WSJ creates storytelling team

Wall Street Journal head of content experience Lydia Serota and Mike Finkel and John Schimmel, vice presidents of engineering, sent out the following on Tuesday:

Colleagues,

We’re excited to announce the formation of our new Storytelling team, which will set and execute a vision for the Journal’s article experiences. Our story pages are an incredibly important entry point for readers, particularly new audiences, and this team will take that experience to the next level. The team will work closely with editors, visual journalists and others in the newsroom who are involved in designing story experiences.

Mariah Craddick started at the Journal last month as Storytelling’s product leader, after working at McClatchy as a product manager for audience. She will partner with program manager Marina Guvenc, product designer Adam Fisher-Cox and a great group of engineers joining the team from around our Digital Experience & Strategy (DXS) department:

Josh Kadis moves over to Storytelling from the Newsroom Tools team, where he has worked on R&D projects, including to support our election coverage. Josh joined the Journal earlier this year after working on product development for news publishers at Alley and at Quartz.

Hugo Striedinger joins from the Web platform team, where he has tackled various Grand Canyon migration projects and accessibility improvements across the site. Hugo came to us from the Tampa Bay Times in January.

Brian Whitton joins after helping to build and launch the WSJ Noted microsite. During that time, Brian worked with reporters on new story elements and experiences, and on the integration with our new CMS. Brian was formerly the engineering manager at New York Public Radio and previously worked as a research engineer at the MIT Media Lab.

This new team rounds out DXS’s Content Experiences group, which is run by newsroom veteran Lydia Serota in partnership with our engineering leads.

We wanted to take this moment to describe the teams within Content Experiences, since it is a new team that was built while we’ve been out of the office. Beyond the new Storytelling team, this group also includes Newsroom Tools (such as Image Manager, Chartlos, Live Coverage and our R&D efforts, under Alyssa Zeisler’s leadership), CMS (led by Tyler Chance, shepherding NewsGrid and our new WordPress-based content-management system) and Innovation (Robin Kwong, whose team runs the Idea Portal and prototyped the coronavirus ribbon).

These teams will be working together and across the organization to serve and grow our audiences and to serve our newsroom, building useful and innovative products and tools.

We’re looking forward to collaborating with you. Please reach out to Lydia with any questions or to learn more.