Port Aransas South Jetty staff changes announced

PORT ARANSAS – Port Aransas South Jetty news editor Dan Parker has been promoted to editor, and general manager Kelli Hartig is taking on responsibilities more in keeping with her title.
Owners Mary Henkel and Murray Judson will remain as co-publishers while turning over leadership of the day-to-day operations of the newspaper to Parker and Hartig.
Parker, 61, is a native of Port Aransas. He has been a reporter and photographer at the South Jetty since June 2006. He became news editor in March 2015.
Throughout his career at the South Jetty, Parker has won awards for news and feature writing as well as photography at the regional, state and national levels. He also has been named Journalist of the Year once and Photographer of the Year twice by the South Texas Press Association.
He is a 1983 graduate of the University of Texas at Austin with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. He began his journalism career as a middle school student when he and a fellow student wrote the school news for the South Jetty in the mid-1970s.
After graduating from UT, he worked as a reporter at the Killeen Daily Herald, San Luis Obispo (California) Telegram-Tribune, Tulsa Tribune, Charleston (South Carolina) Post and Courier and the Corpus Christi Caller-Times.
Parker has covered a variety of beats, including police, courts, coastal issues, environment, county and city government, education and features.
He first started covering Port Aransas and coastal issues in 1994 when he was hired by the Corpus Christi Caller-Times.
Hartig, 31, earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi in 2016. She has been with the South Jetty since May 2018. Throughout school she worked in the hospitality industry, waiting tables for Castaways, Liberty Hall and Shells where she managed the “front of the house” from 2013 to 2018.
She started at the South Jetty as circulation and office manager and was promoted to general manager in November 2021 as she gradually took on more responsibilities under the direction of Murray Judson. She has shouldered the design, scheduling, production and coordination of the newspaper and special sections, as well as handling crucial postal and distribution issues.