Jess Catcher
Senior Editor, Bauer
What was your path to becoming an editor?
While finishing my English degree at the University of Arkansas, I found a program that allowed me to spend a semester living NYC. I was hired as an editorial intern at CollegeHumor, which gave me my first glimpse of the media industry and also led to freelance gigs when I returned to Arkansas. I moved back to NYC shortly after graduating and was lucky to get another great internship with Mashable. The ball kept rolling from there.
How and when did you learn to write? Do you think writing can be taught?
My passion for writing started in middle school after one of my teachers praised my use of voice and tone in an essay. It was the first time I felt really proud of something that was uniquely my own. I think writing can be taught — and that it's important to keep learning new tricks as you go — but, like any talent, having a spark or drive for it is important.
Who are your biggest inspirations within the space?
My coworkers and friends at other outlets, mostly.
What is your brand’s mission? Who are you seeking to impact?
We aim to help our readers learn new ways to make their lives easier, happier, or at least a little more entertained.
What is the most challenging aspect of maintaining your particular brand’s voice?
For the most part, our readers are at least 10-15 years older than me, if not several decades older. So, it can be challenging to predict what they want to see, but I like to find areas where our perspectives overlap and lean into the stories that make us all happy.
How has COVID affected your editorial strategy? What is something you’ve learned from this new normal?
We already tried to provide important health news with our readers, but this was obviously on a completely different scale. That said, we were still able to tap into how the pandemic has affected their daily lives — like whether or not we should groceries or how to keep glasses fogging up in masks — and other small things that make a big difference when just trying to get through a day.
What do you think will be the greater impact on journalism?
In lifestyle brands like ours, I think we're all just trying to tap into more ways we can help keep our audiences informed and healthy, but also provide comfort and distraction when things become overwhelming.
What feedback have you gotten from your readers that is new/different than before?
The way our readers flock to stories surrounding the pandemic, like the previously mentioned piece we wrote about whether or not we should sanitize groceries, has shown us that even if demographics differ between our brand and others in the industry, we're all still asking a lot of the same questions.
What are you currently reading?
I'm doing my best to keep up on all of the emerging news from the current Black Lives Matter movement. I also always have my eye out for food and cooking stories (which of course overlaps often with BLM) for my own personal interest as well as potential articles.
How important is it to have mentors during this new journalistic landscape? Can you describe your ideal mentor relationship?
I don't personally have a single mentor, more relying on the general group of people I'm surrounded by in my personal and professional life for guidance and insight. This is pretty ideal to me.
Knowing that news breaks on social media, whether it's a new government policy or the latest celeb pregnancy announcement, how does your team use social media to report on the story?
We focus mostly on Facebook and Pinterest, highlighting stories in a way that we hope will grow our reader's engagement within the platforms and generate page views.