About The Giornalista

Victoria Reitano is a journalist, speaker, and 20-something looking to help other 20-something women navigate the murky world of college life and beyond. Originally from Staten Island, N.Y., Reitano has three and a half years of professional experience and is a Quinnipiac University grad. Never one to shy away from conflict, Reitano has aggressively fought to educate print journalists about the endless possibilities social media, and the Web, bring to traditional print reporting.

Reitano currently lives in Huntington, N.Y. and is currently working full-time as the Assistant Editor at SD Times, the industry leading software trade publication serving enterprise software developers and their managers. She served as the Managing Editor for UniversityChic.com, a website dedicated to help high school juniors, seniors and women in college navigate one of the most stressful – and exciting – periods of life: College, from January 2011 to September 2011. She also contributed a chapter to U Chic 2E: The College Girl’s Guide to Everything, which was published in April 2011.

Reitano is an avid blogger, focused on 20-something advice geared towards women in the working world, and is always on the hunt for new projects! She’s currently working on launching the Long Island site of She’s Fascinating, a daily deals site for women under 30 and has several book projects in the hopper!

She is also a founding Editor of The Quad News, Quinnipiac’s first Web-only, student-run publication, which was founded in 2008 and is still publishing today. Reitano served as one of the first Head Copy Editors at the paper and later, helped the team determine a successful social media strategy while serving as the Web Editor in 2009. During her undergraduate career, Reitano also served as the Online Editorial Intern at This Old House magazine, published by Time Inc., for two years, which allowed her to begin to examine the production side of things.

Reitano’s production experience was further enhanced by her time with Patch.com, where she launched Commack Patch in three weeks in June 2010, two short weeks after graduating from QU. She learned to create an editorial calendar for a daily news site, manage a group of freelance writers, allocate a specific freelance budget, edit articles on a daily – sometimes hourly – basis, and she learned how to handle breaking news stories in the midst of planned events (she ran to a fire or two with her recorder still running from a community event). After leaving Patch in January, Reitano continued to freelance for the company, serving as a video anchor, with her most memorable assignment being the visit of Snooki to Huntington Village. She also started a lifestyle column – Village After Dark –, tweeting and writing about the best late night eats and dance scenes on Long Island’s North Shore.

Most recently, Reitano was featured on the TODAY show in a segment about dorm must-haves on Friday, Aug. 26. Her work has also been featured on USATODAYCollege, Huntington Patch, Commack Patch, StudentStuff.com, GlobalShift.org, The Huffington Post, UniversityChic.com, The Staten Island Advance, SILive.com, ThisOldHouse.com, MacApper.com, QuadNews.net, The Quinnipiac Chronicle, and The Summit, her high school newspaper.

This blog serves as a place to share her personal voice — which is at times that of a scared, confused 20-something, and at other times a fierce Sicilian woman, whose skin and mind is weathered with age. She tweets constantly, so if you’d like to follow her around on Foursquare and beyond, follow her on Twitter- @Giornalista515. You can also learn more about her personal interests on her About Victoria page.