A Service of UA Little Rock
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Brittany Cheng Joins NPR As Digital Analyst

Courtesy of Brittany Cheng

In a note to NPR staff Sr. Director for Digital News and Strategy Justin Bank and Senior Director of Audience Insights Steve Mulder announced the following update:

We are quite pleased to announce that Brittany (Britt) Cheng will be joining our newsroom as a digital analyst — part of a Gates-funded grant initiative to bring metrics-based intelligence to the way we approach our work in news gathering and news presentation.

Brittany will have a broad remit. We anticipate her becoming a strong voice at the daily news meetings to offer analytic insights. She'll regularly brief newsroom and programming leadership to inform content strategies for digital platforms. And we know she is super eager to circulate around our building — Slacks and Zooms, for now — to embed with all sorts of content teams on adapting the analytics, distribution tactics and story forms we use to deliver NPR storytelling to our target audiences.

She will also have a second "home base" on the Audience Insights team, with a dotted line to Steve Mulder's group. We are keen for this arrangement to build more bridges between what we know about our readers and listeners from research and analytics and how we serve them with our journalism — in a way that we anticipate benefits all divisions and departments.

Brittany comes to NPR after a very impressive five-year run at Vox Media. She specialized in audience habits for three of their signature brands: SB Nation, Vox and Polygon. While on their central analytics team, she built tools to scale data fluency and trained newsroom leaders and staff in SEO, content optimization, and how to use metrics to make proactive editorial and strategic decisions.

She built personalized dashboards for their network of local sports sites at SB Nation. She developed projects focused on the community effects of commenting platforms that builds safer engagement online. And she evangelized the role of evergreen stories in editorial planning to bring the best of their newsroom's editorial work to bear over longer periods of time and stand out from commodity news.

Brittany looks forward to bringing these approaches to our content teams in support of our mission.

A D.C. native, Brittany honed her journalism skills at the University of Maryland where she helped the school paper, The Diamondback make the transition to going paperless — so she's clearly been familiar with moments of transformation for a while.

In her spare time, she enjoys yoga and spin, testing plant-based recipes, and keeping her fickle houseplants alive.

Her first day is April 26. Please help her find all the fun Slack rooms!

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Steve Mulder
Justin Bank
Justin Bank is an editor in the NPR newsroom and also serves as Senior Director of Digital Strategy and Head of Digital News.