How The 19th built its inclusive three-year strategic plan

As part of our Summer Member Drive and launch of our three-year strategic plan, we’re sharing a portion of The Asterisk, our monthly members-only newsletter, with all 19th readers. In each edition, we go Behind the Asterisk with a 19th team member to give our members an exclusive look inside The 19th.

This month, we go behind The Asterisk with Alexandra Smith, The 19th’s chief strategy officer. In our Q&A, she shares more on how she worked with our entire team to design The 19th’s strategic plan, why we’re launching it now, what’s been the most rewarding part of this process and much more.

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Sereena: Congratulations on the launch of the strategic plan! You kicked off the planning process in January of 2024, and, since day one, you made it clear that your goal was to make it “as inclusive of our staff and audiences as possible.” What did you do to remain true to this intention? 

Alexandra: Thank you, Sereena! I knew we would not be able to design and implement a compelling, effective strategic plan without bringing our brilliant staff and our audiences into the process. I refused to hand something down from the top, and thankfully our leadership team partnered with me on that vision from the start.

To remain true to this intention over the past 18 months, I asked our staff for their participation in many ways, and I’m so grateful for how they’ve shown up.

I facilitated half a dozen staff working groups to gather perspectives from across departments to directly inform our decisions. I asked my colleagues for help conducting dozens of audience interviews to best understand how we could serve our readers.

I partnered with departments to host workshops to help design solutions to our stickier challenges and led all staff through a project pitch process to help figure out how we might leverage our greatest opportunities; in both efforts, we prioritized our audiences’ needs in the ideas we decided to pursue.

We’ve done risk assessments and scenario planning with all staff, we’ve used existing meeting spaces to gut check our initiative ideas, and we’ve conducted various staff and audience surveys to gather as much input as possible. At each step of the strategic planning process, I asked, “How do we know this will serve our audiences and our staff?”

The plan is designed to guide The 19th through the next three years. Could you explain to our members why this time frame and why now?

Our organization has achieved most of what our founders set out to do when they launched The 19th in 2020. We’ve learned so much in the process. And the media landscape has significantly changed.

We found ourselves at a crossroads: We needed a new plan to guide us into the future that incorporated our successes, left behind what no longer served us or our readers, and addressed the challenges of being a nonprofit newsroom in 2025. Three years felt like a reasonable amount of time to take several big swings while recognizing that a lot can change in a short amount of time in the media environment.

It’s been really cool and inspiring to see how your journey has unfolded at The 19th. You joined in January 2021 as audience director, served as interim chief product officer and then officially became The 19th’s first chief strategy officer in May 2024. How has your experience leading our audience and product strategies informed your approach to leading our cross-departmental strategy?

I sure do bounce around a lot, huh? One of my favorite puzzles to solve is figuring out how I can apply my skills to the current needs of our organization, and that’s how I found myself creating The 19th’s first strategic plan in an inclusive way.

My experiences in audience and product work proved that the most meaningful and effective ideas come from listening to and centering the people we aim to serve. And I love bringing people together to work through hard problems, which is so much of what I did in audience and product roles. I tend to ignore department lines and just get smart people with different areas of expertise together to figure out what we might create next.

Speaking of cross-departmental strategy, let’s dive into the initiative to reimagine how we work together at The 19th. Why was it important to include this in the plan and, with 61 staff members and nine departments, where does the reimagining begin?

In our five years of rapid growth, we’ve done what so many startups do: focused rigorously on what we deliver to our audiences — our journalism. And while we’ve developed many strategies to care for our staff, this initiative is about taking care of them in another way. By updating structures and processes that we’ve outgrown, I believe we can make our work easier for our staff. We are starting with the newsroom because it is central to what we do.

What’s been the most rewarding part of this process for you?

That’s easy: spending more time with colleagues I didn’t get to work with as often in past roles here. This work is complex, and conversations about the dreams, ideas and sticking points in our work has kept me both energized and grounded. 

How can our readers continue to stay engaged with our progress during these next three years? 

Readers: Do you want to stay engaged? If so, I’d love to know what you want that to look like. I can ask Sereena for space to share regular updates, add a note to our daily newsletter a few times per year or something else!

Is there anything else you’d like to share or let our members know?

Through this process, I have been reminded again and again that The 19th staff is wildly committed to providing our readers with the information they need to be equal participants in our democracy, holding power to account by documenting the erosion of civil rights, challenging inequitable industry practices and remaining deeply human throughout all of our efforts. On behalf of their incredibly hard work, I humbly ask you to make an extra $19 donation today.