LAINNA FADER
lainnafader@gmail.com • LinkedIn
GROWTH, CONSUMER REVENUE & STRATEGY LEADER
Cross-functional leader with 15 years of experience across media and consumer businesses. Track record of turning audience data, consumer behavior, and platform expertise into scalable growth strategies, new products, and revenue opportunities. Experienced operating across editorial, product, marketing, data, design, and revenue organizations to identify business opportunities, lead initiatives from concept through execution, and turn strategy into measurable outcomes.
FORBES
Director of Consumer Revenue & Growth, Newsletters (Apr 2025 - Oct 2026)
Director of Newsletter Growth & Operations (Jan 2023 — Apr 2025)
Led strategy and growth for Forbes’ multimillion-dollar newsletter business, a portfolio of 30+ consumer email products reaching ~3M subscribers across editorial, e-commerce, educational courses, and emerging direct-to-consumer offerings.
Drove 8x growth in newsletter sponsorship revenue over three years by evolving monetization strategy, developing two new advertising formats, refining pricing and packaging, and identifying new commercial opportunities in partnership with sales, product, editorial, and ad operations teams.
Set growth strategy for the portfolio, translating opportunities across audience, product, monetization, data, and technology into annual plans, revenue forecasts, budget and resource allocation, OKRs and KPIs, and recommendations to executive leadership.
Set product strategy for the portfolio, prototyping new consumer experiences and initiatives to convert anonymous readers into known users, unify fragmented data sources, and expand zero- and first-party data collection.
Conceived and built an AI-powered sponsorship strategy agent that turned fragmented market data into actionable sales intelligence, accelerating opportunity identification and advertiser recommendations while building a longitudinal view of advertiser activity across the newsletter market.
Built and scaled Forbes’ custom sponsored email program, creating a premium advertising product distinct from standard newsletter sponsorships and expanding opportunities for advertiser revenue.
Owned consumer growth and lifecycle strategy across acquisition, onboarding, engagement, and reactivation, increasing conversion on onsite newsletter acquisition units through continuous A/B testing and launching Forbes’ first CDP-powered campaign to activate registered users into newsletter subscribers.
Built the portfolio’s reporting and measurement framework, defining KPIs across acquisition, engagement, retention, and revenue and partnering with business intelligence to develop dashboards and reporting used by executives and cross-functional teams to evaluate performance and guide decisions.
Led evaluation of the technology stack, translating organizational needs into platform requirements, identifying opportunities to reduce costs without sacrificing capabilities, and developing business cases for key investments.
THE NEW YORKER
Director of Audience Development (Feb 2019 - Oct 2022)
Associate Director of Audience Development (Apr 2016 – Jan 2019)
Led organic and paid audience growth and engagement strategy across search, social, newsletters, partnerships, and onsite experiences, using behavioral data, experimentation, and editorial insight to drive multiple years of record-breaking growth.
Developed a framework for measuring how stories, sections, and types of journalism contributed to subscriptions, moving evaluation beyond traffic alone and helping editors make more informed decisions about what to commission, expand, and invest in.
Created and scaled three of The New Yorker’s most successful newsletters, with open rates up to 3x industry standards, helping grow the overall newsletter portfolio to nearly 20% of monthly site traffic.
Created and scaled @newyorkercartoons into a 3.5M+ follower consumer franchise, expanding the reach of one of The New Yorker’s most distinctive editorial assets.
Built The New Yorker’s search strategy from the ground up, introducing web-optimized display copy and editorial best practices that helped grow search from a negligible acquisition channel to ~30% of site traffic.
Drove the magazine’s archive strategy, using audience and subscription data to identify opportunities for digitization, distribution, and renewed discovery.
Created and launched The New Yorker’s annual “Best Of” franchise, developing the editorial, audience, and e-commerce strategy for a cross-platform tentpole that consistently produced some of the year’s top-performing stories and created a repeatable audience and revenue driver.
Built a rigorous experimentation program for onsite audience acquisition, conducting hundreds of A/B tests across messaging, design, value proposition, and user experience to continuously improve conversion.
Initiated and launched The New Yorker Poetry Bot, experimenting with emerging technology to bring the magazine’s poetry archive to new audiences and attract readers with high subscription propensity.
Influenced audience strategy beyond The New Yorker, presenting successful approaches and insights to audience, social, and analytics leaders across Condé Nast’s portfolio of brands.
NEW YORK MAGAZINE
Engagement Editor (Sept 2014 – Apr 2016)
Led social strategy across New York Media brands and managed a five-person team, driving ~150% YoY growth of @nymag’s Instagram audience through investment in platform-native storytelling.
Led social strategy for New York’s landmark Cosby cover, helping develop a new “Audiogram” format for Instagram that combined photos, text, and audio, and adapting the full editorial package for distribution across social platforms when a DDoS attack took the site offline.
Leveraged audience data and research to identify opportunities for new editorial verticals and advise editors on audience growth and distribution strategy.
Developed a social media partnership program involving dozens of major media companies to drive traffic.
NEWSWEEK
Engagement Editor (Feb 2014 – Sept 2014)
Led social media strategy, using performance data to guide editorial strategy and audience growth.
FORBES
Community Manager (Oct 2012 – Feb 2014)
Managed all social media accounts and trained staffers on social media best practices.
Spearheaded community engagement projects, including #AskForbes twitter chats, in which we had a staffer or contributor to take over @forbes to answer reader-submitted questions about a specific topic every week.
Created revenue opportunities by crafting a strategic plan to productize and monetize Forbes's quotes database and advised the conferences team.
WIRED
Community & Social Media Intern (Jul 2012 – Sept 2012)
Managed several social media channels, wrote and coded newsletters, and analyzed the impact of stories and initiatives.
Fostered vibrant communities on Wired's forums through comment moderation and user engagement projects.
CINEFAMILY
Director of Development (Jan 2007 – Jan 2010)
Supervised a dozen part-time staff members, and created and directed a volunteer program with 200+ members.
Managed Cinefamily's membership program, from marketing to operations, and sought new corporate and grant sponsors and partners for festivals, special events, and title sponsorships.
EDUCATION
B.A., Politics, Russian Studies • Occidental College
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT & LEADERSHIP
News Product Alliance’s News Product Management Certification (2025)
Chartbeat’s Subscription Accelerator (2019)
ONA’s Women’s Leadership Accelerator (2017)
Selected guest speaker at The New School, Columbia University, Princeton University Summer Journalism Program, Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University, ONA NYC