Regional Audience Growth & Retention Editor - West

The Regional Audience Growth + Retention Editor, West will lead the Audience Growth + Retention Team positioned in McClatchy newsrooms in the West Region, which includes 10 newsrooms in 3 states. You will be responsible for leading and motivating your team to help guide our local newsrooms as they expand and diversify audiences, deploy reader engagement strategies that will better connect them to communities, and create retention plans that will drive home our value to readers and subscribers.

The successful candidate knows how to engage with readers on a variety of platforms, from social media to live events; has demonstrated success in growing newsletters and/or additional news-related products; and has a firm command of SEO concepts. The candidate also possesses a love of purposeful experimentation informed by performance data. 

This role requires an editor with strong management skills and a background in digital writing, editing and storytelling. He/she/they must manage a team of about 10 producers, providing daily direction, feedback and coaching, and hold the Audience Growth + Retention Team accountable for growing loyal audiences. The editor will provide guidance to editors and reporters on story format, elevation of high-impact projects, and writing with an audience focus, and help to create plans for story, video and audio presentation and distribution.

This job will be based in The Sacramento Bee newsroom. Sacramento is the fastest-growing big city in California, and its metropolitan area stretches from the farmlands of the Central Valley to the shores of Lake Tahoe. The successful candidate will work collaboratively with other editors in The Bee newsroom and will work closely with the managing editor to ensure staff is executing on its audience-focused mission.

The Modesto Bee, The Fresno Bee, The Tribune (San Luis Obispo) and the Merced Sun-Star in California are also in McClatchy’s West Region, in addition to The News Tribune, The Olympian, The Bellingham Herald and the Tri-City Herald in Washington, as well as the Idaho Statesman.

The Regional Audience Growth + Retention Editor reports to the Senior Editor for Audience Growth + Retention.

Key responsibilities:

• 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.

• Serve as a daily point of contact for editors who need guidance on content distribution that promotes audience growth. This includes: 

• Leading critical news meetings with an audience focus. 

• Leveraging data to make real-time decisions that will amplify content. 

• Creating engagement opportunities on the day’s top pieces of content.

• Collaborating with the SEO team to identify best practices and evergreen topics. 

• Help to project manage the region’s high-impact journalism projects, including video and multimedia, having a keen eye toward innovative distribution tactics that reach the right audience at the right time and novel retention tactics that spur subscriber engagement and loyalty. 

• Implement engagement strategies that focus on initiating conversations and building community conversations. 

• Regularly analyze performance data to improve growth strategies, and offer feedback to newsrooms.

• Experiment with and implement strategies that increase reader loyalty, including popup newsletters; alert strategy; subscriber experiences and outreach; content data analysis; and A/B testing of headlines.

 Qualifications:

• 5+ years of experience, preferably in a digital media organization

• Reliable news judgment

• Experience in a leadership role

• A proven track record of growing and engaging audiences

• A deep understanding of social media best practices and newsletter strategies

• 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

• Reporting and editing experience a plus

• A demonstrated ability to learn new skills

• Occasional travel may be required