John Ness is the Editor-in-Chief and Vice President of Innovation at DNAinfo.

John started his 15+ years in the news business in 2000, splitting his time between neighborhood newspaper reporting and admin work at Newsweek International. He did a piece for the Queens Courier about the Taliban’s diplomatic offices in Flushing, and a few months later he was sent downtown with the rest of the magazine’s junior reporters to cover the 9/11 attacks.

In 2003, the magazine was shuttering its Nairobi bureau and John saw an opportunity to do interesting work with low pay and no benefits. He spent the next year stringing in Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Ghana for outlets like Newsweek and the Chicago Tribune.

He came back to New York to marry his beautiful wife and set to work again freelancing for local newspapers — this time doing police blotters and feature stories for the Sunset News and Bay Ridge’s Home Reporter.

In 2007, he took a job as a manager at FanHouse, Aol's new and awesome sports blog. His boss left, and he ran the sports blog when it won an Editor & Publisher award and became the third biggest blog on the web.

He joined NBC Local Media — where he launched more than two dozen niche blogs in 10 cities — before leaving for another neighborhood news operation in 2011.

He joined Patch as Director of News Integration, tasked with making Huffington Post's sprawling newsroom work with Patch's sprawlinger newsroom. He later became Patch's News Director, and then Editor-in-Chief.

Fun fact: When John wrote Editor & Publisher above, it autocorrected to Editor & Punisher, and he's the type of guy who thinks that's funny for more than an hour.