Catching Up with Lori Todd, NPR Social Media Editor
Lori is one of two social media editors at NPR and has been with the organization for three months. A graduate of the University of Miami, Lori began her career in newspapers as a graphic designer in Milwaukee. After a stint in Austin and later at the Miami Herald, Lori found herself in the corporate world, where she worked in social media marketing, but missed the newsroom.
“In my corporate marketing job, I wasn’t happy,” Lori says. “I didn’t want to tweet about cars. I wanted a higher purpose.”
She traded in her corporate job for a position as the social media manager for both the Orlando Sentinel and Sun Sentinels. Lori enjoyed her position at the papers, but when she saw an opportunity at NPR, she knew she had to pursue it.
“My dream job opened up when Mel Kramer’s position came open, and I had been following her for years,” Lori says. “When that position opened up, I realized I needed to try.”
She landed her dream role and became the new social media editor at NPR, where she supports the entire newsroom, including the individual radio programs, science desk and journalists. She teaches the writers, editors and correspondents best practices and offers feedback to the homepage team, who posts to the Twitter and Facebook accounts.
She likes that her job is social and she doesn’t spend the entire day at her desk with headphones on. She gets out and talks to people, asking what they’re working on and determines if there’s a social angle to it.
In her position, Lori is able to try out new tools and execute social campaigns. While she hasn’t been at the organization long, Lori already found success with the NPR Space Jam event. NASA offered up female astronauts to speak with NPR, but the editorial team wasn’t sure about the best way to make a current news story for their audience. However, NPR fans loves space, and the social media team was able to produce digital content that wasn’t for the radio. NPR streamed live to Periscope and invited fans on their social media networks to join in by posting questions they wanted the astronauts to answer.
“We didn’t want to go out with an agenda,” says Lori. “We wanted to create content that our audience could relate and connect to.”
Lori’s campaign worked, and NPR received questions from all over the world, from Poland to the Middle East and even from 7-year-olds, which was a surprise to the team.
They also used SnapChat with the astronauts and have been experimenting more with their account. NPR sent their SnapChat all around the world to correspondents and Ari Shapiro even hosted the account from London. Lori says they want to embrace the millennial audience and it’s cool to see who their audience is when they send snaps back. Most of the digital media audience are very young kids and their sense of NPR is very different from the typical audience. She’s found that even small things, like changing the Twitter avatar to the NPR snap code, garnered lots of new followers for them.
Of course, she has challenges too, and one of her biggest as social media editor is to be a part of the editorial discussions and not just the delivery system. She stresses that it’s important to be a part of the news process and team up with editors and reporters. Most of the editors are open to social media but it’s just not a natural thing for them to remember.
“At the end of the day, we are a radio organization,” Lori says. “We like to think we are a digital organization with radio, but we are radio. I enjoy the process of trying to shift.”
