An Interview: Josh Sternberg, Morning Brew

This week, I sat down with Josh Sternberg, executive editor at Morning Brew.

• Did you always want to be a journalist? If not, what was the turning point or experience that made you choose the path of journalism?
  • When I was in high school, I was on the school newspaper. I was the editorial editor, and there is something really cool about walking around school and being a nosy body and asking questions. When I got to college, at William Paterson University in New Jersey, I decided I didn’t want to do reporting, so I studied film. So the idea of being a journalist was never on my life plan. My life plan was to be a rock star. I was in a band throughout college and graduate school. We toured. We made an album.
  • I always loved writing, whether it was music or poetry. When I graduated college and needed to find a job, I went back to school and got my master’s degree, and I really fell in love with academics. I was an adjunct professor for a number of years and I tripped into PR. But I am a, “No, but” person, when in PR, you need to be, “Yes, and.”
  • When the economy collapsed in 2008, I lost my PR gig, so I started a communications consultancy. But I also started writing because it was the rise of the blogging era, and my little blog posts got noticed by larger actual publications—Mashable, The Huffington Post. Then, The Atlantic asked if I wanted to write for them, and that just started opening doors. I wound up becoming a staff reporter covering media at Digiday, and I’ve been in media roles since.
• You’ve been in media for over two decades, writing for Digiday, Adweek, The Washington Post, NBC News, and now Morning Brew. What are some of the stories you’re most proud of and why?
  • It’s actually a story that I didn’t write, but that I assigned and edited. I think it was 2018 or 2019. There was a tragic shooting in a Walmart in El Paso, Texas.
  • I was really curious about how a company navigated tragedy like this, where the company had nothing to do with the disaster, but how do they manage through that? It started with that question, and I was talking to a reporter of mine, and we started going back and forth, and it wound up being one of the most empathetic and insightful business stories of what happens when external factors create tragedy for a company.
  • When he filed his first draft, I was taken aback, because the lead of the draft was that he wound up speaking with the owner of the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., to understand what happened afterwards, and we learned about the economics of tragedy—insurance companies to deal with, cleanup crew to manage—and then how to build back from there. And it’s one of those stories that always sticks in my brain, as I’m very glad we told that story.
• As executive editor at Morning Brew, you lead editorial strategy and editorial operations for Morning Brew’s suite of professional publications: Marketing Brew, Retail Brew, IT Brew, CFO Brew, Healthcare Brew, Revenue Brew, and HR Brew. What’s driving your team’s coverage?
  • I love this question, because I love to highlight not just how we do things, but why we do things.
  • I am more interested in understanding how companies do a thing, rather than quote, unquote news. A news event happens, everybody’s covering it. They give you the who, the what, the when, the where, and the why, mostly—often the why is superficial. What we do is because our audiences are highly specialized and focused, right?
  • CFO Brew is written for chief financial officers and their org charts, IT Brew is written for information technology professionals. So the hypothesis is: If we can go narrow and deep in coverage by telling process stories and profiles, we can differentiate what we do compared to other publications, and it seems to be working.
• How much of your coverage involves proactively reaching out for sources, versus inbounds from PR folks? Knowing that you do profiles, that’s like a PR person’s dream, right?
  • It’s a mixed bag. We work with PR people every day. Oftentimes, we have to go through PR, so we establish relationships with them, and then PR folks come back to us in the future, like, “Oh, we love the story that you did about how Walmart is building out its AI platform. Would love to connect you with my client over here, who’s doing something similar.”
  • If there’s a good pitch and it’s like, “Hey, this is something that your audience doesn’t know about, or something your audience should know about,” or, “We read HR Brew, and you guys write about compliance all the time. We would love to set you up with our chief HR officer to talk about what we’re doing over here at widget company Z,” great, let’s take the call.
• As part of your scope, you create new tentpole content series, franchises, and events. Can you share details on these opportunities, including the best way for PR folks to pitch their brands or clients for consideration?
