour,” he said. The listening tour, an “accelerated course in learning about the community,” has begun and speeds up this week.
