The Verge editor in chief Nilay Patel sent out the following staff changes on Monday:
Hey all —
As I shared in the staff meeting today, I’m pleased to announce that we’re promoting Liz Lopatto to Deputy Editor, overseeing both our science and transportation teams. We’re also promoting William Joel to design director, welcoming Dami Lee to the Circuit Breaker team as a reporter and Mariya Abdulkaf to our video team as our first dedicated social producer, focused on Instagram. Please join me in congratulating everyone!
Liz joined The Verge in 2014 as our science editor, and by 2015 Nieman Lab was referring to her as “Headmaster of The Verge Science Academy.” In that role she has built one of the best science teams in the business, covering everything from space to flamethrowers to vaping to her own concussion recovery. She’s also overseen important investigations, like this deeply-reported look into a sexist academic culture at Texas Tech and this piece on pricing scams for allergy treatments.
Along with science producer Will Poor and his team, Liz has also been integral to the recent launch of Verge Science on YouTube, which has reached over 300,000 subscribers in just over 100 days. In fact, Verge Science is the fastest-growing YouTube channel in Vox Media history, gaining over 200,000 subscribers in July alone, with much more to come.
Of course, our science coverage still needs leadership, and one of Liz’s first tasks as Deputy Editor will be to hire a new science editor — that listing will go up shortly. We’re looking for someone who can maintain our high editorial standards for science coverage while working closely with our executive producer Nori Donovan and Will Poor as Verge Science video continues to grow at a lightning pace. We’ll share that listing soon; please distribute it widely into your networks so we can run a diverse and inclusive search.
Liz will also be working closely with Sean O’Kane and Andy Hawkins to focus on growing Verge Transportation — her experience growing Verge Science from a single reporter and a single editor to today’s diverse multichannel team will be invaluable to that project. Liz has already been working closely with that team, and the result has been excellent stories on the Boring Company, deep dives into self-driving tech from both the DIY fringe to the biggest companies in the business, and how big automakers are breaking themselves up to compete.
Will Joel has been invaluable to our team as art director, and as design director he will take a much more active hand building processes and visual signatures for illustrations, branding design, motion graphics, and more. One of our promises to The Verge’s audience is that our work is beautiful and illuminating, and Will’s job is to push that work forward in ever more unique ways. James Bareham will continue to oversee photography; he’ll also be working more closely with our network development team on packaging and promoting our working for sales and marketing.
Finally, I am very pleased to welcome Dami to our Circuit Breaker team, where her enthusiasm and creativity has already resulted this tremendously charming video about the Nintendo Labo and this, the single best story about the Galaxy Home published in the entire tech press. And Mariya’s excellent work on our Instagram Stories has already resulted in our Instagram channel closing in on a million followers against incredible audience growth — our story views doubled in the first half of this year. In her new role she’ll be focused on continuing to grow that channel, innovating on Stories like this What’s In Your Bag with Lakeith Stanfield, and making sure we’re ready for more and more platforms to adopt the story format.
Okay, that’s it — congrats to everyone!
