Jocelyn Carrington
Direct of Content Operations, Complex
What is your brand’s mission? Who are you seeking to impact?
Complex covers convergence culture across a series of verticals: music, pop culture, sneakers, style, sports, and life. The brand highlights the most important established and emerging voices in these spaces through text, video, and social content tailored to an audience of 18- to 24-year-olds who are invested in each of these categories.
What is the most challenging aspect of maintaining your particular brand’s voice?
Being that our brand covers culture still on the precipice of becoming mainstream, our editors are tasked not just with pinpointing what’s happening now, but identifying what will happen next. And as the artists and brands Complex focuses on have gained wider appeal, we’ve seen a growing cadre of competitors move into a space that was once ours.
How has COVID affected your editorial strategy? What is something you’ve learned from this new normal?
As the pandemic took hold, we covered how COVID-19 affected the brands, artists, and athletes in our sphere, producing stories that explored the future of live music, how clothing companies addressed the crisis, and what sports might look like over the next year and beyond. On a macro level, though, we’ve examined what all of this ultimately means for our audience, and whether their appetite for culture and product will diminish in the face of stricter regulations on daily life and a cratering economy.
What do you think will be the greater impact on journalism?
The impact will be twofold: There will be a heightened demand for up-to-the-minute information from credible sources, but reputable outlets will be forced to prove their credibility as misinformation circulates and faith in the press continues to erode.
What feedback have you gotten from your readers that is new/different than before?
On social media, readers seem more focused on the issues of the day—COVID-19, yes, but more so the brutality communities of color face at the hands of police and the detrimental effects of White supremacy.
What are you currently reading?
I am currently reading Small Doses by Amanda Seales, The Room Where It Happened by John Bolton and Save The Cat: The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need.
How important is it to have mentors during this new journalistic landscape? Can you describe your ideal mentor relationship?
Very. As the landscape of journalism shifts, it can be easy to lose sight of the principle role of the journalist: to gather and present information clearly. The ideal mentor would guide an aspiring journalist through the process across mediums and writing styles, ensuring everything they produce is grounded in fact and meets the content demands of the most prominent outlets.
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?
Complex uses social media both to boost the reach of its stories and engage with the audience about them. For example, after Kanye West announced his bid for president, we published a post that we quickly ran through our social channels. To follow it up, we returned to Twitter, where we asked our followers whether they’d vote for West. For us, social starts the conversation and amplifies the message.