West Region Growth Editor
The regional growth editor will oversee an audience growth team positioned in McClatchy newsrooms throughout the West Region, which includes 10 newsrooms in 3 states. You and your team will be responsible for helping our local journalism grow and thrive by providing expertise, leadership and coaching in key areas such as audience building, loyalty and engagement tactics, social media, newsletters and distribution tactics.
The successful candidate will have expertise in engagement on social media platforms, a tremendous awareness of where potential audiences are going for local information, demonstrated success in growing newsletters and/or additional news-related products, and additional content distribution skills.
This role requires an editor with strong management skills and a background in digital storytelling. The editor will coach and train reporters and a team of digital growth producers; provide guidance on story format, audience and visuals; help create plans for presentation and distribution; offer post-publication feedback; and hold the team and reporters accountable for growing loyal audiences.
The West Region Growth Editor will work closely with and report to the West Region Editor on strategy and tactics to grow audiences and build loyalty around our journalism.
Other key responsibilities:
- Act as a daily point of contact for editors who need help with headlines, content packaging, social media strategy, etc. This includes:
- Monitoring Facebook for engagement opportunities and follow-ups; alert local teams to those opportunities
- Collaborating with newsrooms on promotional planning of reporting projects via slack and other communications tools
- Discussing ways to improve with reporters who are struggling to meet pageview goals or about whom the editors are concerned for other reasons. This includes offering training/feedback opportunities for those reporters, and others, on better headline writing, better SEO, etc.
- Train newsrooms on how to regularly listen to and engage with our audiences, including finding ways to encourage community participation in our journalism via crowdsourcing, etc., to elevate our coverage.
- Assist newsrooms in growing audience for their editorial products, including newsletters and podcasts
- Implement engagement strategies that focus on initiating conversations and building one-on-one relationships
- Regularly analyze performance data to improve growth strategies
- Assist our SEO experts in identifying topics for evergreen search and social traffic
- Work with McClatchy leadership and local newsrooms to identify new audiences
- Experiment with and implement strategies that increase reader loyalty: for example, podcasts, A/B testing of headlines, optimizing archive content
Qualifications:
- 5+ years of experience, preferably in a digital media organization
- Reliable news judgment
- A proven track record of growing and engaging audiences
- Fluent in Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google and other platforms
- A deep understanding of social media best practices
- A way with headlines and an understanding of what works on different platforms
- An ability to work collaboratively on projects ranging from podcasts to video to enterprise stories. Must work comfortably in a job that will be fast-paced, data-driven, shaped constantly by feedback and experimentation and always evolving
- Extensive experience with real-time analytics platforms
- Curious about and aware of audience trends in the digital media space
- A demonstrated ability to learn new skills
- Occasional travel is required