Q&A: Nisha Chittal, Engagement editor @ Vox.com

This week, The Idea caught up with Nisha Chittal, the engagement editor at Vox. We talked about the rise of search and Instagram, Vox’s audience-first approach, and how it’s experimenting with membership.

Tell me about yourself, your career path, and what led you to where you are now.

I am the engagement editor at Vox.com, and I oversee our off-platform coverage and off-platform storytelling, and our day to day editorial coverage on all of these different platforms. I’ve been doing this work in one form or another for about a decade. At the time that I started my career, I turned that into social media and audience development by accident.

When I was entering the industry about 10 years ago, audience development was not a field yet. I don’t think that was even a term that people were thinking about. Social media at that time was in its early, nascent stage. It was just Facebook and Twitter. Facebook had only really just started to launch pages for businesses. Twitter was still very new. I worked for this small political blog during the 2008 election, and it was just a few of us that worked there. I had told my editor, “Hey social media is a thing, people are using it to connect with their readers. I think we should set up a Facebook group and a Twitter handle.” And she said, “Great, go for it.” There was no social media strategy work for our team at that time.

Then, I taught myself how to use those tools, I really enjoyed it. I got on Twitter early, and I really liked it. Twitter was very different then, it was a very fun place to talk about the news and connect with people at that time. I studied political science in school, and I wanted to be a political journalist, and then I started doing this social media stuff, which was when I realized that this is potentially a career path of its own. There were starting to become full-time job opportunities working on social media and engagement, even though we didn’t really call it that then.

My first job out of college was working for a social media agency, doing social media for large clients and helping them figure out how to use these platforms, writing social copy for them, figuring out a strategy for how they’re going to build a following and engage with people. It was a lot of fun, but I was really a news junkie at heart. I did that for a couple years, but I really wanted to be in media. After that, I took a job running social media for Travel Channel. I was a one woman social media department there, so it was a lot. It was a good learning experience.

Then I went to MSNBC and NBC News, and I was there for almost 4 years, and I stayed there through the 2016 election, and I really loved working there. It was a great place. I learned so much and worked with so many really talented journalists. I was there from early 2013 to late 2016, and that was a time when social media and audience development changed a lot. The platforms changed, Facebook and Twitter were still dominant, but it also became about Snapchat for a while. And Instagram and all of these other emerging platforms and messaging apps. We were experimenting with things like Kik and WhatsApp, and Facebook messenger bots.

There was a lot of opportunity to experiment with new platforms and new mediums for journalism and for storytelling. After the 2016 election, I was ready for a change from hard news. I did a brief stint at a food publication, which is a passion of mine. I love food media and cooking and restaurants. Then, I went to Vox Media in Fall 2017. I worked briefly at Racked, and then I joined Vox.com as the engagement editor. I’ve been the engagement editor there since Spring 2018. It’s been great, Vox really tries to think everyday in everything we do about the audience. I really love the audience-first perspective. What does the audience need to know about this? Why do they care about this? Why does this matter to them? We think about that with every story and we think that it’s really important now more than ever.

How has Vox’s off-platform strategy changed since you’ve been there?

When I joined Vox Media in late 2017, I think 2017 was the year that not just Vox, but all publishers, after riding on this high of Facebook traffic for the last 3–4 years, 2017 was the year that that started to change. Throughout the last couple of years we thought a lot about how Facebook traffic is not what it used to be a few years ago. Facebook changed their algorithm, they de-prioritized publishers a little bit, we have seen a drop in Facebook traffic and video views like most publishers.

I spent a lot of time thinking about other things that we can do in addition to Facebook. Facebook is still an important part of our strategy because there’s an audience there of people that are important to reach. We’ve tried to think about other platforms more and make sure that we’re not dependent on Facebook. One thing we spent a lot of time thinking about last year, and that we’re continuing to think about in 2019, is search. I think that has grown in importance a lot. We spent a lot of time last year training our newsroom on SEO, strengthening our search strategy, incorporating that into everything that we do every day. As Facebook traffic has taken a nosedive, we’ve started to think really hard about other platforms more than we used to.

Beyond search and Facebook, are there any emerging platforms that you’re most excited or optimistic about?

I think sometimes there is no “next big thing” — I often find it more effective to focus on serving the audience on the core platforms where they already are, rather than to try to chase the shiny new things. One of the things I’m most excited about is Instagram, because it’s one of the fastest growing platforms. I think that for most regular people, Instagram is the platform that when I talk to people about what social media platforms people outside of media industry use, people talk about Instagram a lot as one of their favorite platforms, the one they use the most.

I think there’s a lot of potential there, even though Instagram is not necessarily a traffic driving platform, I think it’s a great platform for storytelling, I think it’s a great platform for brand awareness, and I think there’s a lot you can do with Instagram stories and visual storytelling on that platform. It’s not emerging or new, but I think that it has a lot of value as the platform that is rising in the space. Facebook and Twitter have a lot of struggles, and obviously Instagram is owned by Facebook, but I think from the user perspective, Instagram is still pretty different from Facebook, and most regular people do not use Twitter. I think Twitter is used by a certain set of people, but there’s been studies that only around 10% of online adults use Twitter. It’s not all that common, but I think about Instagram as a platform that many people use in their daily lives and enjoy using and it has a lot of potential for publishers.

What’s the most interesting thing you’ve seen in media from an organization other than your own?

I love ProPublica’s coverage of how TurboTax is hiding the free file option from users to get them to use the paid version instead. They’ve been crowdsourcing experiences from readers to help their reporting, and it’s unearthed some infuriating stories — they’re doing really important work here that impacts so many people.