This is a candidate for the 2025-26 ONA Board of Directors election.
Angela Chao is the Head of Global News and Director of Content at the world’s leading health and wellness property — Healthline Media, part of RVO Health, which includes publications such as Healthline, Medical News Today, Psych Central, and Healthgrades.
In her current role, Angela leads all aspects of the news content, operations, and strategies, while developing and supporting new, priority content products and business initiatives through cross-functional and people leadership. She oversees an international team of editors, freelance writers, fact-checkers with journalism/life sciences/medical credentials, podcast producers, and coordinates global coverage of the latest health and medical news and research across several brands.
Angela is a digital pioneer who’s led numerous cutting-edge, large-scale content experiments across web, social media, OTT and emerging platforms that resulted in exponential audience and revenue growth for multiple news organizations. Before joining the Healthline Media team in January 2022, Angela worked as an executive producer, digital journalist, and newsroom leader at various media outlets, including Tegna’s NBC Atlanta, The Weather Channel/weather.com, Lonely Planet, USA TODAY Network, and AOL.
Angela has a bachelor’s degree from Washington State University and a master’s from the University of Missouri School of Journalism.
Angela’s vision for the future of digital journalism
If I learned one thing from being a digital pioneer on the forefront of transforming newsrooms and constantly adapting to new, often disruptive technologies, is that change is inevitable.
With a sharp decline in traditional revenue such as advertising and the constantly changing landscape surrounding online and social media platforms, it is crucial for journalists and news organizations to reevaluate their content and audience strategies to grow and thrive in the digital space. Here are some of my thoughts and vision on the future of digital journalism and how we can pivot to be one step ahead of the next big change that will impact our industry:
- Focus on producing content on native and owned platforms with the most revenue opportunities. All of this content can be repackaged for different audiences, including social media. Social can be a powerful way to grow audience and promote content, however, social platforms are too unpredictable and not sustainable as the main avenue for generating traffic or revenue.
- As old school as it sounds, newsletters are an excellent way to cultivate a loyal group of subscribers and gather audience insights. It is also a creative way to generate additional revenue, whether it’s through advertising, sponsorship or affiliated links when appropriate.
- Podcasts and audio platforms continue to present unique opportunities for news organizations to create topic-based, niche, both short-form and long-form audio content that can be beneficial for brand-building and audience development.
- Google and SEO continue to be at the center stage of many organizations’ content strategies. While it is necessary to stay informed with the latest changes in the SEO world, it is not sustainable if we only rely on search-based traffic.
- Implementing AI into editorial processes: Ethical and innovative ways of using AI will likely be the next big thing in digital journalism, and ChatGPT and other versions of such tools have already made their way into many newsrooms. The question is not whether AI will be widely used in the field of journalism, but how. I’d love to see more news and product teams experiment with AI in ways that don’t take away the integrity and humanity of journalism and storytelling, but instead, help journalists do their jobs faster and better, especially with declining resources and many journalists doing more with less.
- How to better deliver and monetize short-form and long-form digital video content will largely determine the success of brands built around visual content. Newsrooms can benefit from creating video content that can seamlessly transfer from one screen to another with the ability to generate revenue across multiple platforms from web, YouTube to streaming services.
The tools we use to tell stories and the platforms we present such stories to audiences will always be evolving, but it remains true that journalism absolutely matters, and the digital audience is hungry for credible and compelling content.