New York-based Janson Media announced the launch of an Originals division, and the hiring of former NBC News Senior Producer Lisa Everson as its Executive Producer.
In her new role, Ms. Everson will work with company founder and president Stephen Janson to develop a slate of original documentaries and factual entertainment to augment the company’s distribution pipeline. Ms. Everson brings over two decades of experience to the new role. For 12 years, she produced the long-running MSNBC weekly show Your Business with JJ Ramberg, which focused on small business and entrepreneurship. She covered hundreds of stories for the program, developed a spinoff podcast, and coordinated the show’s broadcast from Main Streets across the US and also from some of the most significant events in small business, including the Inc. 500 conference, South by Southwest, and the Consumer Electronics Show. Prior to MSNBC, she was a producer for ABC, producing TV specials and series for such cable networks as A+E, American Movie Classics, Discovery, History Channel, and truTV.
At ABC News, Ms. Everson spent seven years producing long-form documentaries on a range of subjects from science and history to crime and pop culture, including several high profile A+E biographies on celebrities like Robin Williams, Bo Derek, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, political figures like Muammar Qaddafi and Laura Bush, business leaders like Thomas Watson, Jr. of IBM, and The Home Depot founders Arthur Blank and Bernie Marcus. During her career, Ms. Everson has interviewed cultural icons such as Martha Stewart, Tory Burch, Anthony Hopkins, Whoopi Goldberg, Jack Dorsey, Alexis Ohanian, Walter Cronkite, Cokie Roberts, Michael Beschloss, Kristin Cavallari, Anne Wojcicki, and Dick Van Dyke.
In years past, Janson Media’s executive-production and co-production projects included When Nature Strikes Back for National Geographic and German broadcasters, the lifestyle series Travel with Kids for PBS, The Hollywood Collection of classic movie star retrospectives and biographies for A+E, PBS, Discovery, and other networks, and primetime entertainment specials on singer-songwriter Kenny Rogers, mountaineer Tom Whittaker, cowboy poet Red Steagall, and others.
The Janson Originals division will generate its own blue chip documentaries for major platform partners and iconic brands, as well as straight-to-digital releases destined for the company’s owned-and-operated brands and managed platforms. Ms. Everson will also develop the company’s co-production relationships with its existing content creators to fast-track projects into Janson’s distribution pipeline, which includes VOD platforms, FAST channels, and PayTV clients worldwide.