Andy Jacobson named vice president of sales for Gannett Digital

Gannett (NYSE:GCI) has named Andy Jacobson vice president of sales for Gannett Digital. Jacobson joins Gannett from Email Data Source, where he was senior vice president of sales. He will report to Chris Saridakis, senior vice president and chief digital officer at Gannett.

Jacobson’s team will be responsible for national sales across Gannett’s online network, which ties together more than 100 digital communities with a combined reach of approximately 25 million people. The media properties in the network include Gannett's best-of-breed news and information web and mobile sites, including USATODAY.com ( www.usatoday.com) and the local sites for Gannett's newspaper and broadcast properties, such as AZCentral.com, IndyStar.com and 9News.com. Additionally, a variety of growing media properties, such as MomsLikeMe.com ( www.momslikeme.com), HighSchoolSports.net ( www.highschoolsports.net), and BNQT.com ( www.bnqt.com) are also part of the network.

Jacobson has an extensive background in growing online media sales. Prior to his work at Email Data Source, he was senior vice president of sales at MediaWhiz and also served as senior vice president of sales and business development at ContextWeb. An early pioneer at DoubleClick, Jacobson built its premium network sales team in the mid-1990s and helped ValueClick transform its media business across several platforms. Jacobson also was instrumental in building Google’s first ad sales organization.

“Gannett’s digital business now makes up over 10 percent of our revenue and is a strategic growth priority for our company. Andy will help us as we build an unmatched sales organization in digital, leveraging the depth and breadth of our reach,” says Saridakis.

Gannett Co., Inc. is an international news and information company operating on multiple platforms including the Internet, mobile, newspapers, magazines and TV stations. Gannett is an Internet leader with hundreds of newspaper and TV Web sites; CareerBuilder.com, the nation’s top employment site; USATODAY.com; and more than 80 local MomsLikeMe.com sites. Gannett publishes 84 daily U.S. newspapers, including USA TODAY, the nation’s largest-selling daily newspaper, and more than 700 magazines and other non-dailies including USA WEEKEND. Gannett also operates 23 television stations in 19 U.S. markets. Gannett subsidiary Newsquest is the United Kingdom’s second largest regional newspaper company with 17 daily paid-for titles, more than 200 weekly newspapers, magazines and trade publications, and a network of Web sites.