Brittany Hite and Justin L. Abrotsky take on new positions for newsroom project management
Los Angeles Times Executive Editor Norman Pearlstine made the following announcement.
Brittany Hite is now our director of newsroom tools and project management.
Hite joined The Times as a newsroom project manager last year after stints at Barron’s in New York and the Wall Street Journal in Beijing, Hong Kong and New York. She has been instrumental in the launch and evolution of Graphene, both in training the newsroom and in coordinating with our partners on the product and engineering teams on the CMS as it develops. She has also helped manage other big newsroom projects, among them investigations and podcasts including “Detective Trapp” and “The Battle of 187.”
In her new role, Hite will replace Len DeGroot as our primary point of contact with product and engineering. She’ll work with them to help create and maintain the tools that help us publish our ambitious journalism, and she’ll lead the team that trains the newsroom on those tools. She’ll also work with product and engineering to identify newsroom needs and opportunities and connect them with key stakeholders as they develop new initiatives. Hite will report to Deputy Managing Editor Julia Turner.
Hite is an Indiana native and has a degree in journalism from Indiana University.
Starting this week, Justin L. Abrotsky joins Hite’s team as a project manager.
Abrotsky has long been the news desk’s guru of documentation, training and more. In his new role, he’ll expand his documentation and training focus, as well as help develop new tools for the newsroom, work on improvements to existing ones, and help manage publishing, communication and deadlines for signature newsroom projects. Abrotsky, who will be joining Dan Gaines on Hite’s team, first joined The Times in 2011 and has worked with every Times CMS since Oxygen (which he encountered when working at the Sun-Sentinel in south Florida). Most recently, he has been a homepage editor on the news desk.
He’s a graduate of the University of Florida (bachelor’s) and USC (master’s), and loves road trips, airline miles and a perfectly on-point emoji.
