Audience engagement team welcomes three new staffers

The following announcement was sent on behalf of Assistant Managing Editor for Audience Samantha Melbourneweaver:

I’m pleased to announce new additions to the audience engagement team.

Alison Sneag will join the audience engagement team as an editor embedded in the Sports section. Sneag was most recently managing editor for motorsports at the Athletic. She has more than two decades of experience working as an editor, copy editor, writer and digital strategist in sports journalism at organizations such as ESPN, NFL.com and Racer.com.

She will report to Seth Liss, deputy director for audience, and will work on project management, promotion and experimentation alongside our reporters, editors and digital staffers in Sports. She wants to focus on creating new digital experiences and conversations that build a deeper connection between Times’ storytellers and their audience.

Sneag starts Feb. 7, just in time to help cover the biggest sporting event of the year: Super Bowl LVI.

Katie Antonsson has joined the audience team as an audience analyst who works alongside engagement editors to dissect performance metrics and help The Times work toward digital sustainability.

Antonsson joined The Times in 2021 as a data analyst working under Alexa Sonnenfeld and moved to the audience team late last year. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Antonsson has a master’s degree in specialized journalism and the arts from USC. She previously worked at the Hammer Museum, the Shedd Aquarium and the Art Institute of Chicago as a digital and social media specialist.

In her role, Antonsson works closely with audience editors and newsroom content teams to assess story performance, address gaps in coverage and help set audience growth and project goals.

Antonsson is the first analyst to join the audience team in a move that signals the importance of assessing audience metrics when it comes to building engaging, impactful journalism.

Marisa Martinez joined the audience team as a social media editor. She’s a part of the core social team, which works across newsroom desks to amplify The Times’ journalism on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and experiment with new storytelling tools on emerging platforms.

Martinez was a summer 2021 intern for the News Desk. She also worked as a fellow at KCRW, Cal Matters and EdSource, where she reported on higher education and local news.

Martinez, who graduated with a journalism degree from Cal State Los Angeles, was editor in chief of the student newspaper there and at Santa Monica College.