It’s been a tumultuous time in the Valley News newsroom since this spring, but this week, the newspaper signaled it’s trying to calm things down. Its badly depleted reporting and editing ranks grew with the addition of new reporting and photography intern Sophia Sahni and, on Wednesday, a new managing editor, Allison Rogers. Yet even the stirrings of a turnaround were marked by news of another departure: Newsroom veteran Geoff Hansen, who’d shifted to parent company Newspapers of New England, gave two weeks’ notice on Monday.
Rogers, who grew up in Lebanon, is no stranger to the Upper Valley’s writing and editing scene. She was a staff reporter at the Connecticut Valley Spectator—the regional newspaper that ran from 2002 until 2009, when its parent company, Eagle Publications, filed for bankruptcy and closed it down—and was founding editor of the quarterly Lebanon Times. She also did long stints in media relations for King Arthur Flour and Vital Communities, then moved over to the web publication Heavy.com, where she finished out as managing editor of EntertainmentNow.com. “I'm so honored and excited about this,” she writes in an email about her new position.
Sahni, meanwhile, is a student at Dartmouth and was a photo intern in its Office of Communications. Her Thursday Valley News story on the Tunbridge World’s Fair is accompanied by her photos.
Meanwhile, Hansen’s departure caps an extraordinary stretch of losses for the paper, during which virtually its entire senior reporting, editing, and photography staff—with the exception of community editor Liz Sauchelli—walked out the door, along with a pair of younger reporters. Hansen began his work for the paper in 1989, right after college. He was a longtime photographer for the paper, as well as its photo editor and then its managing editor. This spring, he left that post to become a paginator for parent company Newspapers of New England, responsible for page layout and design.
In an email, Martin Frank, the paper’s former top editor and, before that, its longtime editorial page editor, writes about Hansen: “Besides being an excellent photographer himself, putting together and managing a talented photo department, and designing sharp front pages, Geoff ran a photography internship program that recruited and mentored aspiring news photographers from all over the world. Geoff’s skills and judgment were instrumental not only in making the Valley News photojournalism what it was, but also in shaping news coverage in general. He was a superb journalist and valued colleague.”
For her part, Rogers says the newsroom is poised to grow again, with “several staff writer hires in the pipeline.”
