“She Says” with Andi McDaniel
One thing to know about Andi McDaniel is that she is far more than her title. In addition to her role as the Chief Creative Officer of City Cast — a national network of daily podcasts and newsletters spanning 13 (soon to be 15) cities — she is compassionate, committed to her work and the advancement of her colleagues, a multi-media maven, a storyteller, a leader, a mom of two, and all-around problem solver. From developing the look and sound of City Cast’s newsletters and podcasts to figuring out how to scale them, cultivating talent, and helping people understand their superpowers, there is no obstacle that Andi can’t overcome. She has even helped with establishing a comprehensive parental leave policy for current and future City Cast employees, ensuring that they have the support needed to grow their families, providing flexible working accommodations once their parental leave has ended, and creating an environment where all voices are heard, welcomed, and prioritized.
In this month’s “She Says,” we talk with Andi McDaniel about finding solutions, what she loves most about her work, and why it’s important to support organizations like Women Employed (WE).
Tell me about yourself.
I am the Chief Creative Officer for City Cast, a national network of daily local podcasts and newsletters across the county. We’re currently in 13 cities and are preparing to launch 2 more this year. At City Cast, we’re focused on making people better neighbors. We believe that when people are more engaged with their cities, when they’re more in love with their cities, when they participate more in their cities, whether that’s going to a restaurant, voting, or some sort of activism, they make those cities better places to live. While our daily podcasts and newsletters are our core products, we provide membership opportunities, and articles, and partner with local organizations and businesses, all to help residents understand what’s going on in their cities and how they can be a part of it.
How long have you been with City Cast?
I was the second employee after our CEO, four years ago. Together, we built City Cast from the two of us, and plan to grow to around 100 people by the end of the year. Building this company has been the professional joy of a lifetime. I work with the most creative and smart group of people who are very passionate about their cities and are really collegial and kind towards one another. We’re all working on solving this interesting problem of how to make something that is local and shows up every day, into something that makes sense as a business and scale it across all those cities. Especially when there are all kinds of unexpected challenges that are fun to solve with people who I deeply enjoy.
What have some of those challenges been?
Well, one of the challenges that comes up in different ways is, because we’re a national network, with a local focus, figuring out how to do new things for not just one individual city, but for all of them. It’s sort of this constant Rubik’s Cube of how to make something work, not just once, but 13, soon to be, 15 times. We’re very passionate about localism and know that each city is unique in its own way. So, we want to preserve that and make sure the teams have a sense of agency. We want them to be able to authentically express what they know of their city, but we’re also trying to run all these cities at once, and so there’s a certain consistency and efficiency that we have to figure out.
Another one is just managing daily podcasts in all these cities. So not just what sort of stories are reflective of the cities, but are also interesting to listen to, and then how do we go from having an idea for a story to booking someone to talk about it, to editing it down, publishing it, and then packaging it all in 24 hours or less can be tricky. But we get it done.
Tell me more about your background and role at City Cast.
My background is in journalism, and I have worked in different areas of it. I started out at a magazine and later, a commercial TV station. From there, I worked in both public radio and television. So, I have a lot of experience being hands-on and figuring out the best way to tell a story across various formats. The work I do now is, in some way, a culmination of my journalism experience. But it’s more reflective of different challenges that have come up in every journalistic setting I’ve worked in.
As a media organization that is forced to evolve to meet the extensive disruption in our ecosystem and changes in how people consume information, there’s the challenge of just making sense of who we are and how we tell stories, and then adapting to how people want to receive them. So, a big part of my work previously in public media and commercial TV was about figuring out how to help legacy media organizations understand what they can and should be in this entirely new context. So that looks like a lot of change management, experimentation, and testing new ideas. Which is the part of leadership that I’ve loved the most, determining how to take people along on the journey.
People come into this industry passionate about one thing and then it changes, and so we find ourselves identifying what they’re really great at and adapting it for this new context. So as far as my job at City Cast, it has changed a ton over the past four years. It started out deciding what our podcasts and newsletters would sound and look like. But as we’ve grown, it’s become more about hiring and problem-solving as issues arise, and then thinking through how we scale. So, basically, how do we create meaningful experiences for our members, listeners, and subscribers? And it’s really fun.
