Vox editor-in-chief Swati Sharma and VP Allison Rockey today announced new roles for Blair Hickman, Nisha Chittal, and Agnes Mazur; they’ll become executive director of audience, managing editor, and associate director of audience respectively.
Hickman has held several roles and led several teams at the Vox for the last four and a half years. In her most recent role as managing editor of audience, she led the launch and development of the Vox Contributions program. Her new role as executive director of audience will touch all parts of the editorial and business departments at Vox, and ensure Vox’s audience is at the heart of all of the network’s editorial, strategic and business decisions. Before Vox, Hickman was the audience editor and part of the founding team at The Marshall Project, and prior to that worked on crowdsourcing and audience engagement at ProPublica. She was also an adjunct professor at NYU and Columbia journalism schools.
Chittal was previously director of audience & engagement at Vox, overseeing off-platform content and growth strategies — that included overseeing social platforms, SEO, newsroom analytics, crowdsourcing and community, managing relationships with Apple News and other partner platforms, and new platform experimentation. She most recently led the launch of Vox’s presence on Tiktok, and revamped Vox’s newsroom SEO strategy. She began her career at Vox Media as engagement editor at Racked, and prior to that she lead audience and engagement strategies at MSNBC and NBC News.
Mazur has worked at Vox in a variety of audience engagement roles for the past six years, most recently as deputy engagement editor. During her time at Vox, she has helped the Video team develop a passionate audience of nearly 10 million YouTube subscribers, and expanded Vox’s video presence across platforms. She has led Vox newsletter strategy, developing and growing a roster of 10 active newsletters. She also oversaw the Engagement Team’s live event coverage from elections to impeachments to the Olympics. Prior to Vox she worked as a digital strategist at Blue State Digital and across numerous political campaigns.
Sharma and Rockey’s memo to the staff about these new roles follows:
We want to congratulate Blair Hickman on her promotion to Executive Director of Audience, Nisha Chittal on her new role as Managing Editor, and Agnes Mazur on her promotion to Associate Director of Audience.
Over the last four and a half years, Blair has been a key leader at Vox — from expanding our crowdsourcing program to leading our shift to SEO to creating data-informed editorial strategies that help us grow and build loyalty. She has deep editorial and strategic experience from her work here, and her previous roles at The Marshall Project and ProPublica. In this new role, she’ll continue to ensure that Vox’s audience is at the core of our editorial and business decisions.
For more than three years, Nisha has been a talent at Vox and has understood how to help our stories thrive. She joined us from Racked, where she was the engagement editor, and before that, MSNBC. In this new role, she will be central to empowering our editors to create the journalism that lives up to Vox’s mission. She led us from a world where you can only post an image on Instagram to one that included galleries, stories, and reels, shaped our evolving SEO strategy, and deftly guided and mentored the engagement team through an ever-evolving industry. Nisha has an uncanny ability to spot issues before they happen, and her skills to solve problems paired with her background in journalism will be a huge asset to editors in the newsroom.
Agnes has been at Vox almost since the beginning, and the number of ways she has contributed to Vox are far too numerous to list here. She has worked on almost every platform we’re on, built an evergreen video repromotion program that led to hundreds of millions of views, created off-platform coverage strategies for countless debate and election nights, and has been instrumental in building our newsletter program, to name just a few. She has an incredible strategic mind that will be essential to Vox’s future growth and audience development. (She also has the best GIF game in the business!)
Author: Vox Staff
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