NICHOLAS JACKSON
Editor • Newsroom Leader • Strategist in Media, Publishing + Tech
Nick is a National Magazine Award-winning newsroom leader with 15+ years experience building and running large, ambitious, data-driven teams and driving exponential digital and revenue growth in director-level and editor-in-chief roles at tech startups and consumer publications including The Atlantic, Pacific Standard, and Outside. He consults for a wide variety of clients through his LLC, Fifth Gate Media, which serves as a vehicle for work on content and distribution strategy; freelance reporting, editing, and project management; media literacy efforts; and other entrepreneurial experiments in both journalism and tech environments. ··· The Long Bio →
Consulting Opportunities + Contact Information: Fifth Gate Media LLC
NICHOLAS JACKSON
Editor • Newsroom Leader • Strategist in Media, Publishing + Tech
Nick is a National Magazine Award-winning editorial leader with 15+ years experience building and running large, ambitious, data-driven teams and driving exponential digital and revenue growth in director-level and editor-in-chief roles at tech startups and consumer publications including The Atlantic, Pacific Standard, and Outside. He consults for a wide variety of clients through his LLC, Fifth Gate Media, which serves as a vehicle for work on content and distribution strategy; freelance reporting, writing, editing, and project management; media literacy efforts; and other entrepreneurial experiments in both journalism and tech environments.After the usual high school and college journalism projects, he got his start by writing for Encyclopedia Britannica, where he was the first person to include the word “beatboxers” (in a profile of Björk) in the publication’s 250-year history; covering Barack Obama’s campaign as a new media intern (when that was a specialized job people had) for Texas Monthly; aggregating news for The Slatest, one of the first early morning newsletters, with an audience of 600,000; and reporting on Google, Facebook, Apple, and other big tech companies for The Atlantic. Some articles he wrote include a look at inventors killed by their own inventions, a profile of the customers who write thousands of product reviews on Amazon — and why, and a story on the men obsessed with exploring the deep ocean, for which director James Cameron wrote him an email claiming he should have been more prominently featured.After transitioning into editing and management, he sent reporters and photographers around the globe, including to Everest Base Camp to document a difficult and deadly climbing season on the world’s highest peak, the Northwest Passage to capture the effects of climate change, and six countries — from Honduras to Azerbaijan — where Indigenous communities waged previously unseen battles against governments and commercial interests to remain on their ancestral lands. He helped to make a magazine from start to finish over one 48-hour weekend; assembled a story package that brought together writers and high-profile public figures from all 50 states (plus D.C., and the five U.S. territories) looking for solutions to entrenched societal problems; has been advised by his lawyer not to visit the Maldives for the 10 years after green-lighting an intimate profile of a repressive regime; and developed innovative partnerships with The Marshall Project, the Food and Environment Reporting Network, The Guardian, Magnum Photos, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and others in order to fund high-impact, ambitious reporting, both written and visual, in the public interest.Along the way, he has 4x’ed the size of multiple editorial teams, nurturing a generation of newsroom talent with a special focus on diversity, ongoing professional development, and helping new voices to reach wide audiences (an interest that's also led him to conduct resume workshops for graduating journalism students and appear as a guest speaker in many journalism classes at universities across the country). He’s had the great privilege to work with, manage, or coach some of the best in the business, and collaborated with them to build contributor networks made up of more than 500 healthcare practitioners and technologists to supplement original reporting with expert commentary and analysis; created significant user-generated content functions (more than 20,000 published submissions) as the first editor-in-chief of Atlas Obscura; and scaled homepage traffic and email newsletters from 50,000 to 1.2 million subscribers using focused curation, machine learning models, and personalized story recommendations (while maintaining open rates above 45%).And he’s launched, or contributed to the launch, of new and creative editorial products and distribution mechanisms including a tech dictionary, educational coursework, art exhibitions, high school lesson plans, and more; and joined forces with growth, engineering, and business intelligence teams to stand up best-in-class SEO operations, design an updates program capable of keeping thousands of archival stories factually accurate and current for today’s readers, and leverage generative AI to support the production of large content libraries that adhere to strict standards. Particular strengths include developing and executing editorial strategy with a focus on launching new products, organizing and driving teams toward big goals and OKRs, and producing journalism of exceptional quality to drive significant audience growth.He believes editorial done well — and that anyone who does it has a responsibility to do it well — underpinned by advanced use of automation, analytics, and support systems and processes can reach more people and do more good than any marketing campaign or advertising program ever could. Journalism is a powerful tool. It can hold institutions accountable, elicit strong emotions, affect change. It can benefit both the bottom line and serve as a valuable, motivating resource for many.Stories, photo essays, and editorial packages he’s commissioned and edited — on subjects as varied as science and technology, health, extreme sports, social and environmental justice, career advancement and work — have won the National Magazine Award, the Society of Publication Designers’ Silver Medal, the Sidney Hillman