About Me

Hi. My name is Marie K. Shanahan and I’m a senior online producer deputy online editor of courant.com, the website of The Hartford Courant, Connecticut’s largest daily newspaper.

In 1999, I left my job as a Hartford Courant city desk reporter to join the newspaper’s online staff. Back then, my print journalism peers reacted to my career choice with collective disapproval. Why in the world would I want to sit in front of a computer all day and mess with HTML code and Photoshop?  The print editors turned up their noses at the web as a place to deliver journalism and treated me like a pariah. The internet was clunky and obscure, and it was giving away the news for free. Online journalism, they said, was a bad career move. 

How times have changed. I’ve since witnessed a complete turnaround in the newsroom’s attitude toward the web. Those same print journalists are now scrambling to use the web to expand the newspaper’s storytelling capabilities. They’ve gotten the message: readers don’t have to consume static words and pictures on paper anymore. More and more people – especially young people – prefer to participate in an “interactive” news experience of words, photo galleries, video, audio, blogs, hyperlinks and message boards.

The position of “online content producer” in 1999 was far from glamorous. I worked from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m., cutting and pasting a select number of stories from the next day’s newspaper. I formatted photos, wrote code, and did my best to work with less-than-dependable computer equipment and database tools. Regardless, I loved the job, the fluidity of the web and the ever-changing technologies. 

So why I am in graduate school?  Despite my 12 years of real-world work experience, I feel I am still missing something. At my workplace, there is neither the time nor the resources for any professional development. I fear that my skills have become too specific to my workplace and the only way I can advance and generalize my skill set is outside my job.  

I’m excited to learn, and network to with many of you in the ICM program. It’s nice not to be a pariah anymore!

Oh, and I live in Broad Brook, CT (that’s a village that’s part of the town of East Windsor) with my daughter, our moody cat named Iris, and three goldfish. 

Deep down, I really wish we were all in Hawaii.