NY Times promotes four on the newsroom audience team

The following excerpt was sent out from The New York Times‘ newsroom audience director Anna Dubenko:

I am thrilled to announce four exciting promotions on our team: Vindu Goel as the director of Community Engagement; Maggie Adams as the deputy Search editor; April Zhong as a senior Search analyst; and Kari Haskell as a senior news assistant.

In his new role, Vindu will lead our efforts to strengthen the relationship between The Times and our readers through our comments section. Vindu joined the Audience team in 2020 after 12 years as a reporter and editor in Business, including a stint as our tech and business correspondent in India. As our emerging platforms editor, he has blended strategic vision, hands-on execution and cross-departmental collaboration to help us explore and build a presence on new platforms. Before joining The Times, Vindu was a reporter, columnist and editor at The San Jose Mercury News in Silicon Valley, The Plain Dealer in Ohio and The Wall Street Journal in Philadelphia.

Maggie has become a key leader on the Search team, and she will continue pushing us forward as our deputy search editor. She contextualizes the search and audience strategies that are driving our journalistic and audience goals. Maggie has proven to be an integral part of our team, whether it’s by working tirelessly on elections, developing our evergreen strategy or by working before the sunrise to write the morning audience note.

April has played an essential role in the growth of search traffic on Cooking and has become an integral part of the Cooking and Audience teams. She has defined high-impact technical search engine optimization (S.E.O.) work that directly led to measurable outcomes, including increasing the rankings of recipe and collection pages, achieving exceptional Core Web Vitals scores, and significantly increasing Cooking’s visibility on Google Discover. As senior S.E.O. Analyst, April will lead onsite S.E.O. data analysis, set technical S.E.O. requirements for various projects across the product tracks, and help define large strategic initiatives.

Kari has long been a key member of the Community team. As our early morning moderator, she begins each day assessing comment volume and opening top stories, showing keen instincts for what makes a particular piece good (or bad) for comments. This year, she mastered new analytic skills to author Community’s first ever Wrap-Up note, creating a vibrant weekly report highlighting reader insights and comment data. We’re excited to get Kari more involved in Community projects in her new role as a senior news assistant, and we look forward to benefiting even more from her creativity and enthusiasm.