What do you love most about the work you do?
I think there are two things I really, really love about this work. Well, maybe three. The first is I love getting to work with people who don’t take themselves too seriously. We have fun no matter what. I love cultivating talent and for me, that means working with different people at different levels and understanding their individual superpowers. More than anything, I love helping someone identify what they’re good at and then helping to grow whatever that thing is. Especially when that thing is leadership. The third thing I love is storytelling. After working in different areas of media, storytelling energizes me. It contains a degree of delight and something unexpected, and we’re able to create content that builds community around it.
Something that we really focus on at City Cast is producing conversations that people are invested in. Whether they inspire passion on the affectionate side or outrage, they make people feel something, and that makes people lean in and have more of a connection to one another in their city. Every time I hear a podcaster or read one of our newsletters, it brings me great joy knowing the content is resonating at a frequency that’s meaningful for a lot of people. It’s doing a service that helps welcome them into the conversation.
Why is it important that City Cast supports organizations like Women Employed (WE)?
Women have such extraordinary gifts to give. So, it’s important to support organizations like yours because you’re doing the sometimes mundane and thankless work of advocating for a group of people who have tremendous value. And if they aren’t in a position to succeed, then we are missing out.
I think about some of the challenges me and my colleagues have experienced that are connected to the fact that we’re women. We face so many things but can’t always advocate for ourselves individually as effectively as we could as a larger cohort of people going through the same challenges. What WE is doing is recognizing the systemic challenges that women face and leveraging that to change things.
Do you have a connection to any of the work that we do?
We created City Cast from scratch and one of the policies we had to set was parental leave. When you’re in the building stages of something, it’s hard to navigate what we are expected and required to offer. So, we had to figure out what was going to be most meaningful to future employees and the impact it would have on their families.
Currently, we provide 13 weeks of paid leave. But in the beginning, we offered less and had to navigate the typical gauntlet of staff taking time here and there, sometimes paid, sometimes unpaid. One of the things I carry with me is knowing that there are women who had that challenging experience with our company before we were able to offer something better. As someone who has agency over policies and decisions, it’s important for me to use that to uplift people who need it.
In the beginning, there were only two of us. Then we grew to three, then five, and continued growing over time. At one point, I was the only parent of a small child. We now have many parents, a lot of whom are moms who are juggling child care demands, kids being sick, and breastfeeding between or during Zoom calls. And one thing I’ve observed is that while having parental leave is necessary, the hardest part is what happens once you return to work, and your kids are moving around. Everything becomes so much more complicated. I feel really lucky to work in an environment where I don’t feel penalized for prioritizing my family’s needs, and I hope that every parent at City Cass feels the same way. That’s one of the advantages of having a remote company. We can be more flexible about things that make parenting and working more doable.
I’ve definitely experienced, firsthand, how challenging it is to focus on two dueling major life priorities, and I see so many of my colleagues doing the same. But it’s such an honor to be part of a leadership team, at a company that has seen families grow. We have people who joined with no kids and now have multiple kids, and I think that’s a sign of a healthy culture. When someone wants to stay with you through all those life transitions.
Our theme for this year is Centering Women’s Voices. How does City Cast center the voices and needs of women?
We’ve created a company that prioritizes transparency in our decision-making communications. We genuinely want to hear from people at every level of the company. That input meaningfully influences decisions.
I think women face a particular set of challenges when it comes to raising their voices and having them heard. We are very intentional about inviting everyone who has something thoughtful to contribute to a decision, whether it’s dissenting or not. It’s about having space to do so. That’s not something I can fully take credit for, but I like working for a company where women, who don’t often feel comfortable expressing their opinions, are invited to.
What makes you proud of the work that you do?
Every time we get a message from someone in one of our cities who expresses that they feel a greater sense of belonging in their city because of the work that we’re doing. That makes me feel proud. And just seeing the incredibly hardworking and creative people who work on our teams succeed and make content that reaches a lot of people and resonates with them. I feel so proud that we’ve created an ecosystem where that can happen.
