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St. Charles, Ill. — The Champaign Room’s Jim Vainisi announced Tuesday that Jim Vainisi plans to step down from his role as Managing Editor, effective whenever his replacement is identified. Vainisi will remain on the website’s staff in a new role.
In three years, Vainisi guided The Champaign Room to over 7.93 million page views while logging a site-record 1,894 blog posts. Unfortunately, his legacy will be defined by his failure to cover a single NCAA Basketball Tournament over that time span.
Statement from Jim Vainisi
I’ve been running TCR for three years now, and while I’ve loved absolutely every moment, I think it’s about time to transition into a different role with the site.
This is something that I’ve thought about quite a bit since graduation from Illinois in early May. I’m about to begin a full-time career in advertising (read: not journalism), which means my future availability will make it hard to meet the demands of this position. Moreover, I think TCR has hit a bit of ceiling under my watch. We’ve experienced some tremendous growth since July 2014, yet as I mentioned in this community post last month, we’ve become complacent with a single formula. I believe the site could really benefit from a new voice in charge as a result.
Again, this is not a permanent goodbye. My role with TCR will shift to something more akin to that of a traditional editor. I’ll still be around to interact with everyone and laugh at Illinois on a daily basis, but I plan to write a lot less moving forward.
Thank you to everyone who helped make TCR a big success over the past three years. I literally had zero writing experience prior to this position, plus it took awhile to acclimate myself to the world of blogging. But I’m happy to say that this experience quickly became one of the many highlights from college.
I sincerely hope my reign resembled something similar to Josh Whitman. But if I happened to be another Mike Thomas, at least I didn’t hire Tim Beckman and John Groce.
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Jim Vainisi
University of Illinois | Class of 2017
The Champaign Room | Almost-Former Managing Editor
SB Nation will begin a national search for the next Managing Editor immediately, and more information will be posted to The Champaign Room in the near future. Prospective candidates should begin preparing their resumes. In the meantime, feel free to contact Vainisi on Twitter (@JimVainisi) with any questions.