Deez Interviews: Adrienne Green on less-than-linear career paths, moving from The Atlantic to The Cut, and the importance of regularly scheduled self check-ins
Happy Friday, Deezers! This week’s interview is with Adrienne Green, who’s currently senior editor at The Cut. We talked about her fellow-to-managing editor career trajectory back at The Atlantic, her best organizational tools and hacks (spreadsheets, baby!), and the one audience she always keeps top of mind in her work. Enjoy!
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You joined The Cut last fall to oversee culture & politics projects. What can you tell us about these projects so far, or at least the driving questions that guide your work?
My goal when I started this new job was to try to get in on a little bit of everything, to learn how New York works, and to have fun (I can be extremely self-serious, and I'm working on that). So far that has included editing features, improving The Cut's newsletter, talking to writers, and brainstorming special projects/packages.
I guess, in a lot of ways, the questions I'm interested in are no different than any other editor: How can we present our stories in ways that will surprise even the people who follow us closely? How do we keep things fun and fresh and weird? How can I find a way to work with all the talented people all the time? And how do I make sure that I pull together a range of stories so that lots of different people feel like our stories are speaking to them?
So, I’ve been dying to ask you this properly, but when you and I first met right out of college, you were covering education as an editorial fellow at The Atlantic. How did you go from fellow to managing editor within a few years?
I wish I could say I had followed a closely managed plan, but my career has mostly involved trying to step up and take jobs that seemed like a stretch... and then doing my best to rise to the occasion. (And trying to show myself some grace when the learning curves were extremely steep, because imposter syndrome is real.)
I am always looking for chances to grow into my job, and I was lucky enough to have colleagues who put some faith in me. Taking this new job was a part of that same love for challenge and (productive) chaos.
Are there any lessons from navigating your career trajectory that have surprised you?
When I first started out, I felt like I needed to be extremely calculated — because I'd heard so much about how volatile and unforgiving media could be, and I didn't want to waste my shot.
But since then, I've tried to become less rigid about how each job fits into some linear master plan to be a big-time magazine writer or editor, and it has been really, really liberating. I've learned that it is okay to make things up as I go along. To leave digital for print and come back to it. That I can tailor jobs to my strong suits or create new ones entirely if my "perfect gig" doesn't seem to exist. And that even within the same job, changing my own priorities could make an existing job feel entirely new.
Oh, and that managing is very hard, and almost no one is good at it without training.
Between your experience with managing editorial workflows, regular print issues AND special issues at The Atlantic, in addition to your work at The Cut, I'm super curious about the tools/methods you use to stay organized.
Oh man, I live and die by spreadsheets. When I was at The Atlantic, I had all of the the ones that I used regularly set to open automatically whenever I started my browser.
One of the many was just labeled "My Job," and I separated it into task groups that corresponded to checkpoints in the magazine cycle and reminded me to do things like freelance invoices or checking in with the audience editors about social-media schedules or send out manuscript updates. (I am so low-fi, so I know there has to be a better way than maintaining a billion spreadsheets!)
I also used my monitor as a visual to-do list with color-coded sticky notes, but I've become slightly less insane and started to use Trello for my work at The Cut.
My most important tool, though, is my calendar. I try to block off consistent times every week to do all the admin things that I'd otherwise never get around to like responding to pitches, paying people, reviewing traffic, etc.
Also, when I attended Poynter's women and leadership training a couple years ago, one of the instructors did a presentation about carving out regular time to check in with yourself and being ruthless about defending that time. So, I have that scheduled as a weekly standing meeting, and try to make it a priority so I'm constantly checking in on my big goals.
Finally, I imagine moving from The Atlantic to The Cut entails a pretty significant shift in the primary audience you have in mind for your work. Did you feel like you had to "de-program" yourself from one audience to another?
I've actually never thought about it quite like that before. I think my goal has always been less to have a primary audience in mind that's dictated by where I work, than to make sure that the experiences of women, especially women of color, are centered in whatever I'm doing.
First, because we're often along the first to be left out of mainstream conversations, and second because as a black woman editor, I don't know any other way to do my job well (if black women aren't regularly seeing themselves in the work I'm putting into the world, I need to grapple with that regardless of the audience my employer prioritizes.)
That said, it's been really fun to think specifically about women's inner lives and the stories that are possible when you look at politics and culture and power through the lens of our experiences. I'm still very much in the process of figuring all of that out, but I guess it feels like a natural extension of what I've always found important journalistically.
There are obviously a lot of stories that The Cut runs that demonstrate seriousness, but working with a team of women who also embrace weirdness and whimsy and vulnerability and horniness has opened up how I look for ideas. I always want to read those stories, so getting good at editing them and learning how to let loose has been the "stretch" experience I was seeking out.
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Don’t forget to follow @AdrienneNGreen on Twitter, and have a ruthlessly organized weekend!
Deez Links is a dailyish media newsletter from @delia_cai. More challenging yet productive chaos is available at deezlinks.substack.com.