POLITICO names Andrew Briz newsroom architect and Hadley Robinson director of audience, D.C.

Andrew Briz (via LinkedIn)

Announcement from Executive Vice President, AI and Innovation, Francesca Barber, Senior Executive Editor Alex Burns and Senior Executive Editor Kate Day:

Good morning –

We’re making two notable moves today that align our talent with the newsroom’s most urgent priorities.

Andrew Briz, one of our most dynamic and strategic thinkers in the company, is taking on a critical new role building the future of POLITICO: Newsroom Architect.

This is a new role for our newsroom that deepens our commitment to being at the forefront of technological innovation, by embedding knowledge and technical expertise directly in the newsroom so the bets we make stay tightly connected to our journalism and the way we work.

In this role, Andrew will lead our editorial-facing technology strategy across product development and technical infrastructure. He will build an evaluation framework in partnership with newsroom leaders, create a blueprint for rapid prototyping, and develop newsroom products that leverage our reporting and make our work smarter and more productive. He’ll also work closely with Product, Data and Technology to ensure a cohesive technical architecture and roadmap.

POLITICO’s greatest strength will always be our original journalism: our reporting, our judgment, and our distinctive voice. We want to make ambitious technological bets that support our editorial strengths, and there’s no one better suited to help lead this next chapter than Andrew. He’s a thoughtful, capable, and trusted partner as new technologies reshape our workflows, our competitive landscape, and our opportunities.

Andrew’s track record speaks for itself. He has a rare instinct for what’s coming next, and how to build for it. He joined POLITICO in 2018 on the Interactive News Team and built software that powered major coverage moments, including our election reselection results for the 2018 to 2024 cycles, a live chat platform for real-time coverage, and the original POLITICO Minutes, which was the foundation for our live-blog platform. More recently, he’s led work to make AI genuinely useful in newsroom workflows, from investigative search tooling to automated monitoring for newsworthy updates and has run trainings that help reporters and editors move faster without compromising quality.

We’re thrilled to have Andrew step into this newly formed role.

In addition, to bolster our impact with subscribers in D.C., we’re announcing Hadley Robinson as our new Director of Audience, D.C.

Hadley joined POLITICO last month and brings a unified, systematic approach to engaging our professional audience in one of our most important capitals.

In this role, she will partner closely with the Playbook, White House, Legal, Politics, Congress, and Defense teams to share real-time insights and launch projects that deepen our relationship with readers, including initiatives like SMS. She will also work with these teams on off-platform strategies that help us drive the conversation during major news moments, across the beats we dominate, and at targeted events that convene our most important subscribers. One essential element of that will be to craft POLITICO’s distinct voice for our off-platform audiences.

Hadley brings a rare combination of audience strategy, audio and video production, and reporting and editing experience. Throughout her career, she’s moved seamlessly between producing and editing original reporting, developing new storytelling formats for different audience needs, and thinking analytically about what audiences want and how best to engage them. She’s been an early and creative experimenter, from building new audio and video formats to running engagement experiments like using Facebook Messenger to answer real-time reader questions during the 2016 election. That instinct to build and iterate is exactly what will set us apart in a competitive news environment.

Hadley joins us from The Washington Post where she developed podcasts including Impromptu and Reasonably Optimistic. Previously, she field produced video programs for Vox, Consider It and Glad You Asked, and led campaign coverage as the Politics lead for the 2016 and 2018 elections, and ran the Engagement team at AJ+. She started her career as a federal courts reporter for California’s statewide legal newspaper, the Daily Journal. Hadley will report into Global Audience Managing Editor, Zainab Khan.

Please welcome Hadley and congratulate Andrew.