POLITICO Names Alexandra Manzano Managing Editor for Washington Initiatives and Newsroom Development

Announcement from Executive Editor, Joe Schatz, Executive Director, Global Newsroom Strategy, Francesca Barber, Global Editor-in-Chief, John Harris, Head of News, Alex Burns, and Senior Managing Editor, Anita Kumar:

Team -

We're pleased to announce that Alexandra Manzano, a central player in the evolution of the newsroom over the past six years, is taking on a new leadership role designed to help us mobilize for the next chapter in Washington and beyond.

Together, our teams across the newsroom have been rapidly increasing the impact of our coverage over the past five months and organizing our structure to support our ambitions. Our goal, however, is even bolder: A continuous transformation of the POLITICO newsroom and the journalism we produce to meet a new generation of publishing challenges and opportunities.

Ali's new role as Managing Editor for Washington Initiatives and Newsroom Development is a key part of this effort, mixing strategic planning for major coverage and publishing initiatives, resource allocation and talent building to meet editorial goals, and newsroom communication around our mission, expectations and wins. We rely on Ali for not just her strategic insights but also her lively journalistic imagination - and this new role will amplify her already considerable impact here.

Working closely with John and Joe and in tight coordination with Francesca, Alex, Anita, Sudeep, Luiza, Elizabeth, Peter and other editorial leaders, Ali's specific responsibilities will center on three areas critical to the newsroom's success, and the publication's ambitions.

• Fortifying and evolving our Washington portfolio - the Playbook franchise, our Congress products and our election coverage - in a rough-and-tumble market requires deft long-term strategy and an exacting approach to performance assessment. Ali will take the lead on this, aligning our newsroom resources with our strategic goals and ensuring that we are implementing big ideas at a high level of excellence. She will work closely with Washington editors to ensure we are thinking ahead of the curve, delivering on promises and acting as a conduit for those projects with other teams and departments in the company.
  
• Cultivating the next generation of POLITICO talent is inextricably tied to our success. Ali has a proven track record in identifying and energizing talented journalists, and will help us jumpstart specific newsroom efforts to identify, recruit, retain and energize talent across the newsroom. In keeping with that focus, John Yearwood, our Editorial Director for Diversity and Culture - who oversees critical early-career programs including the POLITICO Journalism Institute and our Fellowship and internship programs - will now report to Ali. John and Ali will work closely together to increase POLITICO's competitive appeal in the media market and build a diverse pipeline of talent.
  
• Our mission of growing POLITICO's impact is closely tied to a clear vision and open communication across the newsroom, and we are determined to deliver on those goals. Ali will work closely with other members of our leadership team to ensure that we're bringing the best ideas to the fore and making our newsroom vision and trajectory more clear and actionable for all parts of the newsroom.
  

Ali is well-positioned for this role. Since joining POLITICO in 2018 from the Los Angeles Times, she's worked to transform our digital operations and created our content strategy, homepage, engagement, newsroom engineering and platform innovation teams. She's fostered a strong and productive partnership with our partners on the commercial product teams. She's been at the forefront of our efforts to innovate in the newsroom and across the company, including the conception, development andimplementation of a new POLITICO app (for which Ali's team and our commercial product and tech partners were awarded the inaugural POLITICO Collaboration award in 2022!), the CMS overhaul, the redesign of our article pages and storytelling tools, and the successful Inside Congress liveblog, on which Ali played an indispensable leadership and mobilizing role. Along the way, she has brought talented journalists into the newsroom and helped them thrive and advance.

Ali will report to Joe. With this change, Ali's current teams - Engagement, Newsroom Engineering and Platform Innovation - will report directly to Francesca.

Please join us in congratulating Ali.

Joe
Francesca
John
Alex
Anita

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