Announcement from Director of Next Generation Audiences Phoebe Connelly and Managing Editor Justin Bank:
Jamal Jordan and Yu Vongkiatkajorn have been named editors on the Next Generation team.
Jamal will lead our efforts with experimentation and new formats. In this role, he will work across desks to diversify the formats we employ to tell stories and help reporters build skills needed for reaching next generation audiences.
Jamal began his career managing social media accounts for such Broadway shows as “Phantom of the Opera” and “Les Misérables.” In search of a career as a documentary filmmaker, he worked as a production assistant on MTV’s “Catfish,” HBO’s “High Maintenance” and other shows. From there, he headed to Vice, working first as an associate producer for Motherboard and later as a producer for Vice News.
He joined the digital transition team at the New York Times in 2018. While on staff, he published the immersive photo-driven project “Queer Love in Color,” which was later developed into a book. He most recently completed a civic media fellowship with the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab and a journalist/creator fellowship with YouTube.
A passionate believer in building the next generation of journalists, he has taught a course in multimedia storytelling at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences and leads the annual student newsroom project for NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists. He loves The Washington Post’s storytelling and is beyond excited to join the company.
Jamal started Aug. 7. He will work remotely from New York until he heads to D.C. at the end of the year.
Yu becomes the editor of strategy and growth for Next Gen. In this role, in which she has already started, Yu will work across desks to help drive adoption of key insights from successful experiments, helping new audiences connect more deeply with The Post.
She joined The Post in June 2019 as a community editor, overseeing comments, live chats and reader callouts. In that role, she developed a new process for callouts with enhanced collaborative functionality. She has reported on and edited many reader engagement projects, including how veterans reacted to “The Afghanistan Papers,” a series on Americans navigating the pandemic and an end-of-year piece asking readers to describe 2020 in one word.
As a founding member of the Next Gen team, Yu piloted the analytic reporting processes that became the template for the Desk Deep Dives that are the linchpin of the Audience Accelerator project.
Yu has a strong track record of systemic, transformative work. She founded the Expert Talks series, which tapped reporters and editors to share their expertise around the topics and formats that attract younger audiences. Alongside Shirley Qiu and Lizzy Raben, Yu built Audience Innovation Labs, our idea and project incubator, which is in its second year and where two dozen reporters have been able to pilot new approaches to their journalism.
