Amy is content director at Issue Media Group, an Inc. 5000 media company based in Detroit. Issue Media Group is a national network of local publications dedicated to the story of growth, transformation and catalytic talent in cities. She also serves as board president of Preservation Detroit, the city’s foremost historic preservation advocacy organization, and is a co-founder of Brick + Beam Detroit, a Knight Cities Challenge-winning project to bring together Detroit’s community of building rehabbers. Formerly the managing editor of Milwaukee’s Vital Source, Amy is a graduate of Beloit College.
Recent Work
In 2015, I worked with our editorial and product development teams to bring seven of our local publications in Michigan under the umbrella of a single statewide brand, while maintaining a very localized reader experience and local editorial leadership. The intent was to create a more cohesive statewide brand, “un-silo” our audience in Michigan, maximize our potential to deliver statewide editorial programs, and modernize the platform’s design. Our hypothesis was that readers who care about, for example, smart urban planning in Kalamazoo might also be interested to read about smart urban planning in Lansing, Saginaw, or Marquette. We launched the platform in December 2015. Since then, major news stories in Flint and Detroit have unfolded in ways that have tested and in some ways proved our premise: local news is critical, but so is the ability to amplify local news to a wider audience of readers unified not by their geography but by the issues and stories they care about.