Sign of Times? Online Newspaper Vet Goes to TV

It must be tough running online newspaper sites right now. After many years of strong annual growth in the 30 percent range, online revs are beginning to plateau. And in most markets, the rest of the ship has begun to go down, or at least, taken on water.

If you were running the online operations for Seattle Times Co., and were given the chance to run the Internet ops for a TV station group that includes a premier station in town, would you go? TV station revenues on the Web, of course, are still in a heavy growth stage.

Nancy Bruner is doing just that. She’s run The Seattle Times sites for 10 years, where she and her talented team (including Patricia Lee Smith) launched NWSource, a groundbreaking newspaper shopping site. But now she’s joining Fisher Interactive at the end of the month. Bruner previously was at US West Interactive.

At Fisher, she’ll get to work with Pegasus News founder and President Mike Orren. Pegasus, the hyper-local city guide and news site in Dallas, was acquired by Fisher a couple of months ago. It is likely to undergo further development in Dallas while being integrated into some of Fisher’s 12 TV station sites.