GateHouse loses chief Web strategist

Howard Owens is a great guy and he taught us a lot at GateHouse about blogging, video and best practices. But it's overstating it to say he built our Wicked Local Web presence. He worked out of GateHouse's corporate headquarters in New York and mainly functioned as an adviser to the editors and reporters across Massachusetts who work with a local staff and are directly responsible for their own Wicked Local sites.

They had a strategy and a strategist to determine it?

That's the real news about WickedLocal. Sorry howard, but what a freaking mess you have left over there...

I'm writing as an editor, writer, techie, and most of all, someone who has been somewhat dependent on that convoluted disaster for day-to-day information... good riddance. Make way for someone with relevant experience and a little vision... projects like WickedLocal in its present form explain a lot about why newspapers are more or less doomed if they continue to repeat the same bad habits over and over.