Henry E. (Hank) Scott is a media business executive and journalist. He launched the first online publication of The New York Times.
He also launched the first foreign-language edition, the Russian language edition, of The New York Times.
Scott is the author of three books - Shocking True Story, the Rise and Fall of Confidential, America's Most Scandalous Scandal Magazine', London Comfort: From Hollywood to the White House, an American Idol's Dangerous Real World Adventure, and Want to Launch a Local News Website?", a paperback guide to the publishing news online (Amazon, 2023).
Early life
Scott was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, in 1951 and was raised there, where he attended Pine Forest High School. He graduated in 1972 from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, with a bachelor’s degree in political science.
Career
After graduating from college, Scott took a job in January 1973 at the Butner-Creedmoor News.
Scott, one of three employees at the paper, learned journalism on the job. Within months after joining the Butner-Creedmoor News, the husband and wife who ran the paper quit, and the owner named Scott, then the sole employee, as editor and publisher. Scott later moved to the News of Orange County, a weekly newspaper in Hillsborough, North Carolina, where he worked as a reporter.
In 1977, Scott moved to the Raleigh Times, an afternoon daily newspaper in the state capital. There he developed a passion for investigative reporting, with one of his biggest stories being the revelation that the Wake County Sheriff had given access to prostitutes and fancy meals to a man held in the county jail on federal charges of smuggling drugs from Vietnam in the body bags of dead soldiers. Scott also worked as assistant city editor at the Raleigh Times.
In 1982, Scott joined the Charlotte Observer, the Carolinas' largest newspaper, covering local government and serving as business editor, where he oversaw the launch of a weekly business section. In the same year, Scott was hired as features editor at Connecticut's Hartford Courant, the oldest continuously published newspaper in the United States, where he oversaw coverage of arts, culture, lifestyle, travel, and music.
In 1985, he was named assistant to the publisher and in 1986 named director of marketing, supervising a staff that provided research, marketing, public affairs, and public relations services.
Scott moved back to the newsroom in 1987 when he was promoted to metro editor, where he supervised a staff of 130 reporters and editors who covered local and state government and topics such as health and labor. In that role, Scott oversaw the launch of 10 zoned daily editions of the Courant.
In 1989, Scott moved to New York City to join The New York Times, where he served as managing director for Research and Marketing Planning and later as Vice President/New Media and New Product Development in the company's Information Services Division.
Scott left The Times in 1995 to form Gansevoort Media, a media consulting company. With Gansevoort and its successor, interMediator Group, Scott worked as a consultant with BusinessWeek, the Wall Street Journal, the Dallas Morning News, the Tampa Bay Times, The New York Times, Dagsbrun Media of Iceland, Prodigy, Nest magazine, Poz magazine, El Mio Vino, the Knight Foundation and New Century Media, an internet consortium of America's five largest newspaper publishers. His consulting practice has focused on crafting and implementing strategies to identify and more efficiently target audiences and increase revenue and turning around financially troubled media properties.
In January 1996, Scott was engaged by one of his clients, the owner of Out Publishing Co. to take over fulltime management of Out magazine, a financially struggling gay and lesbian lifestyle magazine. As president and editorial director of Out, Scott also launched an auxiliary publication titled HIV Plus.
Scott made major and somewhat controversial changes to Outs staffing and content to concentrate the magazine's focus on the lifestyle of gay men rather than lesbians and to concentrate its circulation on major metropolitan areas likely to attract major advertisers. His refusal to renew the contract of Sarah Pettit, a lesbian who had been the magazine's editor, sparked controversy. Scott replaced her with James Collard, a gay man who was editor of the U.K.'s Attitude gay magazine. Collard left after one year.