  • Last year, the entire newsroom—all eight publications—were telling this story that we call the Quarter Century Project. Each publication looked back over the past 25 years at the most interesting, important, and relevant stories in that particular job function or industry, and then talked about or explained what’s happening now or what could happen in the next two, five, 10, years.
  • It’s so interesting looking at this, Netflix, Warner Bros., Paramount corporate situation that they’ve got going on. We did a wonderful story for Marketing Brew about how media conglomeration, starting with AOL Time Warner 25 years ago, really set us on this path. So when we look at these ideas and these specific series, everything ties back to telling the most interesting stories that we can tell.
  • Franchises—I built five here. I built HR Brew, IT Brew, CFO Brew, Healthcare Brew, and Revenue Brew. We had Tech Brew, Marketing Brew, and Retail Brew before I got here. And we’re going to launch our newest professional publication, Founder Brew, in April about the business of entrepreneurs, which I’m really excited about. But we also have two different sides of the editorial house. There’s this professional side that I oversee, and then there’s a consumer side, which is Morning Brew, which is our daily flagship newsletter, Brew Markets, and The Playbook, as well as the multimedia shows that we have, like Good Work, After Earnings, or the Morning Brew Daily podcast. We started a Marketing Brew Weekly podcast and an HR-specific show with our head of HR called People Person. We’ve got our fingers in a lot of different types of content modes, which is really helpful.
  • We do IRL events. We do virtual events. Some of them are client-run webinars. Some of them are editorially led and driven virtual conversations.
  • The best way for PR folks to pitch is to read us, know what we cover, and then make a reporter’s job easier by explaining why this is important or relevant to our audiences, since we’re not writing news and we’re writing more analysis pieces and contextual pieces. Help reporters understand how you can be helpful. “Hey, I know you write about HR strategy. I have a client that you really should speak with, because they’ve got 25 years helping HR teams navigate automated systems.”
• With the ever-changing media landscape, how are you adapting Morning Brew’s coverage and the work of your journalists to meet the trends and demands?
  • In order to answer this question, you have to understand our editorial philosophy, which is slow and steady wins the race, because we’re not writing breaking news. Because we’re not writing news, we are writing process stories, profiles, and feature stories. They take time to report, they take time to write, they take time to edit. The media landscape changes, often because its economic changes are foisted upon journalists. The pivot to video forced people to completely change the way they view their jobs, or the race to the bottom of ad impressions, where executives say, “Oh, write more content so we can get more eyeballs, so we can get more ad impressions.”
  • Our business model is predicated on personal touch, not programmatic. So we’re not chasing page views. It’s not a metric I care about, which means that when we need to adapt to newer technologies or newer modes, we actually can be intentional and thoughtful in how we approach it.
  • I take an experimental approach to things. We have guidelines about how to use AI, but AI is not mandatory to use. We can’t use AI to create content, but I’ve seen reporters use AI as part of their research. Like, “I’m going to go look at 10 quarters of Walmart earnings and stick them into ChatGPT because I’m looking for something very specific. And then once it spits it back out to me, I can then go and corroborate that to make sure that it’s correct.” So we like to look at AI as a tool, just like a pen is a tool, but it’s not something that I am forcing people to use.
• With such a senior role, how would you describe your role and day-to-day? Do you still pen important pieces? Has your focus shifted to awards, lists, and conferences?
  • It’s strategic thinking, looking at data and different signals to figure out how effective our journalism is, and then creating the processes and workflows to execute against that, working with my audience development team, or our data and analytics team, or our revenue team, or our finance team. It’s working with all of my peers across the company to reach the same goal, which is to put out the best journalism we can and then figure out how to monetize from there. I don’t write anymore. The only writing I do is memo writing, like personnel announcement type stuff.
  • I try to explain to the newsroom why we do things the way we do, so it’s a lot of internal comms, a lot of trying to figure out what policies make sense, whether this is an advantage or a disadvantage. Because I was a reporter and because I was an editor, and I’ve had those jobs and I sat in their seats, I tried to create a logical, workable environment, rather than a “go get me page views” kind of thing.
• Is there any new news (e.g. features, columns, podcasts, tools) at Morning Brew that you’d like to highlight for Meredith & The Media readers?
  • For the past five years, Tech Brew has gone through all sorts of different types of changes, because we are myopically focused on data to help inform. We like to keep as little daylight between what we are doing editorially, what we are doing from an audience perspective, and what we are doing from a revenue perspective, because we find that when you tell the right stories to the right audience, you make money.
  • Tech Brew is one of our larger publications by audience, and we’re excited to move Tech Brew into a new framework. Instead of what we’ve been doing for the past couple of years—getting down and dirty and really into the weeds with specific topics like AI, EVs (electric vehicles), and clean tech, green tech—we’re now broadening the aperture a little bit, because that’s what the audience is looking for. It’s exciting to tell more consumer tech stories. We’re taking a broader approach to tech coverage across the entire company, and we’re doing that through a new unit, our enterprise tech unit. We launched this at CES. The enterprise unit is going to be covering tech stories across the entire Morning Brew Inc. suite, instead of just Tech Brew.
  • So a story could look like this: Kraft Heinz announces that they’re going to spend $3 billion upgrading their manufacturing facilities in the U.S. So what does it look like if we send a reporter to go talk to them and get a tour of one of their upgraded facilities? That is a story just by itself.
  • But while they’re there, they’re also going to talk to the HR team, because you have a factory where you now have to upskill a whole bunch of people, and that falls under HR. Then now you’ve got an HR tech story that can sit in HR Brew. Then they’re going to go talk to the IT team, because now you’ve got this new facility with everything connected to the internet. Well, you’ve got to keep that facility secure and safe. How are they doing that? So now you’ve got an IT Brew process story. This is the big marketing selling point, so we’re going to go talk to their CMO (chief marketing officer) to understand how they are incorporating this into their marketing collateral. Now we’ve got a Marketing Brew story.
  • The idea is to tell this story in different modes and chapters across all of our different publications.
• How, in your opinion, has the role of journalism changed over the past few years? What are some trends in journalism that you’re seeing, and which do you think are here to stay?
  • It’s gotten a lot harder. There’s more noise. There are also more challenges, at least from my perspective as a business journalist, in certain areas of talking to people because they are afraid of consequences, not just at their own company, but of society. If you haven’t noticed, spend a half-hour on LinkedIn looking for healthcare executives. You will more than likely than not find them there, but it will be like Josh S. and not full name and title because of what happened last year.
  • All of these challenges then present downstream issues for us as we’re trying to get information, because people don’t want to deal with the potential consequences on their own lives of talking to the media. That’s one that is really hard.
  • On the flip side, it presents opportunities for more independent media to be able to talk to people. Trust in media is incredibly low if you’re not sourced up. And if you’re trying to source up at one of the big publications, it’s going to be really hard these days. If you’re a worker at a company, do you want to connect with someone at The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, whereas you might be willing to send documents to someone like Marisa Kabas over at The Handbasket.
  • I think the trend that we’re going to continue to see is an ongoing evolution of the independent media journalist slash company.
• How should PR folks work with you? What is the best way to pitch you and get on your radar as a source?
  • I find it’s always best to go straight to the reporter or editor at the publication. Odds are if you are a PR person I do not know and you send me an email, I am not seeing it. You’re better off talking to the folks who are doing this every day.
• If someone’s like, “Hey, Josh, I have a great story, but I can’t break through,” are you willing to guide or redirect folks?
  • When I do see an email, if the pitch is terrible, I will respond and say that it’s terrible. Not because it makes me feel good, but because I hope that the PR person learns for the next time, and almost always they do. (Like the PR person that called me John multiple times.)
  • I was in PR for a while, and I understand the pressures of having to get hits. There was a PR agency that I worked at where the CEO came in on a Monday and said, “If you don’t get a press hit by the end of the week, you’re fired.” I got the client on the radio and saved my job for another day.
  • Media relations sweatshops are the worst. So I empathize with people that find themselves there and try to help people.