What Lauren Brown of Quartz taught Mitra Kalita

Mitra Kalita, now senior vice president at CNN, writes on Medium about what she learned from Lauren Brown of Quartz, who died earlier this week from cancer.

Kalita writes, “I hired Lauren at Quartz in the summer of 2012 as my deputy. Until then, I had always been the deputy.

“Lauren joined us from Business Insider. I never worked in digital before so it fell on Lauren to teach me WordPress, how to size photos, how to run a Twitter account, how to write headlines that people actually click on. She was patient and hard-working, and together, we crafted a vision for what modern-day commentary could look like. In her memo to me pitching herself for the job, Lauren wrote:

‘While having commentary from notable figures is essential, the social web has proven that people don’t necessarily care where a story comes from or often who is writing it — they just want to read something interesting. This affords us a great opportunity to tap into new voices and unlikely experts; people on the ground around the world who are witnessing firsthand the forces behind macro-economic changes. This allows us to be granular and authoritative in a way that U.S.-centric publications aren’t.’

“And that’s what we did. We called ourselves ‘Ideas editors’ and set out to change the definition of who gets to opine: kids who love soccer, unemployed Greek teens, playwrights obsessed with Robert Mugabe. Lauren also made us take the high road on twerking. We switched up formats; it was Lauren’s idea to Google Hangout with women discussing freezing their eggs.”

Read more here.