Deputy Editor, Audience Strategy & Newsletters

About the role

The Deputy Editor, Audience Strategy & Newsletters serves as a critical member of the Audience Team and a strategic partner to newsroom editors. This role oversees the audience team members embedded with the Star Tribune’s editorial departments, ensuring audience insights, experimentation, and performance strategy are integrated into daily newsroom decision-making. Additionally, this role is the central strategic owner of the Star Tribune’s newsletter portfolio—one of the organization’s most important and rapidly evolving audience products. With more than 30 newsletters reaching hundreds of thousands of readers each week, email plays a vital role in reader engagement, subscription value, and community connection.

This leader will guide the direction, evaluation, and evolution of the newsletter portfolio while ensuring newsletters reflect the depth, clarity, and journalistic standards readers expect. The ideal candidate moves comfortably between strategy and execution, understands audience behavior, distribution across digital platforms, and performance analytics, and respects the rhythms and values of a modern newsroom. This role helps transform strong individual instincts into shared frameworks, sustainable systems, and measurable impact across desks and platforms.

Responsibilities

• Audience Strategy
  • Lead embedded audience strategy for the Star Tribune’s key coverage pillars, including News & Politics, Greater MN, Business, Outdoors, Food & Culture, Sports, and Strib Varsity.
  • Partner with desk editors to identify audience opportunities, data and research needs, performance goals, and experimentation priorities.
  • Develop shared audience strategy frameworks to help desks set priorities, evaluate performance, and identify growth opportunities.
  • Lead audience messaging strategy across owned channels—including newsletters, push notifications, in-app messaging, and other emerging platforms—to create cohesive reader experiences and audience journeys.
  • Partner with product, data, and marketing teams to develop and automate audience journeys that deepen habit, engagement, subscription value, and reader loyalty.
  • Encourage thoughtful experimentation across platforms, including homepage, newsletters, social media, and off-platform distribution.
  • Shape story presentation and distribution to maximize reach, relevance, and reader engagement.
• Newsletters
  • Develop a portfolio-level newsletter strategy balancing audience growth, reader habit, subscription value, editorial priorities, and operational sustainability.
  • Evaluate new newsletter proposals and guide lifecycle decisions, including launches, iterations, and sunsets.
  • Lead experimentation in newsletter subject lines, format, cadence, and segmentation.
  • Maintain quality and consistency across newsletters in partnership with newsroom editors.
  • Develop strong technical fluency in the email platform to troubleshoot issues, support producers, and improve newsletter workflows.
• Leadership & Team Development
  • Help translate Audience Team priorities into clear systems, workflows, and expectations.
  • Coach embedded Audience Editors in strategic planning, editor partnership, data interpretation, and platform decision-making.
  • Build consistent planning, testing, and post-publication learning practices across embedded audience roles.
  • Identify opportunities to improve collaboration between the Audience Team and desks, product, data, social, homepage, and newsletter stakeholders.
  • Model strong editorial judgment, audience-first thinking, and collaborative leadership across the newsroom.

Qualifications

• A bachelor’s degree in journalism or a related field, or an equivalent combination of education and work-related experience.
• A minimum of 5 years of significant experience in newsletter strategy, audience development, digital strategy, newsroom audience roles, lifecycle marketing, or related fields.
• A minimum of 2 years of experience leading or managing teams.
• Strong understanding of audience analytics, performance metrics, and methodology for gleaning actionable insights from data.
• Experience conducting audience research to guide editorial and distribution decisions.
• Experience working with email service providers (Sailthru or similar platforms preferred).
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to build trust with editors and reporters.
• A strong commitment to journalism and public service.
• A commitment to audiences that represent the breadth of Minnesota’s diversity.
• Must be currently legally authorized to work in the U.S. without sponsorship for employment visa status (e.g., H1B, O-1, TN, CPT, OPT).

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in a subscription-based media organization.
• Experience managing an email or audience product portfolio.
• Experience running structured testing and experimentation programs.
• Familiarity with homepage curation in a fast-paced newsroom.

Pay

The compensation range for this position is $103,500 – $125,000. Compensation will depend on a candidate’s qualifications, skills, competencies, and experience and may fall outside this range.

Benefits

• Modern Downtown Office: State-of-the-art workspace with a free fitness center, collaborative center, golf simulator, and rooftop patio.
• Comprehensive Benefits: Commuting subsidy, medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• Wellness & Work-Life Balance: Wellness program with financial incentives, generous paid time off, flexible holidays, one volunteer day, and two wellness days.
• Financial & Family Support: 401(k) with company match, paid parental and caregiving leave, hybrid work arrangements, and tuition reimbursement.
• Additional Perks: Employee assistance program, pet insurance, flexible spending accounts, and health savings accounts.