Jim Townsend, editorial director and a principal of the AIM Group, is a career journalist, consultant and interactive media pioneer with more than 35 years experience in news management. Townsend joined the AIM Group in 2001 as an analyst and consultant and became a minority owner in 2003. He is based in Houston.

Global team

Jim Townsend

He leads a global team of analysts who report media-industry trends in North and South America, Europe, India, Asia, Australia and other countries in the Pacific Rim.

Keynoter

He has been guest speaker or keynote speaker at various national and international trade-association conventions, speaking on topics ranging from mobile media to print-to-Web classified conversion.

Web pioneer

In the mid-1990s, Townsend was founding editor of Houston Chronicle Interactive (rebranded Chron.com), the Web site of the Houston Chronicle, one of the top major daily newspapers in the United States. Under his leadership, his staff developed digital services and features not adopted by industry peers for nearly a decade, including: community-generated content, citizen journalism, blogs and dedicated video production. In 1996, he won the first-ever New Media Federation Digital Edge award for interactive features for the creation of Virtual Voyager, a three-year experiment in interactive journalism. He was finalist for the NAA New Media Federation Pioneer award in 1997. After 20 years at the Chronicle, he left in 2000 to join Whole Health Networks as SVP, a company that produced Web, print and radio content focused on nutrition and health. There, he developed a national reporting and editing staff, working virtually, including bestselling diet authors and radio personalities.

Community partner

While leading the Chronicle’s digital initiatives, he brokered content-sharing agreements with Houston’s major industries, including NASA and the city’s world-renown medical centers.  From 1996 to 2000, at the request of Johnson Space Center, his team provided live, streaming video of NASA’s shuttle missions. He also created an array of subscriber-only services that tied premium digital content to print subscriptions.

Quoted

Townsend has been quoted on classified- and interactive-media matters in publications worldwide, including Forbes, Financial Times, New York Times and elsewhere.

Things you might not know about Jim

He began his professional career as managing editor of a small daily newspaper in South Texas.

At Pan American University (now part of the University of Texas system), he majored in art before switching to journalism. His interest began when he was staff cartoonist for the university’s newspaper.

His home office supports four guitars, a banjo and and mandolin, but he rarely makes time to play anymore.

Find Jim

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