Kassie Navarro is the deputy audience editor at ProPublica. She is also a freelance audience, social and digital strategist and consultant.

Recent experience

Deputy editor, audience at ProPublica
May 2023 - currently

As the deputy editor for audience, I set on- and off-platform audience growth and engagement strategies and lead a team of audience editors and social video producers. My core responsibilities span across the story editorial process, social media, social video, homepage, push alerts, and team management and metrics.

My key duties include, but are not limited to: defining and maintaining our social media strategy for 10 platforms, including Bluesky, X/Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, where our journalism is shared daily; defining and maintaining our social video strategy; providing guidance to senior editors and reporters in a 140-person newsroom on audience-first best practices, including story formats and distribution across text, video and audio; monitoring our daily publication schedule, setting audience editor assignments and priorities; serving as the main liaison between editorial leadership and the audience team on major investigations; and setting clear and measurable targets and benchmarks for audience development initiatives.

Selected accomplishments so far:

• Built ProPublica’s first social video team from the ground up — hiring and recruiting talent, defining editorial workflows, standards and formats, and more. In 2.5 years, the team’s work has brought in more than 56M views and nearly 6M engagements.

  • ONA Online Journalism Award, Digital Video Storytelling — Social Media, Small/Medium Newsroom: “Adapting ProPublica's Investigative Reporting for Social Video Audiences” (Nominee, 2024)

• Overhauled our social strategy and defined day-to-day workflows that have driven more than 580M impressions and 33M total engagements, including nearly 4M shares and 1M comments, for our journalism. In three years and under my leadership, our social following has reached 3M followers, a 515% increase from previous years.

  • ONA Online Journalism Award, Excellence in Social Media Engagement — Medium Newsroom: “Friends of the Court” (Winner, 2024)

• Revamped our push alert strategy, scaling opens in 2025 on the ProPublica app by 376% and on Apple News by 137%.

• I will soon launch ProPublica’s first YouTube team, bringing our long-form investigative journalism to viewers via platform-native video.

Director of audience development at Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting
Feb. 2022 - April 2023

As the sole newsroom leader working at the intersection of audience, editorial and product, I led the development and execution of impact-driven growth and distribution strategies for our digital investigations, weekly radio show and podcast and feature film documentaries; led product strategy, identifying opportunities to build or initiate new products that enhance our investigations and storytelling and/or serve a communicated audience need as well as managed the day-to-day of our current product offerings and systems; and led our membership program, creating growth revenue strategies that increased the top of our audience funnel with a goal to convert. I also managed a team of four audience and community engagement specialists.

🔺 Audience strategist

Aug. 2021 - Feb. 2022

Selected accomplishments:

• Oversaw the roadmap for the redesign of all newsletter templates, including the newsroom’s flagship weekly newsletter; Executed new content modules and subject line testing strategies — all with a goal of increasing subscriber growth and reader engagement. In 2022, we saw growth across all our major newsletter metrics when compared to 2021, including a 22 percent increase in subscribers, a nearly 12 point increase in open rate averages, and a 54 percent increase in our unique opens average.

• Created and implemented the infrastructure and workflow for the organization’s first-ever editorial outreach initiative.

• Designed a new template system for all social media creative assets.

• Led and executed the social and engagement strategy (organic and paid) for our seven-part investigation podcast series, “Mississippi Goddam.” In three months, related organic content received nearly 900,000 impressions and over 31,000 engagements, with the year’s top-performing posts on Facebook and Instagram coming from the podcast.

• In the five months in 2021 that I managed our social platforms, I executed 46.53 percent of all social posts and accounted for 55.55 percent of total followers gained and 65.75 percent of total engagements received.

• In 2022, we increased our engagement rate across all social platforms by 35 percent and saw 46 percent in Instagram follower growth and 12 percent follower growth on Facebook.

• Collaborated with our membership manager to successfully reach our 2022 membership revenue goals and helped to execute yearlong strategies via radio callouts, social, texting campaigns, two major spring and fall fundraisers and more.

Freelance audience, social and digital strategist and consultant
2021 - currently

Clients have included:

• Houston Landing

• Press On

• Futuro Media

• Southerly

• National Catholic Reporter

Selected accomplishments:

• Led and executed the social strategy for Futuro Media’s first-ever fiction podcast and animation series, as well as the companion interview series, which included conversations with musician John Legend, director Ava DuVernay and more.

• Led and executed Press On’s website redesign process, serving as the lead on content, development and design.

• Overhauled Southerly’s design brand standards and created a template system for its email newsletter, social media platforms and website.

Social editor at The 19th
July 2020 - July 2021

As The 19th’s first and only social editor, I led and managed growth and engagement efforts across social platforms since their launch, packaging and distributing news stories to meet The 19th’s audience exactly where they were at.

• Led daily content execution on all @19thnews accounts (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn); 43 percent of all website traffic since launch came from social; 97.8M impressions and 2.7M engagements; Curated and pitched more than 50 Twitter Moments

• Created and executed audience engagement and promotion strategies around feature news stories, 19th signature events and special projects

• Conducted live social for 19th signature events, breaking news and other large news moments

• Executed daily social news gathering and performance reports to the newsroom, identifying opportunities for future audience-informed stories

• Created and informed, in partnership with the creative director, a design template system for all social visuals

Director of digital strategy at the LBJ Presidential Library
Sept. 2016 - July 2020

I defined, led and maintained the long-term strategic growth and implementation of the LBJ Presidential Library and LBJ Foundation’s digital and social strategy. Areas of work included content strategy, social media, design, digital marketing, email newsletters, brand management, analytics reporting and website development. I also oversaw and managed the Library and Foundation’s digital team’s output, performance and six-figure annual budget.

Selected accomplishments:

• Created a 5,000+ post content repository that served as the knowledge base for a 365-day editorial calendar

• Steady, organic growth and engagement across all social platforms: 46M+ impressions, 2.4M+ engagements and 44,000+ net new followers

• Created the U.S. National Archives’ first GIPHY channel for a presidential library to highlight the breadth of the Library’s archival content. At the time, our gifs had more than 9.5M views.

• Led the digital communication campaigns for two major summits and dozens of events featuring high-profile figures and political dignitaries, including former Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former CIA Director John Brennan, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, filmmaker Ken Burns and more.

• Led the strategy, production and promotion for the Foundation’s first-ever podcast

• Led RFP to identify a digital agency to implement the custom website redesign of lbjlibrary.org, a six-figure, three-year project; Served as the project lead for content and creative.

• Led the production of a new interactive photo-op and neighboring social stream wall in the Library’s permanent exhibition space. In the first two years, more than 5,000 posts from visitors were featured in the stream.