CFR welcomes Millie Tran as chief digital content officer

Millie Tran

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is pleased to welcome Millie Tran as vice president and chief digital content officer. In this newly expanded role, she will oversee the digital content team and lead all of CFR’s storytelling efforts across its website, social, audio, video and other digital properties.

Tran will start on May 6, based in New York City. She will report directly to CFR President Michael Froman.

“We are thrilled to welcome Millie to this crucial role. No one is better positioned to lead us into the next era of digital communications and storytelling, and to deliver on our goal to have an impact — on policymakers, CFR members, community leaders, journalists, students and the public — to help them better understand the world and the policy choices facing the United States and other countries,” Froman said.

Tran’s hire underscores CFR’s commitment to connecting nonpartisan, independent research on foreign, national security and international economic policy with a wide array of constituents and stakeholders around the country.

“In a time when there is increasing need for high-quality content about international issues, CFR has an immense opportunity to become an even more indispensable resource for understanding how foreign policy affects our lives,” Tran said. “I’m excited to support this important mission.”

Tran was most recently vice president of content strategy and growth at Condé Nast, where she built and led the global content planning and sharing teams as part of a broader global content transformation, enabling stories to move across a global network while maintaining local integrity, trust and distinctiveness.

Previously, she was chief product officer at the nonprofit, nonpartisan Texas Tribune, where she oversaw the audience, engineering, data, design, marketing and communications and loyalty teams.

Before that, she worked at The New York Times, first as the global growth editor, focused on growing the organization’s international audience, and later as deputy off-platform editor, leading a global team of social strategy editors and helping manage coverage and distribution of journalism across platforms.

This is a homecoming of sorts for Tran, who was at CFR as a multimedia coordinator from 2012 to 2013. She has also worked at BuzzFeed, where she was a founding editor of its news app, as well as at the National Journal and the American Press Institute. And she is also currently an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Among other honors, Tran has been selected as a Sulzberger Executive Leadership Program fellow and a 92Y Women in Power fellow and was named to Editor and Publisher’s 25 Under 35 in 2018.

Tran received a BA in Global Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles.