Senior Editor, Audience Development, CNN Features
Your New Role
The Senior Audience Editor is the embedded, desk-specific partner to Audience Strategy & Insights—translating audience signals into clear editorial choices that grow reach, deepen engagement, and strengthen habit, including among subscribers. You will supply the desk with essential performance learnings; shape framing, formats, and distribution to meet audience demand; run experiments; and coordinate execution across Search, Social, Home, Notifications, and Newsletters.
Accountabilities
Performance Insights & Editorial Guidance
- Deliver concise, actionable daily/weekly/monthly insights that guide coverage decisions and follow-ups, including clear “do more / do less / try next” recommendations.
- Suggest stories, angles, and formats aligned to search intent, evergreen opportunities, and time-sensitive audience demand.
- Shape story framing and presentation across on-platform surfaces (site/app, home, article packaging, recirculation) and off-platform channels (search, social, alerts, newsletters).
Cross-Platform Strategy & Collaboration
- Partner with Product and platform teams (Search, Social, Home, Notifications, Newsletters) to identify opportunities in modules, templates, topic hubs, and alerting.
- Drive reach, engagement, and habit by aligning desk plans to audience goals and capturing learnings in structured retros and playbooks.
- Coordinate distribution strategy across Off-Platform, Social, Community, Programming, and Newsletter teams.
Senior-Level Leadership
- Assign, write, and edit audience analysis across platforms; act as the insights lead for strategic desk priorities.
- Build scalable workflows for insight generation and measure the impact of audience-driven initiatives.
- Pitch and run experiments (format, packaging, timing) and translate results into actionable guidance.
- Coach and train newsroom staff on audience tools, search and social best practices, and packaging strategies.
- Collaborate across editorial, product, analytics, design, and research to embed audience-first thinking across the desk.
Channel Expertise & Desk Support
- Optimize for discoverability: research intent, track seasonality, steward evergreen content, and partner with Search on technical and practical best practices.
- Coordinate with Social, Community, Home, Notifications, and Newsletters to maximize reach and engagement.
- Contribute to daily/weekly/monthly desk and section updates, synthesizing insights into clear, actionable takeaways.
- Uphold CNN's journalistic mission by using data to inform editorial decisions.
Qualifications & Experience
- 5–7+ years in digital journalism, audience development, content strategy, or insights roles.
- Proven ability to identify coverage, framing, and format opportunities that attract new readers and deepen engagement.
- Strong ability to synthesize complex data into prescriptive editorial recommendations; experience partnering closely with analytics teams.
- Ability to write platform-native social copy and coach others on best practices.
- Strong cross-newsroom collaborator committed to CNN's journalistic independence and mission.
- Fluent in search trends, intent shifts, and misinformation dynamics.
- Deep expertise across mainstream and emerging social platforms.
- Strong communication and storytelling skills for reports and presentations; comfortable with testing, iteration, and directional reads.
- Skilled at bridging editorial, product, analytics, design, and research to move work forward.
- Strong understanding of the competitive landscape and broader attention patterns.
How We Get Things Done
This last bit is probably the most important! Here at WBD, our guiding principles are the core values by which we operate and are central to how we get things done. You can find them at www.wbd.com/guiding-principles/ along with some insights from the team on what they mean and how they show up in their day to day.
Championing Inclusion at WBD
Warner Bros. Discovery embraces the opportunity to build a workforce that reflects a wide array of perspectives, backgrounds and experiences. Being an equal opportunity employer means that we take seriously our responsibility to consider qualified candidates on the basis of merit, without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, mental or physical disability, and genetic information, marital status, citizenship status, military status, protected veteran status or any other category protected by law.