BDG Nabs More Editorial Hires From Hearst Magazines
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Bustle Digital Group is still recruiting and has managed to pull another two hires away from Elle and Cosmopolitan for its newly formed lifestyle group.
Katherine Stoeffel is the group’s new features director, a new role, coming over from Elle, where she’s been features director since mid-2018, with earlier stints at BuzzFeed and The Cut. Christina Amoroso is also the new executive editor for Bustle, joining from Cosmopolitan, where she’s worked since 2017, most recently as lifestyle director. Both magazines are part of Hearst.
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Emma Rosenblum defected from Elle earlier this year to take up BDG’s new position of editor in chief of several brands it dubbed its lifestyle group, like namesake Bustle, Elite Daily, The Zoe Report and Romper. Nylon, recently acquired by BDG, is also in the group, with top editors of all reporting to Rosenblum. Stoeffel and Amoroso are some of Rosenblum’s first outside hires, along with a new editor of Nylon, and both will work to expand BDG’s output of features and Bustle’s lifestyle coverage, respectively.
“In 2020, my goal is to create a structure that will enable BDG’s lifestyle brands to build on their established scale while also elevating the quality of editorial across the board,” Rosenblum said.
While Bustle is still BDG’s biggest brand, Rosenblum said Elite Daily and The Zoe Report, both of which BDG acquired in recent years, “have seen tremendous growth” over the last 12 months. For the coming year, she’s looking at Romper, a parenting site, as an area for investment and growth, and same goes for Nylon, which in 2020 will relaunch its web site and begin printing special issues of the magazine.
Rosenblum also made two internal promotions. She named Charlotte Owen, previously Bustle’s editor in the U.K., the brand’s new editorial director, where she will oversee all U.S. operations as well as those in the U.K. Amanda Chan, Bustle’s managing editor, was promoted to director of content strategy for BDG’s lifestyle group.
Like her boss, BDG chief executive officer Bryan Goldberg, who has said plainly he sees the company as “the successor to Condé Nast and Hearst,” Rosenblum is ambitious for the group. “We are looking to create brands that establish BDG as the leading modern media company,” she said.
To that end, Rosenblum is looking to up the ante on content with a new focus on features and longer-form work, alongside BDG’s core output of SEO-driven pieces and subjects. In her few months on the job, she’s noticed that readers differ from site to site, or course, but that they do “engage with longer and more in-depth stories.”
“We had a profile of Busy Philipps in Bustle’s ‘Rule Breakers’ issue that performed remarkably well and a story in Romper about how Peppa Pig was giving American toddlers British accents that went viral,” Rosenblum said. “People love to read great stories. I will never not believe that.”
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