BILL OSTENDORF

PRESIDENT AND FOUNDER
Bill Ostendorf is president and founder of Creative Circle Media Consulting, a network of talent he has been building for more than 20 years.

Bill has worked with more than 100 media companies in 18 countries as a trainer or management consultant and has led redesigns of more than 100 publications. He founded Creative Circle in 1982 at the tender age of 26. Even then, he was committed to the concept of teamwork and named his group accordingly. After 18 years of balancing part-time consulting and full-time work as a newsroom editor and manager, Bill left The Providence Journal to manage Creative Circle full time in June 2000.

Bill is an energetic and entertaining speaker who has been featured at more than 300 industry workshops. Trained as a reporter, he aspired to be a columnist, but quickly moved from reporting to editing to design. “I wanted to be the next Mike Royko in my native Chicago, but it just never happened,” he says.

INSTEAD, HE HAS BECOME A SPECIALIST at helping “word people” and “visual people” work together. “My bosses kept asking me if I could take pictures, manage the photo department, design pages or redesign papers – all things I originally had little training for. So I developed a passion for helping people avoid all the mistakes I had to suffer through learning on the job.”

Bill worked as a reporter, photographer, news editor, features editor, copy desk chief and graphics director at several newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, Paddock Publications in suburban Chicago, The Times-News in Twin Falls, Idaho, The Standard-Examiner in Ogden, Utah, and The Plain Dealer in Cleveland. He has also been a columnist for Desktop Publishing and News Photographer magazines and art director of DESIGN magazine. He taught copy editing at Utah State University and has guest lectured at dozens of universities.

Bill joined The Providence Journal in 1987, turning down several other offers partly because he wanted to work at a family owned paper. In 1996, he created the Independent News Network, enabling family owned papers like the Journal to share content and provide their staffs with the kind of exposure chains provide with their internal wire networks. And, while Creative Circle works with a variety of media companies, he still supports family newspaper ownership. “Our group is all about relationships. And we like the kind of relationships we can have with family owned companies. ”

During 13 years at The Journal, he served as managing editor for visuals and new product development, overseeing the design, layout, photography, graphics and much of the editorial production process. In addition, he created and served as editor of the New England News Service, produced annual calendars and worked to integrate the newspaper’s resources with local television outlets, Rhode Island Monthly magazine, KRT News Service and projo.com web site.

He also served as director of photography and associate managing editor for new products. He played a key role in helping the paper move from black and white to color, redesign its format, restructure its newsroom, design a new newsroom, digitize photography, change its local news content and move to full pagination.

THE PAPER WON HUNDREDS OF AWARDS for design and photography during his tenure including “Best Use of Photos” for metro newspapers from the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA). ”Awards are nice but I’m most proud of the things we did that our industry has no awards for,” he says. “We were very good at tightly integrating visuals and words and the visuals department was very good at generating story ideas. We also stuck pretty closely to a documentary style of photojournalism. ”

Bill served as a member of the board of directors for the Society for News Design (SND) for 13 years and has also held leadership positions in the NPPA. Both organizations have given him awards for his volunteer contributions to the industry.

He also served on the board of directors of Innovation, an international media consulting firm with offices in Detroit and Pamplona, Spain.

He originated SND’s well known “Quick Course” workshops in 1988 and ran the program for three years. The concept has become a fixture for SND in North America and has been duplicated in Europe and Latin America. The assignment editing drill he originated for the NPPA’s Northern Short Course has been a sellout for 12 years and is now a regular feature at The American Press Institute as well. And his “Management Camps” – SND team-building workshops he founded in 1992 to help newspapers improve key problem areas like color quality control, page one planning or improving photography content – have been called the best interdepartmental workshops in the industry by numerous attendees.

Bill has a BSJ in magazine writing and an MSJ in newspaper reporting and management, from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and lives just outside Providence in Seekonk, Mass.