Top 3 Reasons Why Janine Kahn Kicks Butt

There has been a lot of talk all over the internet about the wonderful development at SF Weekly, the San Francisco alternative weekly newspaper, where Alexia Tsotsis is arriving Monday after her sojourn at LA Weekly to become a web editor in the City by the Bay. I am super excited to get to work with her regularly.

Numerous blogs have written about Tsotsis and just how much they would miss her in the LA Tech community and at the LA Weekly offices in Venice. Alexia brings a special presence and connectivity to her work. I have met few people who are truly there with you in almost every way during a conversation the way Alexia is. She has a natural talent for bridging differences and connecting people like few I have known.

LA’s loss is SF’s gain indeed. But SF Weekly is experiencing a loss of its own. Alexia is replacing a truly wonderful social media maven in Janine Kahn, who is moving to Dogster.com to be a community manager there. In the year or so since Kahn took over at SF Weekly traffic has more than doubled, much of it through her own special brand of social media magic.

1.) The Freelancing Edge

Kahn has built an array of strong freelance wordsmiths all over the Bay Area and the country for that matter who can turn a phrase or two about food, music, marijuana and the environment. She knows how to find good feeelancers, manage them and try and make it worthwhile for them to keep churning out content.

Most notably, Janine has helped marijuana viral article guru Steve Elliot and the tremendous food/travel/enviro writer Ariel Schwartz put some of their best work onto SFWeekly.com

2.) The Viral Knack

She’s one of the best. Most of the social media people out there in the world would kill to have developed the sharpness and nimbleness that she has displayed on social media sites like Yelp, Foursquare, Twitter and others.

3.) Speaking of Twitter…

Have you read her tweets on @SF_Weekly? If you didn’t you missed out. She ran contests, took pictures, and updated everyone on her life, while simultaneously running a feed on the latest headlines from the Weekly. if you want to know how to actually engage people and get them interested in what you have to say, you really need to read what she wrote.

Alexia is going to come in and hit the ground running and do a great job filling Janine’s shoes and even expanding on what she did, so things should be excellent. But both Alexia and I, as well as all of the people at SF Weekly will miss the great attitude and on line prowess Janine displayed.

Fortunately she’s only moving just down the street a little to the Potrero Hill District in San Francisco at Dogster.com so we will still be tweeting about happy hour at the Hog Island Oyster Company.