On the Work
This line is the heart of the job description and the north star of this position. Everything I would bring to this role would stem from this being a core tenant of this position. Here’s a few thoughts about how I would take this directive and from it lead a writing team, how I would approach the first weeks on the job, and why the AI dimension of this role is one I am uniquely prepared to run.
Signal Over Noise
We are living through a media moment defined by volume. Content is infinite and attention is scarce. Most content feels like noise — undifferentiated, unverifiable, and frankly, can be put in the bucket of content that is not worth reading.
The Times is the anti-noise.
And the marketing opportunity is to highlight and showcase this difference. This looks like showing the difference between information and journalism. Reminding people of the robust work of sending a reporter to 160 countries, of holding a story for six months until it is right, of publishing something that might be inconvenient for the powerful. And then drawing a straight line to the idea that this valued and trusted work is not free, not accidental, and it cannot be replaced by a language model.
not the boat.”
This is the core idea to build the marketing creative strategy around. The idea that The Times is the signal in all the noise, the lighthouse and not the boat, the truth worth reading amidst a sea of content.
Every campaign, every email, every subscription prompt, every brand expression should be an expression of that idea. It should be a no-brainer that this work, this institution is trustworthy, stalwart, and worth paying for.
Be Regular and Orderly in Your Life, So That You May Be Violent and Original in Your Work
This is the philosophy I bring to every team I have led. I have managed hundreds of writers, producers, and creative teams across editorial and marketing at Google, Food52, and Squarespace. The thing I have learned, over and over, is that creative people thrive with the right structures in place.
My job as a manager is to figure out exactly where processes need to be consistent and buttoned-up and completely boring. This usually looks like the intake process, the brief, the feedback loop, the calendar — so that creatives can use their creativity to be wild and free and surprising in the actual work. When the scaffolding is invisible and completely taken care of, the work gets better.
I am also, fundamentally, a player-coach. I love being in the work with my team: reading drafts, giving line-level feedback when it counts, modeling the standard I am asking for. I have coached dozens through career pivots, confidence crises, and creative breakthroughs, helping them see their own blind spots and go after the things they actually want. That level of impact and making a difference for people is something I absolutely love.
For this role I would spend the first weeks understanding who each person is, what they are great at, where they are stuck, and what they need to do their best work.
The Flaubert principle works at every level: for the team as a whole, for each individual writer, and for the culture we build together.
Let’s Go
I view the first 30 days as a moment to learn but also a moment to create and contribute with a fresh set of eyes. In practice this looks like attending meetings, listening carefully, building relationships across the newsroom, the product team, and the brand strategy function. But it also looks like producing, immediately, because trust is built through output, not through good intentions.
My first remit would be to audit the existing work: what has been published, what is performing, what the current voice guidelines say versus what the writing actually sounds like. I will identify the highest-friction point in the team’s workflow and I will fix it.
By week three, I will have a point of view on the team’s AI strategy that I am ready to share with leadership. I already have my own grounded frameworks with regards to AI, and this would be about refining these frameworks to highlight what these tools should and should not do in a marketing writing context at a journalistic organization.
The goal of the first 30 days is to make clear that I am here to make the work better, and to start doing that immediately.
The AI Practice, Specifically
Over the past year, I completed a 107,000-word novel manuscript using an original AI-assisted writing methodology I developed from scratch. I have since formalized it into a teachable framework and am currently leading professional workshops on AI writing strategy and human-AI creative collaboration.
What this means in this context: I know from the inside how these tools change the writing process. I know where they accelerate real work — structural drafting, ideation, iteration — and where they flatten it. I know what a piece of writing sounds like when AI has been allowed to do too much, and I know the specific editorial moves required to catch it and fix it. I also know that these tools morph and change in real time; this is and will be an iterative practice of working with language models.
The stakes of getting this right are high. The Times has an authority built on a century of trust in the accuracy and accountability of what gets published under its name. However, AI is a tool that when used accurately can unlock better and faster work. We need to adapt and iterate in this AI moment.
The guidelines I would build for this team would be grounded in one question: does this piece of writing make the reader feel the value of the institution? If the answer is yes, the tools we used to get there are secondary. If the answer is no, no tool justifies it.
Three Main Ideas
The best advertisement for Times journalism is Times journalism. The content strategy would utilize this. We would build content that systematically surfaces the process. This looks like showing the reader the six-month investigation, the reporter in the field, the editor who killed the story until it was right — as marketing material in its own right. As storytelling that makes people feel the stakes of what is being created and protected when they subscribe.
Many brand voice guides are written once and ignored until it’s time to refresh them. I would scrap the idea of a one-time brand guide and instead make a living document that evolves with the work, maintained by the writers themselves, and treated as a creative resource rather than a compliance document. The goal is a voice immediately specific and true to the institution that it cannot be mistaken for anything else, and more importantly — cannot be replicated by a model trained on generic marketing copy.
The best marketing the Times has ever produced has come from writers who were allowed to take the work seriously. I would build a team culture where the marketing brief is treated with the same rigor as an editorial assignment. This means that writers are encouraged to push against the expected angle, to find the surprising entry point, to write something that could stand on its own as a piece of writing, not just as a conversion vehicle. That would be the standard. And it is achievable, with the right structure underneath it.