BoardWalk Consulting Recruits COO for Deep South Today
December 2, 2025 – Executive recruitment firm BoardWalk Consulting has assisted in the recruitment of Hollis R. Towns as the first chief operating officer of Deep South Today. Founder Sam Pettway, director Cynthia Moreland, and senior research associate Lysondra Somerville led the assignment. His appointment is the result of a national search conducted over the last six months by BoardWalk Consulting.
“Hollis Towns is bringing precisely the kind of skills and expertise that Deep South Today needs at a moment when we are poised for dramatic growth,” said Warwick Sabin, president and CEO of Deep South Today. “He is an accomplished journalist and a proven business strategist with a deep understanding of talent development, digital innovation, and financial management. Hollis is also a Georgia native who now lives in Alabama, so he is intimately familiar with our region. I am looking forward to working closely with him to advance our work and deliver more local journalism to the communities we serve.”
In his role as chief operating officer, Mr. Towns will be responsible for translating strategy into actionable steps, sustainably scaling the organization, driving operational integrity, and strengthening the fiscal business hub.
“I’m thrilled to be joining Warwick and Deep South Today as its first COO,” Mr. Towns said. “It represents a pivot and it affords me the opportunity to leverage my deep management, news and leadership experience. Deep South Today is already a well-regarded and fast-growing media operation; I’m excited about building on that.”
Mr. Towns is an experienced journalist and media executive who most recently held senior leadership positions at Gannett and AL.com and Alabama Media Group. He is a nationally recognized media strategist who has led successful teams for more than 25 years. Mr. Towns is credited with creating Gannett’s police coverage strategy that led to national recognition and for envisioning the Center for Community Journalism (CCJ), a self-contained news structure that combined Gannett’s small to mid-sized media properties into a self-sustaining operation.
Throughout his career, Mr. Towns’s teams have reached the upper echelons of journalistic excellence. His teams have won a bevy of national awards, including being a Pulitzer finalist in the prestigious public service category for a series on New Jersey taxes. His investigative team was featured in the Columbia Journalism Review. Mr. Towns has judged numerous journalism awards, including the Pulitzer Prizes (three times) and the Poynter Prizes (twice). In 2025, he led his team at AL.com to launch Beyond the Violence 2.0, a comprehensive solutions-journalism initiative that seeks to tackle Birmingham’s intractable gun violence.
Launched in 2016, Deep South Today aims to solve the challenges facing local news through a networked hub of non-profit newsrooms serving what it calls “the most challenged region in the U.S.” The vision of Deep South Today is to create an infrastructure for impact-driven newsrooms that allows local players to focus on audience and editorial while receiving support in finance, administration and fundraising from a centralized hub. Deep South Today currently has two newsrooms in its network: Mississippi Today and Verite, in New Orleans, LA.
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In 2023, BoardWalk Consulting placed Warwick Sabin as the inaugural president and chief executive officer of Deep South Today. Mr. Sabin, who most recently served as chief strategy officer at Interfaith America, a non-profit that celebrates the potential of religious diversity, was selected after a seven-month national search that attracted more than 100 candidates. He is a former three-term Arkansas state representative, having served from 2013 to 2019.
Serving Mission-Driven Non-Profits
BoardWalk Consulting, based in Atlanta, is a national executive search firm that recruits CEOs and senior leadership for mission-driven non-profit organizations. Founded in 2002, the firm leads executive searches for clients from across the non-profit sector with global, national, regional, and local missions. Many of the firm’s team members have previously served as non-profit executives, grant makers, and board leaders. BoardWalk Consulting is also an active partner in Panorama, the global network of independent executive search firms.
BoardWalk Consulting was founded by Mr. Pettway, a 30-year search veteran. Over his career in executive search, he has worked with hundreds of board members and leadership teams with entities ranging from start-ups to mature multinationals in both the corporate and non-profit sectors. Since founding BoardWalk in 2002, Mr. Pettway has served clients as varied as international relief agencies, national foundations, regional trade associations, and local agencies in dozens of markets.
Ms. Moreland is an experienced non-profit leader with more than two decades of non-profit leadership experience. She has been executive director of four non-profits in her native Washington, D.C. and Atlanta. Collectively, these organizations addressed issues of child and family welfare, community development, educational access, and youth development. Ms. Moreland’s clients at BoardWalk include global non-profit organizations like Food for the Hungry and the Asian & Pacific Islander Health Forum.
Ms. Somerville has worked as a corporate consultant, product manager, and marketing expert. She brings a decade’s worth of experience in various business, marketing, and management roles. Ms. Somerville is an accomplished corporate strategist with a deep understanding of organizational management and operational effectiveness.
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Contributed by Scott A. Scanlon, Editor-in-Chief and Dale M. Zupsansky, Executive Editor – Hunt Scanlon Media
