Remembering Ellen
Today we are mourning the loss of a colleague: Ellen Crean, a writer, producer and founding member of the CBSNews.com team.
During those nine years at CBS, Ellen did almost every job in the newsroom, streaming video, writing news reports and features, producing photo essays and interactives, and working with TV producers, especially those on The Early Show, to get their reports online. She also was on the team that created CBSNews' TheShowBuzz.com.
Among her contributions were a commentary on some of the early seasons of "Survivor" and a number of entertainment feature pieces.
An Internet pioneer, Ellen had been providing news and features to computer users since the late 1980s. She was producer of entertainment news and features, and later manager of entertainment news, for Prodigy, an early online news service. She started her career as a newspaper reporter at Gannett Co. in Westchester, a suburb of New York City, and worked on several newspapers and magazines in Westchester before turning her talents to the Internet.
In our newsroom, Ellen was known for her intelligence, curiosity, her love of good writing and good entertainment, her clever headlines, her keen eye for typos and spelling errors, and her devotion to her large family.
She was a kind and generous colleague, with a strong sense of fun and a giant laugh that resounded through our studio.
Ellen died unexpectedly at her home in Larchmont, N.Y., on Sunday. She leaves a mother, six brothers and sisters, six nieces and four nephews.
She will be much missed.