LA Times hires Barron’s Hite as newsroom project manager

Los Angeles Times executive editor Norman Pearlstine, deputy managing editor Sewell Chan and assistant managing editor Len De Groot made the following announcement:

Brittany Hite, who was an online pioneer at the Wall Street Journal for a decade and is now the digital editor at Barron’s, will join us Feb. 25 as our newsroom project manager, working on our content management system and on digital workflow and processes.

She will report to Matt Ballinger, deputy digital editor, and will also work closely with our growing team of software engineers and product managers. She will help to improve our CMS and to strengthen other tools and processes that support our journalism.

At Barron’s, which she joined last year, Brittany helped to oversee a website relaunch and to train a 50-person staff on a new CMS. She brought together Barron’s newsroom and product, engineering and design teams to develop new storytelling tools, fix problems and improve workflow. She promoted the magazine’s reporting via push alerts, Apple News and Flipboard.

Brittany built her career at the Wall Street Journal. She joined the newspaper in 2007 as a news assistant in New York and then — after a two-year stint at a Beijing-based publication, China Economist — served as an online editor in Hong Kong, as a multimedia editor in Beijing, and as mobile editor for Asia, back in Hong Kong. As senior mobile editor in New York in 2016-17, she co-managed a 14-person team that relaunched the Journal’s mobile app and developed its push-alert strategy. She was also part of the 2018 Poynter Leadership Academy for Women in Digital Media, a distinguished cohort that also included Colleen Shalby from our Audience Engagement team.

A native of Scottsburg, Ind., Brittany studied journalism and political science at Indiana University. She speaks intermediate Mandarin and conversational Spanish. She leads the Journal’s softball team and is about to run her fifth marathon, this Sunday in New Orleans.