ProPublica hires Marco as senior editor for audience

ProPublica announced Tuesday that Meg Marco is joining the staff as its senior editor for audience, a new position at ProPublica.

In the role, she will oversee ProPublica’s audience strategy, which includes developing ways to reach new readers and sustain relationships with them. She will oversee ProPublica’s social, platforms and newsletter efforts.

Marco starts March 20 and will report to deputy managing editor Eric Umansky and Celeste LeCompte, vice president of business development.

Marco most recently served as an editor at Axios, overseeing the organization’s expansion into enterprise journalism. Before joining Axios, she was editor for digital content strategy at The Wall Street Journal. In that role, Marco staffed and launched the Journal’s innovation lab, a center for experimentation, research and data science within the newsroom, and was responsible for the relaunch of the WSJ’s newsletter portfolio.

In her previous role at Consumer Reports, Marco oversaw both editorial and product for the news site Consumerist, developing a strategy to focus on issues-based coverage of topics such as surprise medical bills, for-profit colleges, telecom policy, consumer privacy and product safety. Consumerist’s coverage led to policy changes by major tech companies and retailers, a nationwide recall of a defective fitness tracker and legislation banning non-disparagement agreements in consumer contracts.

“Meg has a passion for revelatory accountability journalism and has a history of leveraging newsletters, crowdsourcing, social media and other strategies to do it better,” Umansky said.

“ProPublica’s mission is to create change through our journalism. Connecting with audiences is critical — to our business and our journalism and Meg has a remarkable record of doing exactly that,” LeCompte said.

“I couldn’t be more excited to join the fantastic team that ProPublica has assembled,” Marco said. “I’m honored to have an opportunity to collaborate with these exceptionally talented and creative people as they take on such critically important work.”