Matt Clough named an SEO and operations editor

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Head of Curation and Platforms Coleen O’Lear and SEO and Operations Editor Bryan Flaherty:

We are thrilled to announce that Matt Clough is joining The Washington Post as an SEO and operations editor. In this role, Matt will create strategies to expand audiences through search, partner with reporting teams around the newsroom to amplify our best work, and help expand the newsroom’s understanding of SEO, recirculation and digital best practices.

Matt comes to us from the Post and Courier in South Carolina, where he led growth and audience strategies for the Charleston-based newspaper’s statewide expansion. In that role, he performed content audits and trained newsrooms in Columbia, Greenville and Myrtle Beach on digital best practices including headline writing, SEO and how to use data to inform coverage decisions. Before that, he led the paper’s audience team, which during his tenure earned South Carolina Press Association awards for best use of social media and innovation.

Matt’s career has been rooted in understanding and serving digital audiences and creating products to reach them, which has included helping launch newsletters such as Holy City How-To, a guide for new residents moving to Charleston, and Hurricane Wire, a pop-up newsletter providing weekly and breaking news updates during hurricane season. He also wrote the famed Bubba Gump Shrimp tweet that became the basis for a Mashable article on climate change existential dread.

After earning bachelor’s degrees in journalism and English from the University of Kansas in 2017, he was a Dow Jones editing intern at the Kansas City Star before joining the Post and Courier.

In his spare time, Matt enjoys running, swimming and reading. A proud Kansan, Matt can be found every Sunday in the fall cheering on his beloved Kansas City Chiefs.

Please join us in welcoming Matt. He starts Monday.