Ava M. Macha’s unique job title, Audience Engagement Editor for Underrepresented Communities at The Guardian, caught our attention immediately! We sat down with her to hear all about arriving into this first-of-its-kind role, the work in practice and discover how it’s paid off for The Guardian’s wider strategy.
> The Guardian US created a first-of-its-kind role, Audience Engagement Editor for Underrepresented Communities, sitting between editorial and community rather than inside social media > Ava M. Macha's first move was an audit of what the Guardian didn't know. There was very little demographic data on readers, and what existed showed an audience skewing older and whiter > For a series on racial disparities in fertility care, she joined private Facebook groups for Black women trying to conceive and consulted the admins before anything else. Listening and sourcing first, promotion never > Success was measured in saves, shares and comments rather than traffic. One Instagram post drew 583 saves and 83 comments, and Reddit threads brought 12,000 views alongside replies from the readers being written about > The rule she keeps is closing the loop. Callout respondents are told how their contributions were used and sent the finished pieces, which is the difference between participatory and extractive journalism
The engagement editor as community strategist: Ava’s role in redefining audience journalism
As the audience engagement editor for underrepresented communities, Ava sits between editorial and community, helping the newsroom design engagement strategies that serve underserved audiences. This includes regular audience editor tasks, but also working closely with the immigration, race & equity and west coast desks to build relationships with diverse audiences, both through pre-publication listening and post-publication amplification to the communities where it matters most.
“I’m not just here to publish tweets. I’m here to ask: ‘Who should we be speaking with? Who needs to see themselves in this story? And how do we build those relationships early, and ethically?”
Stepping into this first-of-its-kind role
Stepping into her role, Ava’s first strategic move was to investigate The Guardian’s existing US audience. This meant diving deep into comp score studies and surveys to truly learn about who Guardian US readers are (age, race, sexuality, gender identity, location) – “What can we learn about the demographics of the audience? What can we NOT know?”. Then, crucially, defining what “underrepresented” readers the brand was actually trying to reach, and then establishing the right metrics to track them, became foundational to measuring her impact and defining success.
