TIM ATEN

Multimedia News Editor

• Contact TIM via e-mail
• Call TIM at 239-263-4857

Tim Aten brings a wealth of media experience and more than 20 years of newsroom leadership to his position overseeing online news. News editor of the Naples Daily News since February 1998, Tim has been an anchor for the newspaper's podcasts since they began in 2005 and answers readers' questions in his column, "In The Know."

He and his wife, Peggy, left Midwestern winters behind 15 years ago to relocate to the Sunshine State. They initially lived in the Florida Keys, where Tim was made an Honorary Conch while serving as managing editor of the daily Key West Citizen and later The Reporter, a weekly in the Upper Keys.

Back in Ohio, Tim was city editor for the daily newspapers in Ashtabula and Chardon, Ohio, while serving as lead reporter covering the area's nuclear power plant. Not counting his three-year stint as cartoonist for his high school paper, Tim began his newspaper career as the county government reporter for the former Lake County Telegraph in Painesville, Ohio.

But Tim was bitten by the radio bug first, beginning his broadcast journalism career in 1985 as a reporter and morning news anchor on WQLS in Painesville, and later a local cable television channel. He previously was a disc jockey for WQLS, WCDN, WKNT, college station WKSR, a college nightclub and numerous social events in northeastern Ohio.

Tim earned a bachelor's degree in telecommunications (radio and TV broadcasting) from Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, where he co-wrote and directed a campus TV comedy show called "To Be Announced."

He thinks the iPod is the greatest invention since ... well ... the Internet.

"If I would have had one or two iPods during my disc jockey days, I wouldn't have had to lug all those records and that bulky equipment around," Tim said. "But I'm even more excited about the new technology the future will bring."