Location: Augusta, GA
TAC Media, publisher of The Augusta Chronicle, is seeking a Vice President of Audience to drive significant local audience engagement and growth around the company’s portfolio of digital and print products.
The goal of TAC Media is to become integral and indispensable in the lives of local people, resulting in much larger audiences. This will enable TAC Media to provide incomparable service to the community and unparalleled reach for advertisers. The Vice President of Audience plays the lead role in this effort.
The successful candidate for this leadership position understands the opportunities in developing strong community engagement, is digital savvy, and is motivated by the TAC Media audience mission statement:
- “To become and remain the dominant convener and server of community audiences in the market."
- “This will be done by meeting the news, journalism, information, discussion, discovery and interaction needs of our communities.
- “In this process, we will provide unparalleled and diverse opportunity, reach and frequency for commercial communication.”
The Vice President will have two strategic responsibilities:
1. Oversee the transformation of the newsroom to embrace new forms of content creation and distribution, including social media, video, new story-telling formats, community conversation, and mobile engagement.
2. Work collaboratively with the publisher and advertising department to use the company’s resources to develop large non-news audiences and a deep understanding of the behaviors of those audiences. 3. Coordinates and oversees product development and marketing oversight as part of this effort.
The Vice President will also work collaboratively with the Morris Publishing Group VP of Audience in development and implementation of emerging news and non-news initiatives.
We are looking for candidates with these qualities:
• Passion for the local media business, coupled with entrepreneurial spirit and ideas.
• Record of innovation and leading change.
• Can articulate vision for audience initiatives and develop strategy for advancing the future of a multi-media enterprise.
• Can see the intersections between audience and revenue for the greater good of both the community and the company.
• Experienced leader with an ability to manage upward, among peers and across the organization.
• Credibility understanding news and content generation processes and oversight of news – not necessarily having the skills.
• Can talk and understand the language of IT developers.
• Can develop, read and understand business plans and financial statements.
• Competency and presence in social media.
• Sees the value of the print audience and newspaper within and beyond the immediate future.
Duties and responsibilities:
• Play the lead role in developing the company’s strategies and activities to create, sustain and expand the key audiences needed to dominate our market in the 21st century, meeting metrics targets and goals.
• Maintain communication and cooperation with Morris VP of Audience on new audience initiatives, both news and non-news, digital and print.
• Provide leadership, inspiration and guidance for the news staff in finding 21st-century ways to meet the news and information needs of local people. The resulting user-centric content choices and decisions should dramatically increase monetizable digital news audiences and sustain the print news audience.
• Lead and execute strategies to grow monetizable non-news audiences.
• Assure that TAC Media delivers highly satisfactory and engaging audience/user/reader experiences through our offerings, including design and presentation, content, ease of use and other attributes and benefits.
• Take authority and responsibility for effective use of our audience distribution channels, both digital and print, to assure optimal effectiveness for both audience and sales.
• Collaborate with other departments, including advertising and circulation, to meet the audience needs of their ongoing operations, programs and projects.
• Deploy effective marketing strategies and programs to assure that our offerings achieve maximum audience gains.
• Participate in strategic planning and decision-making to maximize the company’s market share in audience and in advertising revenues.
• Lead and direct appropriate social media activities to: 1) expand the audience penetration and pull of our content, and 2) gather from social media the news and “buzz” that will reflect the interests and concerns active in our community.
Experience:
• Preferred: At least three years’ experience in managing news operations.
• Alternative: At least three years experience managing consumer-facing marketing or comparable public-facing communications.
• Significant experience in audience creation, development and metrics.
• Bachelor’s degree in journalism, marketing or business, or equivalent.
Morris Communications is a well respected, privately owned communications company. A highly motivated, creative thinker will excel in this position. This position offers a competitive compensation package, benefits and 401(k). Please send a copy of your resume and a cover letter to cynthia.spencer@augustachronicle.com. PLEASE MENTION GORKANA WHEN APPLYING TO THIS JOB!