TBD aggregation editor Elliot Kort joins NJI Media

TBD’s community engagement team has all moved on to new challenges now, except for me. Elliot Kort, a late addition to the team, left Thursday to take a new job as an interactive strategist for NJI Media.

Elliot Kort

Elliot and Elyse Greenberg produce Capitol Bites, one of the first members of the TBD Community Network. Before he began working for us, he was an enthusiastic TBD supporter and we were following each other on Twitter.

He pitched me last year with a thoughtful plan to produce podcasts for TBD. While I couldn’t hire him to carry out that plan, I liked what I saw and heard, and kept him in mind as a prospect to work with TBD.

He joined us in January as an aggregation editor, checking feeds from more than 200 members of the TBD Community Network for links to aggregate for TBD.

He worked the early shift and I’ve been an early riser since my paper-carrier days. Before the newsroom started to fill up, we enjoyed lighthearted banter about the news of the day and Kansas City and University of Kansas sports. (Elliot’s a KC boy who went to KU and I spent six-plus years working for the Kansas City Star and Times.)

He handled his new duties easily and contributed immediately to the team’s weekly brainstorming efforts.

Elliot’s time on the community engagement team was short. The month after he joined, our company decided to change directions with TBD and cut the staff, including the community engagement team.

Elliot moved to the aggregation team and took on other duties, including aggregation of content from outside the network and sharing duties running our Twitter account. Like most of his TBD colleagues, he was also looking for a new job, which he landed this week.

Elliot explained his new gig: “Basically my job is to strategize with clients how to present themselves in the digital realm. I’ll track analytics, help clients engage with their target audiences/communities, and try to keep them on the cutting edge of new media.”

I hope he will be able to do podcasts for them. I know he’ll excel for them.