Suzi Watford, the former chief membership officer of Dow Jones and current Sirius XM chief growth officer, is moving to The Washington Post to take up the newly-created post of chief strategy officer.
Watford will work under recently-installed chief executive William Lewis, a fellow Brit and her former boss at Dow Jones.
The Washington Post said in a release that the new role is “designed to oversee the publication’s strategy, aligning it across all business functions and overseeing brand identity”.
Watford was chief marketing and membership officer of The Wall Street Journal between 2014 and 2018 before moving up to do the same job across the whole of Dow Jones.
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The Post said that Watford’s achievements at Dow Jones included “significantly growing consumer revenue and building an industry-leading live events business, establishing professional membership verticals and negotiating multimillion-dollar partnerships”.
Lewis may be looking to Watford to help arrest subscription declines at the Post. Previously a beneficiary of the so-called “Trump bump”, The Washington Post saw its subscriber count fall 15% between 2021 and 2023, precipitating a steep round of lay-offs.
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Lewis said: “Suzi has built a career pioneering transformative strategy across media outfits, dynamically mastering change with seamless execution. I’m confident her experience and competitive industry prowess will advance our role as the most important news organisation in America.”
Watford said: “I’m thrilled to be joining one of the most accomplished and respected news organisations in the world at such a critical inflection point. The Post’s history of innovation lends itself to a vision of unrivalled potential that I can’t wait to be a part of.”
Before moving across the Atlantic Watford worked at Dow Jones sister company News UK for seven years, working on partnership, loyalty, sales and marketing at The Times and Sunday Times during a period that coincided with the launch of the publications’ paywall.
Watford starts at the Post on 13 May and will be based in Washington DC. Lewis was named publisher and chief executive in November and started work the following January, and has since hired in Jamie Stockwell as executive local editor, Karl Wells as chief growth officer and Gitesh Gohel as head of product and design.
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