Summary
The New Yorker has always been a way of seeing: not simply a magazine, but a practiced intelligence for noticing how language, power, taste, technology, and everyday life braid together into culture.
We are seeking a Head of Cultural Trends & Speculative Strategic Foresight to expand how The New Yorker senses, interprets, and engages the world as it changes—especially as generative AI and machine intelligence reshape the production, distribution, and meaning of media.
This is a generalist leadership role for someone equally at home in cultural analysis and technical prototyping: an operator who can move between editorial sensibility, product strategy, and engineering realities to create new forms of engagement, participation, and “co-creative edges” that deepen comprehension and extend the life and reach of our corpus.
Description
This role exists because culture is no longer legible through a single channel. It is not only art, entertainment, and literature, but a full-bodied web of interdependent clauses and phrases: incentives, interfaces, rituals, platforms, languages, and ways of belonging. The New Yorker needs a capacity to read that web and to prototype how we meet it.
You will build a small, cross-functional practice that translates cultural signals into strategic options and tangible experiments. You will help leadership understand the contours of a kinetic environment, and you will help teams ship new interaction surfaces that let audiences participate with our work—not as “comments,” but as structured forms of attention, inquiry, remix, and co-creation.
This is not an IT role and not an “AI integration” checkbox. It’s a future-facing editorial/product/engineering bridge: developing two-, three-, and n-directional configurations of content and creativity—new pathways where readers become collaborators, archives become living instruments, and stories become interfaces.
Key responsibilities
- Build and lead an applied foresight practice that tracks cultural change across technology, politics, aesthetics, labor, platforms, and everyday rituals—turning signals into strategic options.
- Produce decision-grade artifacts for leadership: cultural intelligence briefs, scenario lenses, opportunity maps, risk narratives, and clear recommendations tied to experiments.
- Prototype new engagement endpoints that expand comprehension and participation (e.g., interactive story forms, guided inquiry experiences, audience co-creation formats, and corpus-driven explorations).
- Develop new interaction surfaces that leverage machine learning and machine intelligence to deepen reader experience—without compromising editorial integrity.
- Partner with editorial, audience, product, and engineering teams to design and ship experiments that test new formats, workflows, and distribution dynamics.
- Explore and prototype new forms of content-commerce that are aligned with The New Yorker’s voice and values (e.g., memberships, limited editions, learning experiences, live formats, creator collaborations), using generative AI responsibly where appropriate.
- Design audience participation as a craft: create structured prompts, rituals, and formats that enable meaningful contribution rather than noise.
- Establish a responsible experimentation framework: provenance, attribution, consent, model risk, bias, and IP considerations in partnership with legal and policy stakeholders.
- Act as a connective node across silos—convening editors, technologists, researchers, and partners to create momentum and shared language.
Key qualifications
- Demonstrated ability to operate as a generalist across culture, technology, and strategy—translating between editorial concerns and engineering constraints.
- Strong technical literacy and prototyping sensibility beyond IT support: comfort collaborating with engineers and shaping experiments that involve data, ML, automation, and interactive systems.
- Track record of producing clear, persuasive synthesis for mixed audiences (leadership, editorial, product, engineering), including writing that makes complexity legible.
- Experience building programs, communities, or cross-functional initiatives that persist—creating conditions for collaboration, not just one-off projects.
- Ability to identify and interpret weak signals early, and to design experiments that test meaning, adoption, and value—not only feasibility.
- High judgment around editorial integrity, trust, and audience relationship—able to push new forms without eroding credibility.
Preferred qualifications
- Experience working with large corpora (archives, knowledge bases, editorial systems) and designing meaningful interfaces for exploration and participation.
- Background in computational journalism, newsroom tooling, interactive storytelling, or creative technology within media.
- Experience designing responsible generative AI workflows (evaluation, provenance, human-in-the-loop processes) that respect rights and audience trust.
- Evidence of original methods for cultural sensing and foresight (scenario work, speculative methods, participatory research, experimental publishing formats).
- Entrepreneurial experience building new offerings under constraints (from concept to launch), including revenue-adjacent experimentation.
Education & experience
- Advanced degree (MA/MS/PhD) or equivalent experience in fields that support cultural and technical synthesis, such as: media studies, anthropology, STS, HCI, computational media, design, history/philosophy of science/technology, or related areas.
- Portfolio of shipped work that combines cultural insight with tangible making: interactive pieces, tools, prototypes, products, exhibits, research publications, or widely adopted programs.
- Experience presenting and convening: talks, workshops, salons, teaching, or public-facing leadership that demonstrates charisma and clarity.
Additional requirements
- Comfort working in a fast-moving environment where the right question is still being discovered.
- Ability to lead through influence: aligning collaborators without relying on formal authority alone.
- Willingness to iterate in public-facing ways while maintaining appropriate guardrails around trust, IP, and editorial standards.
- Occasional travel for reporting, partnerships, convenings, and field observation.
Compensation
Compensation is competitive and commensurate with senior leadership scope, experience, and location. The expected base salary range for this role is $260,000–$390,000, with eligibility for bonus and benefits.
Final compensation will be determined based on role scope, relevant experience, and internal leveling.
Additional information
Notices
The New Yorker is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or any other legally protected characteristics.
Employment is contingent upon successful completion of a background check in accordance with applicable law. Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered consistent with relevant Fair Chance laws where applicable.
This posting is speculative—a design fiction artifact imagining a near-future role that formalizes cultural intelligence and machine-enabled editorial experimentation as core organizational capacity.
We provide reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities.