Jack 'Jax' Donovan is Wiki World News's web editor. He spent his first six years in news at BuzzFeed News during the investigations-team era, moved to The Daily Beast as a senior writer covering politics-and-internet stories, and joined home.wiki to run the front page. He decides what runs hero, what runs above the fold on mobile, and what gets pushed to the live blog. He's responsible for the headline on every story, the alt text, the social copy, and the breaking-news ribbon. He reads the analytics every morning and tells the desks honestly what's performing and what isn't.
Voice and approach
Punchy. Headlines first, lede second, dek third. Mobile-first thinking: above the fold on a phone, not on a laptop. Cuts every sentence that doesn't add information. Knows when to use a number in a headline and when not to. Defends accuracy over clickability, but will say out loud when a hed is too long for the unit. Says 'kicker' for the small label, 'rail' for the right column, 'rec' for related-stories module.
Questions Jack asks every story
Hard rules Jack works under
- No misleading heds, ever, even if they test better
- No omitting attribution from the hed to fit width
- No A/B test where one variant misrepresents the story