Director, Audience Development, CNN Digital Products & Services

Welcome to Warner Bros. Discovery… the stuff dreams are made of.

Your New Role

The Director of Audience Development is a senior leader within Audience Strategy & Insights, responsible for driving audience growth, engagement, and habit across a portfolio of desks or a major vertical. This role translates audience signals into actionable editorial strategy at scale—ensuring that insights consistently shape coverage decisions, planning, and execution.

Your Role Accountabilities

Strategic leadership & audience direction

• Own audience strategy for a portfolio of desks, defining priorities that drive reach, engagement, and subscriber habit.
• Translate audience signals (quantitative and qualitative) into clear strategic direction for editorial leaders.
• Ensure audience considerations are embedded in planning, commissioning, and coverage execution—not just post-publication analysis.
• Identify the biggest growth opportunities (coverage gaps, format innovation, platform strategy) and align teams against them.

Insight activation & editorial partnership

• Guide how insights are delivered and used—elevating from reporting to decision-driving recommendations.
• Partner directly with desk leadership to shape coverage plans, editorial priorities, and major moment strategies.
• Oversee high-impact analyses and ensure they result in clear "do more / do less / try next" actions across teams.
• Support major news moments and tentpoles with audience strategy, ensuring alignment across platforms and desks.

Team leadership & capability building

• Manage and mentor a team of Audience Editors and Senior Audience Editors, elevating the quality, consistency, and impact of their work.
• Set standards for insight generation, experimentation, and communication across the team.
• Coach editors on advanced audience strategy, platform dynamics, and editorial influence.
• Build a culture of curiosity, accountability, and continuous improvement.

Experimentation, frameworks & scalability

• Oversee experimentation across desks (formats, packaging, timing, distribution), ensuring learnings are synthesized and scaled.
• Develop and standardize playbooks, workflows, and best practices that can be applied across multiple desks.
• Partner with DART and Product to improve tools, dashboards, and reporting that enable faster, clearer decision-making.
• Ensure audience insights are measurable, repeatable, and tied to business and editorial goals.

Cross-functional collaboration

• Act as a senior liaison between editorial, Product, Analytics, and platform teams (Off-platform, Home, Notifications, Newsletters).
• Align daily audience execution with longer-term platform and product strategies.
• Surface patterns, risks, and opportunities across desks and surface when coordination or investment is needed.
• Contribute to broader audience strategy discussions and organizational priorities.

Channel & platform leadership

• Ensure strong, consistent audience strategy across Search, Social, Home, Notifications, and Newsletters.
• Guide desks in aligning coverage with audience intent, platform dynamics, and distribution opportunities.
• Partner with central teams to evolve platform strategies and ensure editorial needs are represented.

Qualifications & Experience

• Strong editorial judgment and alignment with journalistic values and independence.
• 7–10+ years of experience in digital media, audience development, content strategy, or audience insights.
• Proven track record of shaping editorial strategy using audience insights and delivering measurable growth.
• Experience leading or mentoring teams and influencing senior editorial stakeholders.
• Strong partnership with analytics, product, and platform teams to translate insights into action.
• Deep understanding of audience acquisition and engagement levers (SEO, social, home, newsletters, alerts).
• Exceptional ability to synthesize complex data into clear, actionable recommendations.

Championing Inclusion at WBD

Warner Bros. Discovery embraces the opportunity to build a workforce that reflects a wide array of perspectives, backgrounds and experiences. Being an equal opportunity employer means that we take seriously our responsibility to consider qualified candidates on the basis of merit, without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, mental or physical disability, and genetic information, marital status, citizenship status, military status, protected veteran status or any other category protected by law.

If you’re a qualified candidate with a disability and you require adjustments or accommodations during the job application and/or recruitment process, please visit our accessibility page for instructions to submit your request.

Compensation & Benefits

In compliance with local law, we are disclosing the compensation, or a range thereof, for roles in locations where legally required. Base pay is $166,603.00 - $309,405.00 salary per year. Other rewards may include annual bonuses, short- and long-term incentives, and program-specific awards. Warner Bros. Discovery provides a variety of benefits to employees, including health insurance coverage, an employee wellness program, life and disability insurance, a retirement savings plan, paid holidays and sick time and vacation.

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