As a research assistant for the Membership Puzzle Project (MPP), I was tasked with helping the team in the final stages of the membership guide. Apart from the more minutiae tasks with uploading contents of the handbook, I also helped interview various newsrooms from around the world about their membership practices and how various set ups were successful under very different, and often difficult, circumstances. I also wrote a case study for Malaysiakini, an independent news organization in Malaysia that established a blended membership-subscription model in a bid to protect their members during a time when the government had several lawsuits against the organization. Additionally, my colleague and I were also put in charge of managing and updating the database of membership newsrooms around the world.

For my master’s thesis project, I worked with The Atlantic’s Audience Research to see if the role of journalism could be expanded to the classroom and be a useful to both teachers and Gen Z high school students. After interviewing several public high school teachers from across the US, I prototyped a teaching tool/ reading list using the Atlantic’s archival materials that would be useful in the classroom.

View the deck here.

Watch my presentation here (starting at 1:44:15).

I was the Deputy Project Manager for the first half of this project (we swapped roles halfway through the project). The cohort researched and conceptualized an all-encompassing audience growth strategy for the Financial Times. We researched four specific aspects - editorial output, onboarding processes, podcasts and audience engagement. We identified gaps and opportunities and proposed solutions during this 6 month-long project.