Director, Audience Development, CNN Digital Products & Services

Warner Bros. Discovery•Washington, DC

About The Position

The Director of Audience Development is a senior leader within Audience Strategy & Insights, responsible for driving audience growth, engagement, and habit across a portfolio of desks or a major vertical. This role translates audience signals into actionable editorial strategy at scale—ensuring that insights consistently shape coverage decisions, planning, and execution. You will oversee and elevate the work of embedded Audience Editors, setting direction, prioritizing opportunities, and ensuring that insights lead to measurable impact. You’ll operate as a strategic partner to editorial leadership, helping define how audience needs inform what we cover, how we present it, and how we distribute it. This role sits at the intersection of editorial judgment, data fluency, and operational leadership—balancing day-to-day decision support with longer-term audience strategy. You’ll work in close partnership with DART (Data, Analytics, Research & Testing), Product, and platform teams to ensure our audience-first approach is both actionable and scalable.

Requirements

Strong editorial judgment and alignment with journalistic values and independence.
7–10+ years of experience in digital media, audience development, content strategy, or audience insights.
Proven track record of shaping editorial strategy using audience insights and delivering measurable growth.
Experience leading or mentoring teams and influencing senior editorial stakeholders.
Strong partnership with analytics, product, and platform teams to translate insights into action.
Deep understanding of audience acquisition and engagement levers (SEO, social, home, newsletters, alerts).
Exceptional ability to synthesize complex data into clear, actionable recommendations.

Responsibilities

Strategic leadership & audience direction
Own audience strategy for a portfolio of desks, defining priorities that drive reach, engagement, and subscriber habit.
Translate audience signals (quantitative and qualitative) into clear strategic direction for editorial leaders.
Ensure audience considerations are embedded in planning, commissioning, and coverage execution—not just post-publication analysis.
Identify the biggest growth opportunities (coverage gaps, format innovation, platform strategy) and align teams against them.
Insight activation & editorial partnership
Guide how insights are delivered and used—elevating from reporting to decision-driving recommendations.
Partner directly with desk leadership to shape coverage plans, editorial priorities, and major moment strategies.
Oversee high-impact analyses and ensure they result in clear “do more / do less / try next” actions across teams.
Support major news moments and tentpoles with audience strategy, ensuring alignment across platforms and desks.
Team leadership & capability building
Manage and mentor a team of Audience Editors and Senior Audience Editors, elevating the quality, consistency, and impact of their work.
Set standards for insight generation, experimentation, and communication across the team.
Coach editors on advanced audience strategy, platform dynamics, and editorial influence.
Build a culture of curiosity, accountability, and continuous improvement.
Experimentation, frameworks & scalability
Oversee experimentation across desks (formats, packaging, timing, distribution), ensuring learnings are synthesized and scaled.
Develop and standardize playbooks, workflows, and best practices that can be applied across multiple desks.
Partner with DART and Product to improve tools, dashboards, and reporting that enable faster, clearer decision-making.
Ensure audience insights are measurable, repeatable, and tied to business and editorial goals.
Cross-functional collaboration
Act as a senior liaison between editorial, Product, Analytics, and platform teams (Off-platform, Home, Notifications, Newsletters).
Align daily audience execution with longer-term platform and product strategies.
Surface patterns, risks, and opportunities across desks and escalate when coordination or investment is needed.
Contribute to broader audience strategy discussions and organizational priorities.
Channel & platform leadership
Ensure strong, consistent audience strategy across Search, Social, Home, Notifications, and Newsletters.
Guide desks in aligning coverage with audience intent, platform dynamics, and distribution opportunities.
Partner with central teams to evolve platform strategies and ensure editorial needs are represented.