Q&A: Lizzy Raben and Mollie Leavitt, strategy research fellows at Atlantic Media
Each year, Atlantic Media hires around 40 recent graduates for its fellowship program. Fellows are placed in editorial or business positions across The Atlantic, National Journal, and Government Executive.
Tell me about your fellowship.
Lizzy Raben: We are on the corporate strategy research team at Atlantic Media. We do a lot of different things. We help support the leadership of the different brands at Atlantic Media, a lot of times through research, competitive analysis, or landscape best practices. We’re kind of like the Swiss army knife of the company, in that we can do anything that anyone needs us to do.
Mollie Leavitt: Examples of things that we’ve worked on have been: We’ve looked at the competitive landscape for digital video, we’ve looked at the competitive landscapes for newsletters and podcasts.
LR: We’ve also done audits of internal products, and have helped specifically on the launch of The Atlantic’s paywall, which is still forthcoming. And we write The Idea! Which is our weekly newsletter about the business of media.
ML: The Idea is very closely tied to what we do in our fellowship because a key part of our job is keeping tabs on the media landscape. We have to be really smart on that for our jobs, so that’s how we can do The Idea well.
How did you find out about the fellowship?
ML: I went to Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. There, I got a lot of emails from career services about the AMI fellowship, and I’d always been interested in the fact that they had an editorial fellowship and a business fellowship, because I really wanted to learn about the business side of media. As a journalism student, I wasn’t really interested in editorial, so it sounded like a perfect opportunity for me.
LR: I found out about the fellowship from a friend I was in a student organization with — she had gotten the fellowship the year before doing a business role with Quartz — and I thought it sounded really interesting. I liked the fact that it was a year long, that it was at The Atlantic, that it was paid, and in DC. So I applied my senior year and actually didn’t get it, and then I took a year to play professional soccer in the Czech Republic and decided to apply again the following year, but in the meantime subscribed to every Atlantic and media industry newsletter and thing that I could find to help be prepared in the chance that I decided to apply again in the future. I applied again and got contacted back for this role, which I didn’t know existed, but happened to be exactly what I was looking for. And I was really excited.
What’s your favorite thing you’ve gotten to do as a strategy research fellow?
ML: We’ve gotten to do a lot of really cool things. The first that always comes to mind is I got to work on a newsletter project with a combination of the product and editorial teams and another strategy research colleague. It was a really cool instance of product, editorial and corporate strategy all working together. We got to see the development of our newsletter strategy from the beginning, which was me researching the newsletter landscape, all the way to the product development process at the end, and getting to see what those products looked like. And it was really cool to see that end to end.
LR: One of the coolest things I got to be part of was helping to put together a deck on all the trends happening in the media landscape to help inform leadership before a big strategy retreat that they were having. It was very intense and we had a very short timeline, but we put together a really good product. And I got to travel to New York with my team to present it. That was the first time I’d ever done anything like that, and it was awesome.
You’ve both been hired to full-time positions! Tell us about your new jobs.
LR: I will be joining Atlantic57 as their new insights editor. My role will be to mine The Atlantic for insights and to understand how The Atlantic does what it does, how it’s become successful over the years, and help translate those insights into things that Atlantic 57 can use in its client work — which, Atlantic 57’s clients are primarily public media, nonprofits, brands, and educational institutions. Atlantic57 is The Atlantic’s in-house consulting and creative division, and is like a mini media company within a media company. I’m really excited to use what I’ve learned in my fellowship and stick around and be part of the Atlantic Media family.
ML: That’s beautiful! In my new job, I’m doing a lot of the same stuff I’m doing now, but I’m actually also working as the assistant to my boss’s boss, who is the president, so now I have two bosses. Now I’m helping him out with a lot of administrative things, but also if he’s having a meeting with someone, writing a little briefing on that, and broadly helping him do his job.
What are your dream jobs?
LR: My dream dream job would be to run a media company slash production studio with my best friend (which we’ve talked about). My non-media dream job would either be to work on Saturday Night Live or to own a book store. Or be a teacher.
ML. Whenever people ask me this, I never have a job that I want to do, but it’s more like a thing I want to fix, which is for me the reason why I wanted to get into this job. I’m really motivated to fix journalism as an institution, so in whatever capacity I can do that is my dream job. My dream job is just to make journalism something that is available to all, isn’t just a luxury and also isn’t constantly under threat in our crumbling democracy.
LR: Jesus that’s beautiful.
What was your childhood dream job?
LR: I definitely wanted to be a pro soccer player.
ML: And then you did it!
LR: Achieved. I think I wanted to be a vet for a little bit, to be honest, I really liked animals. And that’s all I got.
ML: When I was in elementary school I really wanted to be a teacher because I loved school so much. There’s this little store in my hometown called HP Tops where they do this thing where they press velvet letters onto whatever clothes you want. You know what I’m talking about? You could get whatever you wanted printed on a T-shirt. And my parents took me when I think I was in second grade to get — you know those soffe shorts? You could get whatever you want on a pair of soffe shorts — it could say like “soccer” or “dance” or whatever — and I was like, I want mine to say “I ❤ school.” I loved it so much.
What’s the best advice someone’s ever given you?
ML: This advice is from Aretae Wyler [Atlantic Media’s CAO and General Counsel], from her fellowship academy, and it’s something that really stuck with me. She said that especially when in your early stages of your career, no job is too small to be done, and if you just put your head down and do the small tasks and prove yourself to be able to do little things well and easy things well, then you can earn people’s trust and build relationships with them and get to where you want to go. And I really try to never think that I’m above anything, because I think that attitude can be very prevalent with people in our generation, and I’m not above anything because I’m just starting out in my career.
LR: There’s the advice my dad tells me all the time, which is “Life isn’t a dress rehearsal,” and to take risks and don’t be afraid of failure. Life is short, and you only get one chance at it, so do it your way. (For context, my dad is a cancer doctor, so he gets to see this up close and personal every day.) And then I still think about what my high school debate teacher had on the board on day one: “Be nice and work hard.” I think those are really two pillars I try to live by.
Do you have any advice for people looking for entry-level jobs in journalism?
ML: Yes. I went to college with a lot of people looking for entry level jobs in media, having gone to journalism school. And I just want to reiterate that there are more publications than The New York Times. It’s an amazing journalism organization, but there are ways to build your career from publications that aren’t big national organizations. Some of the people I know doing the most interesting things from my journalism class are working at small newsrooms or not in editorial news, maybe like me, but are adjacent to it. And there are other jobs than being a national political reporter at the New York Times and there are other ways to get to where you want to go.
LR: When you’re looking for jobs, one good place to start is looking at organizations that you admire and would proud to work at — and being open to the kind of work you do for them. But I think more importantly, as long as it’s somewhere you can learn and grow, you just need experience in the beginning, so be open to the ways you get that. And know that your first job isn’t your last job. And it’s all going to be okay, and you’re going to learn something no matter what if you have the right mentality, so be open minded.
ML: Ugh your first job isn’t your last job. Retweet.
Bye, we’ll miss you!
