Katherine Lehr is Matter Studios’ new COO
When Mark and I began hashing out the vision for what Matter Studios would be, we knew that we’d need to find a very particular kind of person to come on board and help me run the business. And I immediately had someone in mind.
There’s no roadmap here — we’re starting small (a handful of employees) but we have huge ambitions. Not only in terms of the kinds of projects we aim to develop, or the voices we want to make heard. But in the kind of company we want to build. My current mantra is “no websites, no newsrooms.” Matter Studios won’t be either. There’s no daily grind here, except what we put ourselves through, because we want to be good.
Instead we want to build a place that is transparent, creative, flexible, nimble. A place for people with diverse experiences, backgrounds and passions that, when working together, make something new. A structure as iterative and innovative as we want our projects to be. We envision core Matter staying tight so that we can change and adapt easily, though a team we assemble around a project could dwarf the size of the company. Embracing failure is a cliche, but we really want to embrace our failures — and not repeat them.
For employees, we want each person on the Matter Studios staff to have a say, their passions to be heard and followed, and for pay to be fair, equal, known. For creators, Matter Studios needs to offer the best experience possible—equitable in ownership of ideas, clear, thoughtful and structured in its feedback, warm but professional. And all of this will rely on the right systems, culture, support, joy and passion to make it work.
It turns out the first person I thought might be the right person to make this all happen is the right person, so I’m thrilled to announce that Katherine Lehr is joining Matter Studios as Chief Operating Officer.
I met Katherine Lehr during a stint at Politico in 2010. Katherine had launched Click, Politico’s gossip site, but moved into management as Executive Director of Editorial Operations in the era when Politico was really becoming Politico. While I actually started my career on the business side (working in advertising at Lingua Franca magazine), Katherine started in editorial and moved over. This dual experience — from running writers to managing P&L’s — is unusual, and uniquely valuable. It’s how you begin to understand a whole company, not just part of it. In a media landscape where walls are coming down all the time — and where I think we need to tear them down even more quickly — this is a talent as much as a skill.
Katherine was an obvious force inside a very competitive (and male) organization. She was known for “getting shit done” (the highest compliment at Politico) but she was also an incredibly warm colleague, a straight talker, and huge-laugher (she’s from Texas!). She can make friends with anyone, but be honest with you when something isn’t going right. She’s creative, but pragmatic.
Most recently, Katherine has been Vice President of Operations at Politico States, helping to lead the company’s biggest expansion since its inception. In a shockingly short period of time, Politico States has established a reporting presence in six states — California, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York — and set up offices in Albany, Manhattan, Tallahassee and Trenton. She also worked with my and Mark’s longtime friends and dear ex-colleagues from The New York Observer Josh Benson and Tom McGeveran when their site, Capital New York, moved into the Politico fold.
Katherine can do anything, so we can’t wait to feel her influence here at Matter Studios. She joins us officially on June 1 after a much-deserved vacation.
