IMA to work on ‘revitalization,’ names Ericson as director
Integrated Media Association, aconvener of web-minded public broadcasters for more than a decade, has announced a “revitalization initiative” and the hiring of a new executive director, Jeannie Ericson, who headed development of the Lens on Atlanta web portal for Public Broadcasting Atlanta (WPBA/WABE-FM) since January 2009.
IMA is getting a new start based at the Atlanta station operator, under the wing of Milton C. Clipper Jr., president of PBA, who is IMA’s chair. CPB is supporting the relaunch with more than $400,000 in assistance over two years, Clipper says.
“If IMA went away,” he says, “we’d have to replicate it with a new organization to do what IMA was designed to do.”
The association has been largely inactive for months since the departure of its founding CEO, Mark Fuerst, who led the creation of the group and produced a series of annual conferences between 2003 and 2009. Fuerst is now heading Public Media Metrics, which analyzes web audiences, and manages the Public Media Innovation Grant Fund for CPB.
The recession hobbled IMA’s annual conference in 2009 and foreclosed its return in 2010, but Clipper says the event will be revived early next year.
Ericson, who coordinated multimedia standards among Coca-Cola and its bottlers for five years and then consulted with IBM clients on web development for a decade, was director of the Atlanta station’s new online community Lens on Atlanta. “Our charge today,” Clipper said in a release, “is to redefine what it means to be a public media service. We must be smart enough to sense changing needs and have the inventive courage to meet those needs — enabling us not only to make the digital transition but to also transition ourselves to provide new, viable services that our audiences will continue to rely upon for education, news, information and entertainment.”
Just before moving to IMA last month, Ericson wrapped up her tenure at Public Broadcasting Atlanta by restructuring and relaunching PBA’s Lens on Atlanta.
Succeeding her as head of Lens is Wayne Sharp, who formerly headed IT for Public Broadcasting Atlanta.
Web page posted Nov. 4, 2010
Published in Current's People column.
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