Kate Farley (MSJ21)

Senior Editor at MediaFeed

Tell us about your career path. How did you get where you are today?

I currently work at MediaFeed, which produces, publishes, and distributes content in various verticals. The branch I work under, Brand Publishing, also builds editorial destinations for companies. But at the end of the day, we’re all really a team of journalists, some of whom have worked at the New York Times, Frontline, HBO, ABC News, NBC News, and so many more. That journalism connection is actually how I found MediaFeed. They had a freelancer who was an editor at Central Michigan University while I was the editor-in-chief at Saginaw Valley State University. We met through that network, and I actually took her freelancer spot when she switched to a different gig. Small world.

I’ve worked in newsrooms, both digital and old-school print, and radio. By my senior year of undergrad, 2020, I had two job offers after graduation, one in print and one in radio. But this little thing called a global pandemic happened, if you recall, and bye-bye job offers. So my newspaper advisor says "go to grad school." She gave me a list of places I should apply to, and Medill was one of them. They're the only school on the list that doesn't have me sitting in a classroom for two years relearning things I've been teaching others to do. While at Medill, I had the opportunities to freelance for many places, mainly covering business reporting and breaking news in the Uptown Chicago area during a pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests, and an election year.

What are your main responsibilities in your current role?

I work as the go-between for MediaFeed and our clients, ensuring everyone's goals and expectations align and everyone is on the same page. With Brand Publishing especially, there's usually a lot of education and training that takes place when you first start working with a company about what editorial content is vs. an advertorial and why differences like that matter. I help them comb through what content they have, work on content and SEO gap analyses, set them up with editorial calendars, and then work with our team to clean up that content and distribute it to places like AOL and MSN. I also give them data on traffic and SERP rankings, among other stats related to their syndicated content, so we can review our plans and adjust them if need be.

We also launched a Medill internship program this year! I was a MediaFeed fellow, but we haven't had any since then, nor have we had any official programs. We are just about to say goodbye to our first graduate intern and actually prep for our first undergraduate intern. So I'm excited to be heading that up and hopefully expanding it in the future.

How has your Medill training helped you in your career?

By far the most valuable and impactful classes for me were Business Reporting and Magazine Editing. For Business, using the Bloomberg Terminal, talking to advisors and analysts, digging into spreadsheets, and just doing a very different type of reporting than I had done before, it was eye-opening. If I were still writing, I definitely would have stayed in business reporting. But Magazine brought home the real value of getting that MS in editorial journalism: gaining the skills and experience necessary to be a managing editor, which is pretty akin to what I am doing now. We got to do these super in-depth edits of documents, audience analyses, and a project where we chose a magazine and really tore apart its core demographics and what its strengths and weaknesses are both editorially and as a business. This class, more than any of the others, gave us the chance to really be editors and start to bridge the gap between the writer/reporter and editor/managerial sides of a newsroom.

How has the Northwestern Medill network helped you advance in your career?

MediaFeed was just at the SABEW business journalism conference this year. I met up with former professors and faculty to set the groundwork for our internships before the conference, and MediaFeed as a whole was able to reach out to new businesses and other colleges. The latter is important to us because, as former student journalists, we want to make those connections and see how we can help students get more clips and learn things like using a CMS or ethical AI before they graduate.

How can your industry be more inclusive and representative of society?

Often, the people calling the shots in journalism and marketing don't look like, live like, think like the people they're creating for. That's problematic because what happens is that you lose touch with your audience; you lose their trust and respect. And then these same executives wonder why “the locals” won't support “local” journalism. Because in that local journalism, that content isn’t local. It’s being created by someone outside of their zeitgeist who isn't willing to listen to them when they try to tell them that their content is self-serving, flawed, and biased, and not at all actually local.

The first thing I tell new reporters before an interview is simple: Listen more. We don't do it enough. We talk and try to push questions to get answers to things we want, but too often, we ask the wrong questions. Even simpler, instead of talking about how much you care about diversity and your locals, hire locals and hire non-white, noncisgender men every once in a while.

How have your identities influenced the way you navigate your professional career?

So, I'm a woman, a first-generation college student, and an asexual, queer person, not listed in order of importance! What they all have in common is that they mean I'm not a white cisgender man, and no matter what your field is, that already puts you a few steps behind. As a first-generation student, I paid for undergrad and graduate school myself, meaning I started my adult life in debt. Like too many others my age, that also meant working multiple jobs at the same time.

As far as being a woman, I'm often one of maybe two on a conference call, which isn't surprising since it's still pretty hard for women even to get a senior editor position.

Then there is the ace of it all. So, most people know what LGBTQ stands for, maybe even the "I." But ask about the "A," and the first guess is often "ally." It's "asexual." In the world of content, LGBTQIA+ content is no longer just subjugated to June. Pride is year-round. And several prominent, very well-known publications have had to issue retractions and even apologies in the last few years because they published LGBTQIA+ content that indicated the "A" stood for "ally," not "asexual." In this sense, being connected to a more niche, unknown side of the queer community has actually been quite valuable for navigating content in a world where queer issues and interests are becoming more and more mainstream.

What advice do you have for someone considering Medill?

Apply. Why not? I had just days to do it during a pandemic and made it work! I've talked to so many prospects, too, who think they don't have a shot of getting in. You could be here, too. As Michael Scott would say, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take.