Michael Jon Jensen Joins Westchester Publishing Services as Director of Technology
Danbury, Connecticut (PRWEB) December 07, 2015 -- Westchester Publishing Services is pleased to announce that Michael Jon Jensen, an accomplished technologist in the digital publishing and scholarly press markets, has joined Westchester as its new Director of Technology. Founded in 1969, Westchester Publishing Services (formerly known as Westchester Book Group and Pistone-Rainsford Type) is a U.S. employee-owned composition and editorial services company supporting publishers across a wide range of market segments. Michael Jon Jensen comes to Westchester with decades of experience in the publishing industry, and will lead significant improvements in Westchester’s internal and client-facing technologies.
Jensen was part of the startup group at Project MUSE, the pioneering collaboration between non-profit publishers and libraries that has made a wide range of digital content affordable and available to the scholarly community. From 1995 to 1998, Michael developed business and production-process models that helped Project MUSE scale during its infancy. In 1998, he became Director of Publishing Technologies for the National Academies Press, the groundbreaking online publishing platform of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, the National Research Council, and the National Academy of Engineering. It was Michael’s semantic extraction algorithms that powered the site’s tailored search and discovery engine. By 2007, an average of 1.5 million visitors per month were exploring more than 4,000 reports from the National Academies, helping inform public policy worldwide with evidence-based recommendations. Jensen later served as the National Academies’ Director of Web Communications and then Director of Strategic Web Communications, helping steer and enable outreach and communications strategies institution-wide.
Since 2012, Michael has focused on consulting, teaching distance education courses for George Washington University’s Masters in Publishing program (including codirecting its annual capstone course, Ethics in Publishing), and developing his sustainable organic farm in Nova Scotia. When asked about taking on this new role at Westchester Publishing Services, Jensen said, “The opportunity to work with the best employee-owned publishing services company in North America was hard to resist. With an India-based production arm and a U.S.-based headquarters, Westchester is poised to become the de facto provider of affordable excellence in publishing services across the English-speaking world. I’m truly delighted to join Westchester’s amazing team, especially given its commitment to ethics and customer service.”
The staff at Westchester are equally enthusiastic. “Michael will play a pivotal role in helping us continue to expand our business, by applying his insights to our in-house technology as well as to the offerings we provide to the market,” said Westchester CEO Dennis Pistone. CFO Paul Crecca added, “The team at Westchester—both in our headquarters in Danbury and our offices in India—are thrilled to have somebody of Michael’s caliber helming our technological evolution. Michael will help us develop new product offerings designed to be highly attractive in the evolving publishing marketplace. His expertise across many different types of publishers will also help us improve project management tools for new clients as well as for existing partners like Macmillan, W. W. Norton, Mary Ann Liebert, and the many university presses we support.”
For information about the expanded offerings that Westchester Publishing Services is providing to the publishing industry, or for any questions about this press release, please contact: Tyler M. Carey, Director of Business Development, at: 203-791-0080 x165 or tyler(dot)carey(at)westchesterpubsvcs(dot)com. Further information is also available at: http://www.westchesterpublishingservices.com.
Tyler Carey, Westchester Publishing Services, http://www.westchesterpublishingservices.com, +1 203-791-0080 Ext: 165, [email protected]
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