How Mehta bridged the gap between digital and print at Fast Company

Stephanie Mehta

JP Mangalindan of The Juggernaut profiled Fast company editor in chief Stephanie Mehta.

Mangalindan writes, “When Mehta first arrived at Fast Company in 2018, succeeding longtime editor Robert Safian, Fast Company Deputy Editor David Lidsky describes how she made an effort to help bridge the divide between the print and digital teams — a common issue for publications with print origins. Where some top-ranking editors prefer to remain aloof, maintaining a rarefied aura of mystique and inaccessibility — a formula honed and perfected in the hallways of Condé Nast — Mehta chimes in regularly on Slack to staffers’ ideas, writes prolifically for the website, and maintains an open-door policy for staffers.

“‘I never asked my colleagues to do anything I would never do myself,’ Mehta said. ‘That includes staying up and making sure that the copy is where we want it to be or, at a live event, rolling up my sleeves and stuffing a goodie bag.’

“‘In the mid-2010s, there was still a little bit of a divide here,’ recalled Lidsky. ‘Early on, she made an effort to collapse any of those distinctions so everyone is just working at Fast Company and you weren’t just necessarily working on the magazine or the website or events.'”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.