Washington Post taps Muggeridge as director, announces changes in audience team

The following excerpt announcement was sent out by The Washington Post’s managing editor Kat Downs Mulder and senior director of audience Ryan Kellett:

We’re thrilled to announce Tessa Muggeridge has been promoted to director of subscriber engagement and newsletters.

Tessa joined The Post’s Universal News Desk in 2011. She spent time in multiple editing roles including homepage editor, digital editor, and newsletters and alerts editor before moving to the Audience team. In 2019, she combined her deep expertise in newsletters, passion for our online communities and strong relationships with the Product and Marketing teams to launch the newsroom’s first team focused on subscriptions. Tessa has helped evolve how we engage and communicate with our digital-only subscribers as their numbers have grown to about 3 million.

Over the past few years, her team overhauled our newsletter portfolio. These efforts helped The Post become one of the first publishers to launch a coronavirus newsletter last year, yielding unprecedented sign-ups and subscriptions. She’s also been a strong partner to our PowerPost team working on the 202s, our signature suite of politics and policy newsletters.

As Tessa steps into this role, we are realigning the Audience team to better support the two areas she leads: newsletters and subscriber engagement.

T.J. Ortenzi is being promoted to senior subscriber engagement editor. T.J. has a wealth of experience from previous roles on the Social, Video and Emerging News Products teams. In the past two years, T.J. played a pivotal role in founding the Sub Hub, one of our first truly cross-functional groups in the organization. He’s also captained our efforts to showcase the impact of our journalism for readers through the Must Reads newsletter and newsroom notes from editors with calls to subscribe. Going forward, T.J. will help the team scale up our partnerships with Marketing and Product.

Kanyakrit (Yu) Vongkiatkajorn is being promoted to senior subscriber engagement editor. In this role, she will expand her community journalism work with the wider team and newsroom. In the past nearly two years, Yu has worked with editors and reporters on every desk on engagement strategies and projects.

María Sánchez Díez becomes a senior subscriber engagement editor after a very successful run in Operations, embedded first with Local and then National through the course of the pandemic. She will work on editorial strategy to convert and retain subscribers. In her first year in the role, she will work closely with Managing Editor Kat Downs Mulder to convene cross-functional working groups that will engage journalists across the newsroom in the effort to tackle some of our most pressing subscriber-oriented strategic priorities.

Teddy Amenabar, Eliza Goren and Lizzy Raben also join this team as subscriber engagement editors and will carry forward the ambitious and innovative work that the Audience Embed team started in 2016.

Kelly Poe is being promoted to senior newsletter editor, continuing her amazing run guiding our portfolio, redesigning dozens of products and conceptualizing several new ones. She will continue shaping ideas into innovative, successful newsletters, experimenting with ways to grow products and working with Product and Engineering to develop Carta, our in-house email tool.

Steven Johnson joins this team as newsletter editor. He most recently wrote the “What Day Is It?” newsletter series, a successful seven-day experimental course launched during the pandemic, and built research-based audience personas for our newest Voraciously newsletter.

Please join us in congratulating our colleagues on their exciting new assignments.