Thomas Johnson

About

I am the Head of Audience Development for the Guardian US. As a senior editor, I oversee the audience, newsletter and social storytelling teams. I have spent the last decade working in a variety of audience strategy roles with an emphasis on data-driven experimentation, subscriber growth and creative visual storytelling. Before joining the Guardian, I worked on the Washington Post’s Audience team as the assignment editor for social media. I led a four-person team and shaped The Post’s strategy on social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. In 2020, I was a lead editor on The Post’s coronavirus reopening tracker, and worked on several audience-driven projects, including our new Asked and Answered series on the coronavirus pandemic and 2020 election. I joined The Post's Audience Department in 2018, first as an embedded editor in the Sports Department. I specialized in digital and social media strategy, special projects and new initiatives. I conducted audience experiments across the newsroom to test new distribution platforms, such as pop-up newsletters, and approaches to new coverage areas like YouTube. I started at The Post in 2014 and worked in Video for three years, first as a member of the social aggregation team and then as a video editor focused on breaking news, entertainment, sports and politics, including our 2016 presidential election coverage. I worked closely with sports editors and reporters to create original videos to pair with digital projects and was a 2017 finalist in the Associated Press Sports Editors contest for my video describing the increase in stadium violence in the NFL. I also co-wrote the weekly NBA newsletter, Post Up, for three years. I moved to D.C. in 2014 after completing Stanford’s Graduate Journalism Program and interning for Re/Code. Before that, I lived in Miami, where I worked for the Miami Herald and freelanced for various publications. Contact me at: bytomjohnson(at)gmail.com