The Frisc was a hyper-local nonprofit news site dedicated to digging into San Francisco’s civic issues. As a senior editor, I spent two years bringing efficiency upgrades and professional polish to everything we did.

 
 

From dense to sense

Part of my work at The Frisc was to make stories highly readable. This started at the draft stage, where the editor-in-chief often brought me in to find the structure hiding in 2,000-plus-word first drafts. Then we collaborated to turn reporting with complex, dense information on city policies, data, and more into understandable stories with grabby SEO headlines.

 

Not just words

Once a draft was polished, I created assets to bring stories to life. Sometimes that meant grabbing great photos around San Francisco. Often it meant turning charts into clean visuals or creating interactive maps. All of this adhered to our distinct, bold style, which I kept track of in our Frisc brand style guide and using Canva’s brand kit feature.

Saw it on Instagram

Before I started, The Frisc’s Instagram feed was a ho-hum collection of article screenshots and an occasional city snapshot with no cohesive look. I gave our profile a glow-up, increased our reach by 95%, and grew our views into the thousands with a few moves:

  • Developed Canva templates for unified, professional posts I could crank out in a few minutes

  • Motivated writers to capture video content that I turned into reels

  • Transformed reporting quotes and data visualizations into shareable content

Getting in your inbox

I grew our newsletter subscriber base by 580 readers—a 38% jump—in one year through targeted CTAs and pop-ups on our site that leveraged eye-catching visuals, social proof, and unique value propositions.

Operation, operation

The editor-in-chief once called me “The Tamer of Chaos.” I helped him and our entire team find ways to make our work more efficient, keep up with deadlines, and organize moving parts.

I created a “story template” in Google Docs so the entire team had a centralized place to work on a story together from start to finish.

I researched and advised us to invest in Buffer, a social media posting tool that allowed us to cut time posting across channels when promoting stories or running fundraising campaigns.

I created documentation for common processes and needs, including a guide to publishing stories on Wordpress that reduced back-and-forth with my editor and sped up CMS work.