Link’s Ernie Smith hired by the Washington D.C. Express
Our pal Ernie Smith — late of the Virginian-Pilot’s free tab, Link — has a new gig. We’ve been after him for several days to fill us in.
Ernie writes:
Starting Monday, I’m going to be working at Express, The Washington Post’s free daily newspaper. It’s one of the papers that you pick up before you hit the Metro. I’ll be doing design of news and sports (including front pages), along with a little blogging and whatever else they have you do at free newspapers.
If anyone’s keeping count, that’s my third free daily newspaper in a row. I’ve carved a pretty specific niche in this industry, haven’t I?
Ernie spent about two-and-a-half years at link, starting out in sports and then spreading through the paper. By the time the Pilot pulled the plug on Link, Ernie was designing and illustrating wildly inventive — and extremely well-respected — covers.
Before that, Ernie was part of the team Jim McBee built at Bluffton Today, another wonderfully unpredictable microzoned free daily tab with citizen journalism and a huge web component.
A 2004 graduate of Michigan State, Ernie spent nine months as a temporary designer with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, working on features pages and learning CCI.
The last time we touched bases with young Mr. Smith was on Jan. 1, when Ernie had just begun an experiment in which he attempts to use the kind of short form journalism he mastered at Link and Bluffton Today in a blog environment.
He writes:
ShortFormBlog, by the way, is still going pretty good. It’s been covered here and there by journalism blogs around the world, plus we have a bunch of followers on Twitter. Rawk!
Examples of Ernie’s work:
See more in Ernie’s NewsPageDesigner gallery.
Find Ernie’s ShortFormBlog here.
January 28th, 2009 at 3:56 am
Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!
January 28th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
Good luck, Ernie.