Lisa Newby
Lisa Newby has is our lead webmaster and heads up our outsourced web services team, which provides SEO, social media, newsletter production, web operations and ad ops services to our clients. She also serves as a designer supporting our print outsourcing services.
Lisa comes to Creative Circle after having served as the lead producer for Gannett’s New England newspapers, where she was responsible for optimizing content for the sites and also managing social media posts. Her job was basically to get the highest readership possible from each story and to drive subscription sales by emphasizing content most likely to result in subscription conversions.
Lisa also works as a consultant and trainer and can lead workshops on SEO and social media strategies. So she adds another layer to Creative Circle’s deep training and consulting capabilities.
Lisa has spent almost her entire working career in newspapers, and most of them connected in one way or another with The Providence Journal, where Bill Ostendorf, our founder and president, and two other Creative Circle managers – Scott Kingsley, COO, and Lynn Rognsvoog, design director – overlapped with Lisa’s career.
At the Journal, Lisa moved from a photo technician to photo editor to designer working for Ostendorf. She continued working on the design desk after the takeover by Belo Corporation. When GateHouse bought the paper and largely eliminated the design and photo teams, Lisa managed to survive those staffing cuts and moved into working on the web site. When Gannett bought the paper and continued cutting the staff, she moved to her role as an SEO and social media specialist.
“I’ve always enjoyed working in the news department through changing roles and changing technology,” said Lisa. “I love learning new things and working with different technologies and content so I’ve always been able to adapt to new things.” Her favorite job among all of her roles was designing page one.
While she enjoyed her SEO role, too, after years of working from home and dealing with co-workers almost entirely through Zoom calls in her final years with Gannett, Lisa jumped at the chance to work in an office again. “With so much to do, you could really lose your sense of time and find yourself still working at 5 a.m.,” she said.
And it’s a bonus that many on our team are people she is familiar with.
“This is like coming home,” she said. “It’s fun to work with Lynn and Scott and Bill again and everyone here is just so nice and welcoming. It’s like family.”
Lisa was born in Kansas and moved to Rhode Island from Oklahoma. She has a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Tulsa and came to and stayed in Rhode Island largely because of its robust music and arts acene. She played in the Providence Mandolin Orchestra for a period while working at the Journal.
Lisa lives in Cranston, R.I., in a duplex she shares with her sister and two nieces.