Washington Post announces promotions on the social and operations teams

The following excerpt announcement was sent out by The Washington Post director of social and operations Mark Smith and senior director of audience Ryan Kellett:

Social Media

Tom Johnson will become the assignment editor for Social Media. In this role, he will manage the team dedicated to our flagship account programming on Facebook and Twitter.

Tom started at The Post as an intern and then signed on as a video editor, doing stints across several video teams including social aggregation, the hub and general assignment. Tom came to Audience in 2018 as an editor embedded first in Sports and later across several topical areas including technology and health.

This past year, Tom has played a pivotal role in several Audience experiments including Asked & Answered. Tom also was a lead editor on our coronavirus reopening tracker last year, providing a critical reader service through the summer.

Tom will lead a team that includes social media editors Angel Mendoza, Claire Tran, Rushawn Walters and Edgar Ramirez, who is embedded on the Opinions team.

Operations

Sarah Dunton, Maite Fernández, and Bryan Flaherty will become senior operations editors. They will remain embedded in newsroom sections to make sure our daily coverage continues to meet the moment and grow our audiences and will each take on a larger leadership role as partners to our Product team on key initiatives.

Sarah Dunton will continue her leadership in Politics and grow her portfolio to include the rest of the National section. Going forward, Sarah will be the Operations team lead on article page strategy. In this role, she will work closely with our colleagues in Product and Creative Director Greg Manifold on recirculation strategies to deepen readers’ engagement with The Post.

Maite Fernández will become a senior operations editor and continue in Foreign where she has spent nearly three successful years steering digital strategies for well-optimized coverage across the newsroom. Maite will take a leadership role in live coverage strategies, partnering with the new Global Live team to make sure we fully harness the opportunities available for more frequent live coverage.

Bryan Flaherty, who has been an operations editor in Sports since 2019 and expanded his portfolio during the pandemic to include Local, will become a senior operations editor in Features.

As the first operations editor in Features, Bryan will also assume a leadership role on search engine optimization, becoming the newsroom’s editorial SEO lead partnering with Product and editors across the newsroom to make sure our stories are built to attract this valuable audience.

Marian Liu will shift from By The Way to covering Local, and Shefali Kulkarni will continue working with Business. We will hire a new operations editor to cover Sports.

Please join us in congratulating our colleagues on their promotions and assignments.