Fortune editor in chief Clifton Leaf sent out the following announcement on Thursday:
Dear colleagues,
It is my great pleasure to announce three well-deserved promotions at Fortune. As of today, Emma Hinchliffe, Lance Lambert, and Katherine Dunn will be promoted from the role of associate editor to editor.
If it feels as if you’ve been reading Emma Hinchliffe’s byline somewhat continuously over the past few years, there’s good reason: Emma is part of our illustrious “300 Club” at Fortune, having written no fewer than 333 newsletter posts and other stories in 2020 alone—and her sharp, timely commentary, along with that of her Broadsheet co-author-editors Kristen Bellstrom and Claire Zillman, has helped to nearly double the audience for that newsletter in just the past year. (Just as amazing, even with a subscriber base that’s approaching 100,000 strong, cumulative open rates remain at nearly 40%.) Emma, who earned her undergraduate degree from Georgetown, joined Fortune in August 2018 after working at Mashable and the Houston Chronicle. Since then, she has balanced her daily Broadsheet efforts with a slew of deeper reporting assignments and conference duties. Among Emma’s standout journalistic achievements in 2020, she investigated employee working conditions at the beauty brand Glossier and examined the pandemic’s devastating effects on working women—an issue that continues to be of major concern. She also edited a series of op-eds by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and interviewed some of the year’s most newsmaking leaders, including Stacey Abrams, Melinda Gates, Sen. Tammy Duckworth, Gloria Steinem, and Whitney Wolfe Herd (the last, after Bumble’s IPO made her an instant billionaire). On the conference side, Emma has also been a rising star—both on the recruiting side and in her sharp interviews—as witnessed by her on-stage MPW conversations with actor Yara Shahidi, Rep. Ilhan Omar, and Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex. As if that wasn’t enough, Emma cochairs, with Beth Kowitt, the Fortune-U.S. Department of State Global Women’s Mentoring Partnership—and as of today, she will also begin serving as a new co-chair for our MPW Next Gen conference.
Lance Lambert becomes the analytics editor at Fortune. From the day he arrived, it was clear that Lance had an eye for gleaning surprising insights in what might seem like random snippets of opinion polling and industry data—and he rapidly turned that talent into Fortune Analytics, a subscriber-only newsletter he designed, launched, and that now has tens of thousands of data-devouring readers. These readers, it should be emphasized, are Fortune faithful: They’re premium online subscribers, and Lance’s exclusive weekly insights, we hope, will help keep them that way. But add to the above a second uncanny talent—the knack for attracting new readers to Fortune—and, well, one just has to marvel. Lance’s buzzy, on-the-news stories earned a mind-blowing 11 million page views in 2020. And so far this year, he is once again leading the traffic league tables, garnering nearly half of that 2020 total in just the first two months of 2021. As it turns out, though, Lance has a third skill set that is proving to be invaluable for our new subdomain on higher education—an effort that he has been overseeing “on the side” of his editorial day job: He’s helping Fortune launch a new series of rankings on graduate programs for business and other pursuits, which will begin to go live this spring. Happily, Lance not only has a raft of natural abilities here, but also some hard-won experience: A graduate of the University of Cincinnati (with a B.A. in economics and journalism), Lance was previously a data journalist at realtor.com and at Bloomberg (notably, managing that media outlet’s Best Business School rankings), and also did a stint as a database reporter for the Chronicle of Higher Education in Washington D.C. That said, what Lance is most proud of, naturally, is his talkative four-year girl—and she is excited to become a big sister this summer. So double congratulations are in order.
When insightful reporting is married with compelling writing, something marvelous happens: Readers lose themselves in a story. And readers have been doing that a lot lately in articles written by Katherine Dunn. However one slices the data—whether one looks over the past two months, six months, or a year—Katherine’s collective writing at Fortune consistently registers among the highest when it comes to reader engagement (the time people spend with an article). Translation: Readers are soaking up every word. That’s true whether she’s writing about climate change, ESG investing, COVID vaccines, or frozen wind turbines in Texas, as she did this past weekend. Two magazine features over the past year—on disappearing global positioning satellite (GPS) signals in the Eastern Mediterranean (in the Feb 2020 issue) and on the changing fortunes of her oil-dependent home province in Canada (Oct. 2020)—also deserve special recognition for their wow factor. Since joining Fortune in 2019, Katherine has spent much of her time on the edit desk, working alongside her colleagues in Fortune’s crack European bureau to ready the website and both the CEO Daily and Bull Sheet newsletters for their morning runs. Her everyday brief, no surprise, has included covering and editing a deluge of breaking news in recent months—and having her keen eye watching the global business front from London has been a great asset for Fortune. Katherine, who has a bachelor’s degree in journalism and political science from Carleton University in Ottawa as well as a master’s in financial journalism from City (University of London), Aarhus University, and the Danish School of Journalism, got her start as a reporter covering crime and other news in Toronto during the heyday of that city’s infamous mayor, Rob Ford. She followed that with a stint in Amsterdam, writing for a group of art and design magazines, and happily chose to abandon both of those tracks for business journalism. Prior to coming to Fortune, Katherine wrote a daily business newsletter for the Canadian newsmagazine Maclean’s, covered cocoa and coffee markets at the Wall Street Journal/Dow Jones, and reported on the oil markets for S&P Global Platts. She lives in London with her boyfriend and their corgi puppy, Griff, and points out that she “genuinely misses small talk.”
Please join me in congratulating Emma, Lance, and Katherine on their many achievements and on their exciting new roles. We’re thrilled to have all three helping us lead Fortune into the new year.
Cliff
