NY Times hires WSJ’s Bleyl for social team

Anna Dubenko, deputy audience director at The New York Times, sent out the following on Tuesday:

We’re thrilled to announce the newest addition to The Times’s Audience team: Aleissa Bleyl, who is joining the social team as an editor.

Coming from The Wall Street Journal, Aleissa brings an expert knowledge of social media and off-platform design. She joins at a time when making Times journalism visually compelling and shareable off-platform is a crucial focus of our team.

At The Journal, Aleissa worked on building the newsroom’s presence on Snapchat Discover. She played an integral role in bringing breaking news and enterprise stories to the platform, producing and designing visual-first stories in addition to editing and writing scripts. She helped lead The Journal’s 2020 election coverage on Snapchat, developing regular newsletter-style updates and other visual approaches to covering key moments of the campaign. Aleissa also worked extensively with reporters in the field, producing and editing a number of social-first projects that put a face on WSJ journalism.

Prior to The Journal, Aleissa worked at the Financial Times, as a social media editor and social visual producer, based in New York. She led an overhaul of the FT’s visual presence across social platforms, developed a set of best practices for Instagram Stories and helped produce and curate a number of reader engagement and callout projects as part of the FT’s Audience Engagement team. She also ran the FT’s social accounts day to day and occasionally wrote FirstFT, a morning newsletter. Aleissa has also worked for the E.W. Scripps Washington bureau, as a multimedia specialist and intern for its podcasts.

She shares the social team’s passion for making journalism digestible and engaging for a social audience, and we couldn’t be more excited to have her on our team.

Please join us in welcoming Aleissa to The Times.