CL Atlanta names Henry Scott as new publisher

Henry E. Scott, who joined CL Inc. as vice president and chief marketing officer in February, was named this morning as publisher for CL Atlanta, succeeding Luann Labedz, who announced her departure in March. (No, you haven’t come down with dyslexia —  yours truly is named Scott Henry and his name is Henry Scott, but just call him Hank. Or Old No. 8. I’ll explain in a moment.)

Scott came to Atlanta from New York City, where he ran Gansevoort Media, a strategic planning and product development firm he founded in 1995. He worked with clients as varied as Complex Media, BusinessWeek, the Wall Street Journal, Iceland’s Dagsbrun Media, and Stockholm’s Metro International.

Scott, however, comes from a long career in print and digital journalism, starting with a variety of reporting and editing jobs at newspapers in his native North Carolina and at the Hartford Courant. He then joined the New York Times as head of marketing planning and research and later became vice president of New Media/New Products, overseeing the launch of the Times online for the first time in a deal with AOL in 1994.

With Gansevoort, he served as president and editorial director of Out, America’s leading gay and lesbian magazine, and also launched and managed Metro New York, a 330,000-circulation free daily newspaper.

Scott becomes CL’s eighth publisher in six years, but assures us that he plans to stick around a while. In fact, no sooner was the announcement made than he began talking smack about the competition.

“With the declining circulation of the city’s only daily, and its decision to move its newsroom outside the Perimeter, we have emerged as Atlanta’s largest-circulation hometown newspaper,” Scott said. “That means we have an even greater responsibility to Atlantans who want to learn how to make the most of life in this sophisticated and cosmopolitan city.”

Scott plans to lead the Atlanta paper in “redefining what it means to be an alternative publicati0n in an era when ‘alternative’ has lost its meaning.

“Our audience is a population of creative and professional people who’ve made a conscious choice to live an urban lifestyle,” he continues. “We want to have a distinctive voice and be provocative in an intelligent way because we want to stimulate people to think  about the issues.”

One of Scott’s first duties will be to oversee an upcoming “relaunch” of the Atlanta paper, which will include new print and Web designs, new street boxes and stronger community outreach.

“Creative Loafing Atlanta will have a contemporary look, be more reader-friendly, be easier to navigate, be more useful for Web users and be more valuable to advertisers,” Scott says. “We aim to be a refuge for intelligent people because we believe they’re still out there.”

Scott will continue to serve in his corporate capacity at CL even as he publishes the hell out of the Atlanta paper.

To read the full press release, click here.