This interview has been edited for clarity.
I studied political science in college and I wanted to work in political media and I always really enjoyed writing. I spent a lot of time in college writing online. I had a blog at the time and I did some freelance writing for a few different sites. So I focused on sort of like developing my writing skills and also developing your my knowledge of politics and government. I felt like those two skill sets together sort of prepared me well for a career in journalism. One thing I did learn is that like most employers are not really looking too closely at what your major is. What employers are looking at is your experience and your skill level, your writing skills and your needs assessment and things like that.
When I was applying for jobs, I didn't feel like I was discounted for not having gone to journalism school.
I lead our audience team. My focus is kind of on like setting our overall like day-to-day strategy of are off-platform coverage. So by off platform, I mean anything that's not directly on vox.com the website. So my team manages social media, strategy and accounts, email newsletters, search optimization. We think about visual off-platform storytelling. So, it's asking the question: How are we using social media to not just as a distribution tool, but thinking about it as a storytelling tool? Also, thinking about how do we tell social-first stories on these channels in a way that is digestible. Like, how do you deliver news on Instagram in a way that is digestible and interesting and also visually appealing and eye catching?
My day to day really varies. I oversee or our coverage on a daily basis. I keep track of the news and think about things that we can be doing, things that we can be optimizing in our stories, monitoring trends and working with our editors to better optimize our stories for search and social audiences. And then a lot of it is management like being here to like edit their work and kind of supervise coverage.
Over communication is good. Sometimes we assume that people understand or know things that they might not know. Sometimes, especially when things are sent from one department to another, things can get lost in translation. The other thing is that when you make the switch from being maker to a manager, you really have to learn to like let go of the doing and let people, let the people you manage do it themselves and let them really take ownership of it.
When you're a new manager it be a hard transition because if you became a manager and you got promoted into this more senior role, you were probably really good at the executional and content creation piece that you were doing before. Sometimes new managers have a tendency to want to be like, well, let me just this myself because I'll do it right. But if you want to be a good manager, you really have to resist that tendency and let the people you manage take ownership of it. Your job is to give them feedback and give them guidance and help them.
It was first motivated by the fact that I just care about the topic. I care about like representation of women and women in leadership, politics and in media. And I was always looking for those kinds of articles. One day I was saying, I wish there was a newsletter that just gave me all the best news about women from the week, like all the best articles, and just gave them all to me in one place. And then, so I literally was saying that to myself and then I thought, oh, I could go start this. So I just kind of started it out of a need that I identified, like I wish this thing existed because I would want to read it. It also became a little bit of like a writing outlet for me.
I think particularly because I've been in like more like strategy management roles in the last few years. We don't really write that much anymore. I occasionally publish a story here and there, but my time is not really spent on writing that much these days. So it also became a little bit of a passionate project.
I wouldn't engage audiences any different with stories about diverse communities.
When you write stories about diverse communities, you want those communities to read it, but you also want like the rest of your audience to read it too. So, I actually think it's important to give them the same treatment. Those stories should be on the home page. They should be promoted on social and in the same way and with as much fervor as any other story. I think that that is the most important thing is to not treat these stories as niche
I think that being a woman and also a woman of color makes me question my own biases more and question conventional wisdom and assumptions of what audiences might be interested in. I think that being a woman and also a woman of color makes me question my own biases more and question conventional wisdom and assumptions of what audiences might be interested in. We tend to assume that our personal perspective might be the default. We assume that, well, if I don't care about this thing, nobody else cares about this thing. So I think the most important thing is like challenging your own assumptions about what's important and what's worthy of covering and, and remembering that like your perspective and your social circle is not like the default perspective.
One thing that I often tell a lot of young journalists is diversify your skillset. It's important to be a good writer, but you will have more job options and more opportunities if you have other skills as well. Newsrooms are like facing lots of budget cuts across the country. And so the more skills you have, the more valuable it makes you in many of these roles. A lot more roles are more hybrid now.
The other thing I would say to women advocating for yourself, is that asking for what you want is okay. Don't feel shy in salary negotiations asking for the salary that you want. The worst that can happen is they say no but we can offer you this. Rarely has somebody retracted the offer because of the person asks for too much. It's often just like if they really want to hire you, they'll probably come back to you and say, look, maybe we can't offer that amount of money, but, but we're still really interested in hiring you so here's what we can offer. The other thing is like which should underscore everything is that like you have to work really hard and show that you are skilled and talented and really good at the job and make yourself very valuable.