‘Turbo-charge a legacy newsroom’: A Q&A with Fortune’s new editor in chief Alyson Shontell

By Sara Guaglione

On Oct. 6, Alyson Shontell will become Fortune’s next editor in chief, succeeding Clifton Leaf, who stepped down after four years at the helm. Shontell will be the first woman to lead the business publication in its 92-year history.

She joins a recent wave of female editors who are the first to lead some of the biggest newsrooms. Some examples: The Washington Post named Sally Buzbee its executive director in May; London-based Alessandra Galloni became editor in chief of Reuters in April; and Axios promoted Sara Kehaulani Goo to the top edit role earlier this month.

Shontell served as editor in chief of Insider’s business vertical since 2016. She was the sixth person to join Insider, back in 2008. During her EIC tenure, Shontell doubled newsroom staff to 200, and helped launch its paywall in 2017. She will be in charge of Fortune’s content across the magazine, website, conferences, newsletters, videos, and podcasts, as well as the Fortune Connect platform, an online community for executives. Fortune launched a digital paywall in March 2020, and last year debuted a redesigned print magazine, website and app. Total circulation for the flagship print edition is 653,000, while paying digital subscribers stands at 40,000, according to a spokesperson. The company says it expects a 74% increase in digital revenue in 2021, compared to last year.

Digiday spoke with Shontell about what attracted her to Fortune and what she wants to prioritize there, as well as her thoughts on being the first female editor in chief at the company.

The conversation has been edited and condensed.

What attracted you to this role at Fortune?

I have really enjoyed building a media company from the ground up. I was on the frontlines of building a digital subscription business from scratch. Fortune is a powerful legacy brand that’s been around for 92 years. Now I can apply what I’ve learned over the last 13 years about how to build a digital media company, how to make journalism go even farther and reach people even farther, and fully turbo-charge a legacy newsroom. We need to be nimble. We need to be open-minded and try a lot of things. We have a lot of data at our fingertips, about what readers should care about and what topics we should go deeper in.

What are your first orders of business when you start your new job?

I want to put some systems in place to turbo-charge the subscriptions business even farther at Fortune. I need to know what people are subscribing to and why — what about Fortune makes readers feel like they need to subscribe, that they have to read, when there are a million other publications to choose from? We could define that a bit more, and make that a really obvious answer for people. I want to bring some clarity to that. Part of that is picking areas we want to go deep on for readers, so we don’t boil the business ocean. What can readers come to us for that …read more

Source:: Digiday