Heather (Ciras) Mccarthy Email & Phone Number

I lead the Globe newsroom’s audience initiatives, overseeing a team of social media, community, newsletter, digital analytics, and SEO experts. I provide strategy on- and off-platform to best reach current and future audiences, serve the community, and best communicate the work that The Boston Globe produces.In this role, I:- oversee a team of audience professionals- direct our off-platform coverage, including everything from Spotlight investigative reports to breaking news.- liaise with the business, marketing, and advertising teams to align on strategic plans.- Run several digital-forward initiatives to continually enhance our approach to news online.

I came into The Marshall Project at a critical point in the organization's development: as they were leveling up from start-up to a more established news organization. To serve this mission, I built the first newsroom audience team. Our team was able to make the social media approach more sophisticated, enhance newsletter production, better leverage SEO, and make more accurate data-informed editorial decisions.

- Oversaw digital strategy and visual presentation of the Globe's highest-impact work, pushing the boundaries of what digital storytelling entailed, all with the audience's needs at the forefront.- Developed a strategy to enhance the digital presentation of more than just major projects and it worked: In 2020, several of the top-viewed stories of the year were from the audience experience team.- Managed a team of designers, developers, and audience engagement specialists to tell multimedia stories with a mix of graphics, data, animation, illustrations, video, audio, and interactives.- Balanced the demands of breaking news with long-term stories, deciding -- based on the story needs and potential, and the team's capacity -- where to deploy resources.- Oversaw all stories from the data desk during Covid, building a suite of dashboards and explainers, listening to reader questions and working to answer them in our data-driven interactives.- Led digital project management with attention paid to transparency and collaboration between multiple teams: the newsroom, audience, marketing, product, and consumer revenue. Managed a schedule of ever-shifting deadlines to ensure that each stakeholder had what they needed to make the story or project a success.- Along with those stakeholder teams, I worked to fine-tune our project management process, building in launch meetings, implementing new tech to track our work, holding post-mortems so we could get better and more efficient.- Oversaw and planned off-platform presentations for each major project to drive traffic and meet engagement benchmarks I set.- The leader of a team of creatives based in the newsroom, and therefore worked furiously to support and challenge them. I worked to build a diverse team, and tailored my management of each person to their personal needs and communication styles. I identified their strengths, weaknesses, and preferences and worked with each employee to be constantly growing and learning.

Boston

- Work with the newsroom to create best practices for reaching readers on multiple platforms. - Expanded our definition of "audience engagement" to also include story design and development, so that we were truly thinking of the reader experience from story inception to creation to distribution to feedback.- Create new and innovative ways to have community-wide conversations about the issues important to Bostonians. - Oversee all engagement strategy for editorial priorities, including, but not limited to Spotlight reports, large-scale investigations, and features. - Serve as engagement liaison with video, marketing, product, and photo. - Help create a culture where reader data is integrated into editorial workflows and used to inform decisions.

Boston, Massachusetts

Working in news and the arts & lifestyle departments, I write original content for the web, and enhance online storytelling by pairing articles with multimedia. I also break news and manage the organization's social media. On Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, I work to tell our stories in unique and compelling ways. I am a liaison with the video, design, graphics, and social media teams. I am part of crafting the online mission of the department and help determine the web plan for major articles.

Weston, Ma