The shift “signals that there is a more cohesive place to come to find all of what we’re doing to cover gender and identity in one place,” said Thompson, who oversees coverage of those topics at the Post. “We wanted to bring The Lily to the core of our newsroom and collaborate more with reporters on other teams that are covering a lot of the same topics. There is a lot of opportunity to work together and to do big projects.”

The Lily, which the Post originally launched on Medium in 2017 and then moved to its publishing platform Arc in 2018, was known for its stories aimed at young women, its visual identity and its comics as well as its newsletter and social media accounts (it now has around 148,000 Instagram followers and 270,000 Facebook followers).

Though The Lily’s stories were already appearing on The Washington Post’s website, on Jan. 5 the Post announced The Lily would no longer exist as a separate publication. The seven-person team at The Lily is now working at the Post’s Features and National desks, as well as curating a new gender and identity landing page that launched on Jan. 25.

By living outside of an older, legacy institution like the Post, The Lily had more flexibility to experiment with storytelling and to speak directly to young women, said Anna Blue, DE&I marketing strategist at consulting firm Story MKTG. Now, the Post can apply what it’s learned to other beats that intersect with these issues, such as politics.

“The Lily found ways to think about stories through a millennial lens in particular and it will continue to do that, and find holes and angles in the news coverage that is different and distinct — while also being part of a broader conversation and contributing to coverage there… That was difficult to do in a more siloed space,” Thompson said. “We started to feel that having this coverage – that is so core and an important part of the news cycle — off to the side just didn’t feel like the right place to be.”

The Post has tasked Features executive editor Liz Seymour with building that collaboration and expansion of gender coverage across departments. The twice-weekly “Lily Lines” newsletter and The Lily’s social media accounts will remain as they are, run by Features assignment editor Lena Felton (previously The Lily’s deputy editor). The Lily’s staff reporter Anne Branigin and multiplatform editors Janay Kingsberry and Hannah Good are contributing to the newsletter, as well as other stories and …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron