When Sarah Firshein first joined Tripadvisor in 2022, she said she only had a "vague understanding" of what a deck was. In her nearly 20 years in traditional media roles, she had spent her career reporting, writing, and editing, not doing corporate tasks like building slides for meetings.
Now as the travel guidance platform's Global Head of Content, she leads a team responsible for editorial; sponsored, advertorial, and thought leadership content; content for major brand franchises; and content emails. In this role, she shapes how the brand voice shows up to users all over the world.
When she got the chance to join Tripadvisor to build a content organization "from the ground up," she knew it would be a hard one to pass up. She was excited about the opportunity to create a content roadmap, launch newsletters and sponsorships, and figure out how to get great content in front of the right audiences.
Sarah shared more about her career journey and how she has adapted her skills to the brand journalism world in a recent interview with the Stacker Dispatch. She also shared some advice for other journalists looking to make a leap into the corporate world for the first time.
Learning the corporate side of content
Sarah's time in traditional media included roles as a travel columnist at The New York Times and in editorial leadership at Travel + Leisure. She also launched the national edition of Curbed.
Sarah said her team structure at Tripadvisor might look familiar to someone coming from a similar editorial environment — there are lead editors, freelance editors, and a bunch of photo and production creatives. The team sits within Wanderlab, Tripadvisor's in-house creative content studio.
They lead content for brand franchises like the annual Tripadvisor Trendcast, which highlights the biggest trends in travel for the year. But they're also doing a lot of editorial work behind the scenes, like updating tourism pages and itinerary coverage or working on sponsored content series.
Any time the editorial team launches a new project, they work in lockstep with other teams like the design team or the B2B marketing team, Sarah said. Working cross-functionally to push content projects forward was something that she had to learn and continually practice when starting out in the brand journalism world.
A big element is understanding how to access the resources you need and learning how to refine ideas with other teams' input — especially when your content project doesn’t top their list of priorities.
"So much of it is knocking on doors and bringing things to the table," she said. To build relationships in a corporate environment, she said, don't be afraid to send a Slack message or schedule a meeting to learn more about others’ goals.
"The article publishing cadence, our content roadmap and thinking of how we want to tackle this destination or this potential beat — that felt so organic to me," she continued. "It was navigating a big corporation that has been an interesting professional and creative challenge. That has been an area of real growth for me."
Getting input from a wider swath of people in different functions has tended to yield better results, Sarah said.
"I certainly come from an environment where it's like 30 editors in a room. That's great, and that yields incredible ideas, but it's also really interesting to be in a room where it's like two editors and four people from a product team, and three people from design, and two people from creative strategy," she continued. "I think it yields more interesting, more feasible ideas."
Frame your work like a story
When it comes to landing a brand journalism role, Sarah said it's all about the story you can tell about your career.
"There's one story where it's like, 'I edit a lot of stories.' That's one way of saying what your job is," she said. "The other way of saying what your job is: You shaped a body of work. Maybe you launched a rubric or a franchise. Maybe you helped establish the title or publication's authority on an industry."
"It's always about finding the bigger story — what is the broad frame on what you've done in your career?” she said.
Being able to tell a compelling story about your own work also shows potential employers that you have the chops to tell their story, too.
"If you can frame up your own work and your LinkedIn and your resume, that actually goes a long way in showcasing how you would frame it up for whatever brand you end up going to," she said.
For Sarah, one of the most exciting parts of working in brand journalism is the range of creative work it offers.
"When you're working on an awesome client campaign, that's a unique creative opportunity. When you're working on an organic editorial piece of content, that's something different," she said.
"It's so nice to be able to flex your creative thinking in these different ways."
Madeline Stone is the Content Manager for Editorial & Insights at Stacker. She was previously a longtime business and tech journalist at Business Insider and a content and communications consultant for startups.
