About The Giornalista

Victoria Reitano is a Digital Producer at the Emmy-award winning, nationally syndicated LIVE with Kelly and Michael, produced by WABC in New York City.

At LIVE, Victoria manages the Google+ page, the GetGlue page and produces content for the Web.

In her spare time, Victoria is the Co-Chair for The Society of Professional Journalists’ Generation J group. She also teaches Web production classes and advises college students — and recent grads — on branding. Her branding presentations have been featured at the College Media Association’s CMANYC since 2012 and at the SPJ’s Excellence in Journalism Conference since 2012.

She likes writing on her blog – The Giornalista Files – about her daily struggles in an effort to help other 20-somethings navigate the confusing world of post-grad life and beyond. She focuses on “standing out” in a world where, so often, young women are forced to fit in to some society-defined norm.

Originally from Staten Island, N.Y., Reitano lives on Manhattan’s Upper East Side (like one of her many idols, Carrie Bradshaw) 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 moved back to Manhattan in June 2012 after living and working on Long Island for two years. From January 2011 to May 2012, Reitano served as the Assistant Editor at SD Times, the industry leading software trade publication serving enterprise software developers and their managers. She served as the freelance Managing Editor for UniversityChic.com at the same time (she’s an excellent multi-tasker), 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. From December 2011 to April 2012, she served as the freelance Social Media Director for ChicGalleria.com and helped the team learn about Pinterest, which doubled the traffic to the site.

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 team of 18-30 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.

In August 2011, 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.