He joined Audacy Inc. in August 2020 to establish the strategy and oversee all of the news content and operations for the company’s 25 local News stations. Now, he’s taken to social media to announce that he’s moving “into a new professional chapter.”
Bill Smee has stepped down as VP of News at Audacy and tells his LinkedIn followers that he is “diving back into the strategic consulting and project management work that I enjoyed for a number of years.”
This will see Smee reopen his consultancy, established in the Washington, D.C., area in December 2016. In this role, he offered video strategies to such organizations as HuffPost, and Mashable. Before that, Smee served as Director of Digital Video for NBC News.
“It has been incredibly rewarding to work these last four years with so many talented and passionate people within Audacy’s newsrooms and across the larger company,” Smee said on LinkedIn. He also took note of his team’s collective accomplishments: building out digital and podcasting capacity; integrating broadcast and digital teams within newsrooms; strengthening communication and collaboration across a network of brands; navigating the first wave of AI; and creating new revenue opportunities in partnership with sales teams. “All of this was done while delivering over and over in high leverage, breaking news situations and racking up awards that validate Audacy’s local news brands as best in class,” Smee said.
He added, “The challenges for media and journalism these days — and for local news in particular — are profound, and the stakes are high. But there are new frontiers on the horizon and we can deploy innovative ways of thinking about how we do what we do. As always, I’m excited to explore those frontiers and draw on my many years of strategic and operational experience to help media brands and other organizations find a way forward.”
Smee’s experience includes roles at CNN, where he began his career as a Headline News producer in June 1987.
