Jim Romenesko retiring from Poynter

Jim Romenesko who maintains the Romenesko page for the Poynter Institute, a Florida-based non-profit school for journalists, is going into semi-retirement.

This change will give him more time to devote to his life and to his other project including jimromenesko.com, his own page he subtitles “a blog about media and other things I’m interested in” It will be officially launched in January 2012.

Starting January 2, 2012, Jim will post “casually” to his namesake blog on Poynter.org. We expect that’ll mean a few items a day.

Jim will continue to tweet frequently about media and tech from the @romenesko account and from the @poynter account.

Poynter hired him in August of 1999, after seeing his MediaGossip.com, a hobby site he started in May of 1999.

Romenesko (born September 16, 1953) also runs the blog Starbucks Gossip, which covers the company Starbucks Coffee. It is one of the more influential websites regarding Starbucks, and has a large following of company employees and customers.

Romenesko graduated from Marquette University and went to work for the Milwaukee Journal, serving as a police reporter for the newspaper. Initially repulsed by the sometimes grisly nature of his work, he would go on to publish the coroner's reports of unusual deaths in a book called Death Log (1981). From 1982 to 1995 he worked as an editor for Milwaukee Magazine, where he wrote features and a popular, award-winning column that covered the local media called "Pressroom Confidential". During this time he also taught journalism courses at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He went on to work as an Internet reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer Press from 1996 to 1999.

From 1989 to 1999, Romenesko ran a newsletter named Obscure Publications which covered fanzines. In 1998 he began the website Obscure Store and Reading Room, which linked to odd news stories, and which earned him the reputation of a "witty Matt Drudge." In May 1999 he began another website, this one covering the media and called Mediagossip.com. It proved a success and later that year was acquired by the Poynter Institute. The site, renamed to Romenesko's MediaNews, was migrated to Poynter's domain and became hugely popular among journalists, helping Poynter get more than 14,000 page views a day in 2000. Romenesko's site, reputed as "the best-known newspaper blog."
[Sources: Poynter, Wikipedia]