INDIANAPOLIS — IBJ Media Co. announced Friday that Olivia Covington has been promoted to editor of The Indiana Lawyer and will lead the effort to diversify its coverage and boost readership.
Covington, 27, who joined The Lawyer in 2016 as a reporter, moves up from managing editor, a job she held for more than three years. She is a former reporter for The Republic in Columbus.
She replaces Greg Andrews, who resigned for personal reasons on Wednesday after a few weeks in the post. Andrews had previously been the editor of IBJ and, until Wednesday, an IBJ contributing writer.
Nate Feltman, co-owner and CEO of IBJ Media, will move back into the role of publisher of The Indiana Lawyer.
Feltman called Covington “a proven journalist” who has been a positive and creative leader at The Lawyer. He said she’s well positioned to help “refresh” the news organization by rethinking its mission and analyzing the best way to serve subscribers.
Covington said the work of consulting with readers to learn what they like and don’t like about The Lawyer has started—and some goals have already emerged.
“From a content perspective, we want to try to diversify in terms of not being so litigation-focused,” she said. “We want to expand more into corporate law, into IT law, into the types of law that aren’t in the courtroom every day but make up a big part of the legal community. We want to expand our coverage to reach more practice types.”
Covington said she will also focus on expanding The Lawyer’s digital offerings.
“That might be a podcast or starting to do more video,” she said. “But I think especially for younger lawyers or lawyers in the middle of their careers who are busy and have families, providing a way to hear the news on the go is really important.”
The Lawyer, launched in 1990, covers the Indiana legal community, courts and judicial opinions in an every-other-week newspaper and daily at TheIndianaLawyer.com and through email newsletters. The Lawyer has about 5,500 subscribers, a number that has been growing since it instituted a paywall last year that limits the number of stories readers can access without a subscription.
