Tuesday, August 19, 2014

The newest important person in newsrooms: audience-development czars

Digiday reporting:
The New York Times’ Innovation Report pointed out the need for audience-development specialists to get Times content in front of more readers. While the Times called for a new, cross-departmental approach to this function, other news outlets have already been putting more muscle behind the role.
In the past four years, The Washington Post two-person search-traffic team morphed into a nine-member staff that also oversees a new breaking-news desk. Slate hired its first director of traffic and social media strategy a few years ago, Katherine Goldstein, now editor of Vanity Fair’s site, VF.com, which it has grown to a three-person team. Time Inc.’s Time and Entertainment Weekly have added audience development czars (and czarinas) in their newsrooms as well.
The Times itself is starting to apply the recommendations from its own report. Last week, it named Alex MacCallum assistant managing editor to be in charge of “expanding The Times’s audience and deepening its engagement with Times journalism.” Executive editor Dean Baquet and editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal, to whom she’ll report, said in a memo that she’ll build a team using search, social and other strategies to grow audience..
http://digiday.com/publishers/meet-audience-development-czars/

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