Foundation Award, the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award, Syracuse University’s Mirror Award, the National Association of Science Writers’ Science in Society Award, and many others. They have been optioned for film, television, and radio; expanded into full-length books; and reprinted in numerous anthologies, including several Best American collections. They’ve been taught in classrooms, referenced in journal articles, and deployed by state and congressional leaders.As an editor, Nick has been praised for “maintaining a dedication to all kinds of diversity” and for “paying promptly and valuing writers.” It’s been said that “he cares about the future of publishing and isn’t afraid to innovate in an industry which desperately needs it” and, by Mr. Magazine himself, that “he knows his stuff and is proud to be cultivating stories that inform and change people’s lives.”He has participated in several panel discussions on the future of journalism, combating fake news, and building more collaboration within and among media outlets, and has discussed his work on various international radio and television programs, including the BBC Radio 1 in the United Kingdom, “Q” on Canada’s CBC Radio One, and C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal.” He has interviewed several public figures of note, including the political commentator and former White House Press Secretary Bill Moyers and Canadian author and social activist Naomi Klein in front of sold-out crowds at the Granada Theatre in Santa Barbara, California, where he was the third editor-in-chief of Pacific Standard, a national magazine that combined research with ambitious narrative and investigative reporting, from 2015 to 2019. (He had previously served as associate publisher, during which time he worked to create new revenue streams for non-profit journalism.) When the Columbia Journalism Review profiled the magazine in 2014 because it had “taken the Internet by storm,” heavy emphasis was placed on the then-recent site redesign spearheaded by Nick, brought in nine months earlier as digital director; writer Sarah Laskow described him at the time as “a young editor who has thought hard about how to make the Internet work for places like The Atlantic and Outside.” When he was appointed editor-in-chief the following year, Nick re-positioned the magazine to tell “stories that matter,” focusing most heavily on social and environmental justice.When Pacific Standard closed in 2019, it was written that Nick “led a superb editorial team over his six years there” and that the magazine “stood out from the pack of click-hungry websites.” James Fallows told the Los Angeles Times that “it’s been a really valuable part of the media ecology,” and that Pacific Standard had “been of national and international caliber for more than a decade without just getting into the standard political news fray.” The Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove reported that the shutdown “hit the journalism community especially hard,” with other reporters noting that “I’ve looked to Pacific Standard so many times for examples of great, clear-eyed reporting and elegant (but never over-the-top) writing” and that “Pacific Standard was the best dedicated source for social science coverage anywhere, and routinely put out stories that made me burn with jealousy that I didn’t think of them first or do them as well. The world will be worse without it.”Prior to joining Pacific Standard as digital director, Nick was the digital editorial director of Outside in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he was responsible for all online efforts — website, newsletters, social media — of America’s leading active-lifestyle and adventure-travel magazine. With a team of six and an annual budget of approximately $1 million, he grew traffic to OutsideOnline.com by more than 300 percent in a one-year period and created branded content packages that drove digital revenue to $3 million. Before that, he was an associate editor at The Atlantic, where he launched the oversaw the magazine’s health coverage online (it’s most-read section) and was part of a two-person team that developed TheAtlantic.com’s technology channel and video strategy.Nick is a graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications, where he concentrated on magazine editing and filled various roles with student journalism outlets The Daily Northwestern and North by Northwestern, and served as the editor-in-chief of both The Summer Northwestern and Chicago Unzipped, a 384-page guidebook to the city produced by more than 50 undergraduate writers and photographers from several area universities. In 2017, he was profiled in Medill’s alumni magazine. While an undergraduate, he was also part of the launch team and then editor-in-chief of The Weekly, a magazine-style weekly insert in The Daily Northwestern, the only daily print publication for Northwestern University and the city of Evanston, Illinois (pop. 75,000). In addition to Medill, he is a graduate of The Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, an experimental three-year residential high school founded by Nobel laureate Leon Lederman, director emeritus of nearby Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory; while a student at IMSA, he was the opinion editor of the Acronym, the school’s student newspaper, and a marketing intern at SciTech Hands-on Museum, a 30,000-square-foot interactive science museum located in a historic post office in Aurora, Illinois. Focused, at that time, on coverage of pop culture and the arts, he contributed critical music commentary and reviews to Filter, Sound the Sirens, and a variety of other outlets.Since his time at Northwestern, Nick has been an officer of The International Association for Literary Journalism Studies, a multi-disciplinary learned society whose essential purpose is the improvement and encouragement of scholarly research and education in literary journalism. IALJS organizes an annual international conference and produces both a quarterly newsletter for members and a twice-annual, peer-reviewed journal that publishes scholarly articles on the theory, history, and pedagogy of literary journalism throughout the world.
Consulting Opportunities + Contact Information: Fifth Gate Media LLC