The Dispatch, founded by Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg in 2019, is home to thoughtful reporting and analysis, respectful dialogue, and a wildly engaged community of paying members. We have a perspective—we’re right-of-center—but we’re fiercely independent at a time when more and more outlets have become nothing more than partisan boosters. In 2025, The Dispatch acquired SCOTUSblog, the independent site that has covered the Supreme Court since 2002.About the role
We’re hiring our first Vice President of Audience Growth to own how The Dispatch and SCOTUSblog reach people who don’t know us yet and turn them into lasting readers, listeners, viewers, and, eventually, paying members. This is a marketing strategy job as much as a distribution job. You will build one integrated plan across paid, owned, and earned channels, set the communications calendar around our biggest stories, shows, and launches, and run the content marketing that carries our journalism (and our journalists) beyond the audience we already have. You’ll lead a social video producer, a customer experience and lifecycle manager, a fractional team that manages paid media, and two social interns who execute on the strategy you set. We will want you to have a standing seat in editorial meetings with a real voice on headlines and packaging. We’re a small team and we intend to stay lean, so the job is about building systems as much as running campaigns. The right person will treat every repetitive part of the work as something to redesign and will leave this team able to do more each quarter than it could the quarter before. Why now
We have serious journalism, a trusted brand, loyal paying members, and writers and hosts with real followings. But we haven’t built a reliable way to get that work in front of new people. Too much of our growth still depends on the news cycle. Our YouTube channel has about 29,000 subscribers, well short of what our shows’ podcast download figures suggest it could be. The pieces that bring in the most new readers, like first-person essays, reported enterprise and feature work, and clear explainers, get far less promotion than they deserve. And we’re starting new newsletters and series that each need a launch plan and an audience behind them. Our next 50,000 paying members will largely be people who haven’t heard of us yet. Finding them will be your job. How we work
We’re small on purpose. We’d rather invest in tools and systems that free people up for the work only they can do than bury smart and talented people with busywork. Everyone on the business side spends part of the week improving how the work gets done, including the unglamorous parts: cleaning up the data, building the template, connecting two systems that previously didn't talk to one another. We try new platforms and tools early and cheaply, judge them against our baseline, and change course when the numbers say to. This fall we’ve started building tools that:draft social posts and search fields from finished piecessuggest clip moments from podcast transcriptsassemble share kits for outside contributorswrite a first draft of the weekly metrics readout Some of them will work, and some won’t. You’ll own them.
What you’ll do:
Own the top of the funnel.
Set and own our north-star growth number: net new engaged free relationships each week, broken out by source—newsletter signups, YouTube subscribers, and podcast follows. Then build the plan that moves it, working with our paid media and lifecycle team so the whole funnel runs as one system.
Build one integrated plan.
Run a single calendar across paid, owned, and earned channels covering big Supreme Court decisions, election nights, new newsletters and series, and the stories that deserve a bigger push, each with a promotion plan attached.
Make our people and shows travel.
Help develop YouTube strategy and packaging, short-form video, podcast cross-promotion, earned media and bookings for our writers and hosts, syndication, and swaps with aligned newsletters and podcasts.
Bring audience thinking into the newsroom.
Use your seat in editorial meetings to shape headlines, packaging, and which pieces get pushed hardest. Editors keep the final say, and your job is to make sure their decisions are well informed.
Grow SCOTUSblog’s audiencealongside The Dispatch’ s, with a plan that fits a very different readership.
Run a steady pipeline of experiments.
Every test gets a written hypothesis, a success metric, a budget, and an end date. Share the failures as openly as the wins, and know the difference between a meaningful result and a fluke.
Build the machine, then keep improving it.
Take over the tools we’re building now, fix what doesn’t work, retire what nobody uses, and keep finding the next recurring task that shouldn’t need a person.
Lead a small team.
Manage and develop the social video producer, customer experience and lifecycle manager, and two social interns, and keep the team’s time on judgment and craft instead of copying and pasting.
Report with rigor.
Produce a weekly readout of where new audience came from, what it cost, and what we’ll do differently next week.
What we’re looking for:- Seven or more years in audience development, marketing or communications, including real ownership of a growth number at a media or subscription company
- Fluency across paid, owned, and earned media, and experience building an integrated marketing or communications plan that spans channels
- Content marketing expertise: You know how to turn journalism, video, and personalities into things people share, subscribe to, and come back for
- A track record on YouTube and short-form video, or a convincing account of how you’d build one
- A record of making work run without you: manual processes that you've replaced with automations, templates, scripts, or tools you set up yourself
- Curiosity about new tools, along with the discipline to judge them: You try them on real work, keep what earns its place, and can explain what you dropped and why
- Comfort with large amounts of data and the judgment to turn it into clear decisions, including spotting the difference between correlation and causation in your own numbers
- A real understanding of The Dispatch and where it fits in today’s media environment
- Experience managing and developing a small team
- Who we’re looking for …You’ve started a channel, format, or program that kept growing after you moved on to the next thing
- When you catch yourself doing the same task for the fifth time, you start working out how never to do it again
- You’ve been early to a platform or format, and you’ve also been the one to call it when an early bet didn’t pay off
- You’d rather run 10 small tests than one big launch, and you write down what you expect before you see the results
- You want a wide mandate at a small, independent company more than a narrow one at a big company
- First 30 days:
Learn the audience, the newsroom, and the shows. Audit every channel and every recurring task on the team. Deliver a short list of what to stop, what to start, and what to automate.
By 90 days:
The integrated plan and calendar are running. The weekly growth number is reported by source. The first round of distribution experiments has been read out, failures included.
By six months:
The north-star number is moving. YouTube and short-form run on a set cadence. Several recurring tasks that used to take hours now need only a quick review. A program of swaps, bookings and syndication is producing signups we can measure.
Benefits:
Health insurance, 401(k) match, flexible PTO, generous parental leave, disability coverage, equity participation, and additional standard benefits.
Compensation:
$185,000–$225,000, plus a performance bonus tied to audience growth and equity participation***The Dispatch is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status or any other characteristic protected by law.
