This is a candidate for the 2025-26 ONA Board of Directors election.
Andrew Fitzgerald is senior vice president of streaming video services at Hearst Television and general manager of its streaming app, Very Local. A streaming home for local news, weather, and more, Very Local also features exclusive original series such as Finding Adventure, Blind Kitchen, Boston Rob Does Beantown, and several others. He previously served as Hearst Television’s chief digital content officer beginning in 2017, where he worked with the digital teams at Hearst Television stations to produce and distribute content on multiple digital platforms and oversaw Hearst Television’s central digital content production.
Before joining Hearst, Fitzgerald was with Twitter for more than five years, most recently serving as the company’s director, curation. While there, he built and oversaw the global curation teams responsible for Moments, the Twitter feature developed to ease the way for users to find conversations and context around news, events and information beyond their home timelines. He also served as interim head of news partnerships, overseeing Twitter’s relationships with some 30 news organizations.
Prior to Twitter, Fitzgerald helped to launch the social media show The Stream for Al Jazeera English and led the citizen journalism program Collective Journalism for short-form documentary network Current TV.
Fitzgerald is a cum laude graduate of the University of Southern California, where he was both a Renaissance Scholar and a Presidential Scholarship recipient.
Andrew’s vision for the future of digital journalism
Digital journalism and the news industry writ large is at a critical stage. News product hasn’t been as important in a generation, and yet the business of news has spent the last two decades in increasingly challenged positions. We’ve seen the environment, technology, and operations of news radically change in cycles of increasing frequency. Digital journalists, as the transformation specialists in their organizations, have sat at the fulcrum of that change. We’re now in a period where early digital journalists, the cohort of folks who attended the Online News Association conferences in the mid- and late-2000’s, are beginning to take leadership roles in the industry. Newsroom misfits no longer, the ONA membership represents the industry’s new leaders.
This is a valuable opportunity for the Online News Association, but also a great responsibility. As the industry continues to evolve, ONA is in a position to be an effective advocate for guiding change in the right direction. A commitment to a DEI focus in employment and in news storytelling; the training of a rising cohort of leaders with programs like the Women’s Leadership Accelerator; providing opportunities for early career journalists through fellowships and training; and as ever, serving as a central hub for networking, recruiting, and skill-sharing among digital journalists.
I don’t think the next five years in digital journalism will be any less tumultuous than the last five years. But within tumult: opportunity! I think ONA remains well-positioned to not only serve its existing constituency but to grow its influence and positive impact. As this generation of digital journalists go from being the ‘digital leaders’ in the newsroom to just the ‘leaders’ and as ‘online news’ becomes just ‘news,’ the opportunity increases for ONA to lead not just in the digital corner of news but the whole of the industry.
My career represents this arc with much owed to ONA. I’ve been a digital journalist for the last 15 years, working in newsrooms, board rooms, and platforms. In my current role I’m serving in an executive role helping to build new digital business models for a legacy local television provider. In my previous role at Twitter, I helped a platform better understand both news judgment and the news industry. Even before Twitter, I worked at the intersection of emerging technologies and digital journalism, focused on citizen journalism and user generated content. There is little in digital journalism I’ve not tackled at some point in my career and I’ve always turned to ONA for insights into where I might be focused next.
In the last four years I’ve had the honor of serving as a member of the ONA Board and as its Treasurer and I hope to continue to serve in the term to come. I think this next few years will prove a defining time for ONA’s path forward. I hope to lend my experience as a journalist, as an executive, and as a digital misfit to help strengthen ONA’s ability to produce change-making programs, set industry standards, and support journalists at all career levels to build their skillsets and networks.
ONA has given me so much over the last fifteen years. It’s my honor to be able to give back in some small way.