Smooth Operator Season 1 Episode 1. Jackie Goldstein, VP Commerce, NY Post.

In episode one Blake Saunders of Methuselah Advisors, talks with Jackie Goldstein about moving traditional publishers into commerce. Goldstein is the Vice President of Commerce at the New York Post.

Before taking her role at the New York Post, she worked as the Senior Director of Commerce for Vox Media, a position she moved into after working as the Director of Editorial Operations there. At Vox, Goldstein focused on finding opportunities in commerce and in podcasting. Looking back, Goldstein says her efforts were less focused on diversifying revenue and more about recognizing elements of the business that weren’t being optimized. 

Once she started learning about and seeing the money flow in from podcasts and commerce, her view “totally changed.”  Since then, Goldstein said she works to “open the door” with the editorial side of the businesses and prove that new commerce ideas aren’t a threat.

That requires framing sales as engagement KPI, she said, which often proves compelling to editorial writers who than then see how powerful the content was to the audience. 

After building commerce and podcast businesses at Vox, Goldstein was excited to take what she’d learned, view it with fresh eyes, and launch commerce and podcasts with a large, established publication like the New York Post. 

“We’ve been able to set it up where there’s the editorial side and there’s the business side,” she said. “There are some dotted lines, but we just have the process set really well for our success.”

Most of the affiliate content lives in a separate section called “The Shopping Section.”

No matter the newsroom, getting support from veteran writers and editors requires a strong vision, transparency and ongoing communication about revenue, referrals and how commerce efforts help the overall business. 

“I feel like the way that door opens wider is through more good examples and case studies – things you can point to… to show some success.”

Smooth Operator is made possible by our partner OneCTA, a platform that makes it easy for publishers to grow their affiliate revenue with optimized call to actions.

Head to OneCTA.io to create your free account, explore libraries of popular ad templates, and build custom experiences proven to grow publisher revenue today.

Smooth Operator is a podcast where we explore the business of commerce content. Commerce content is emerging as a key driver of revenue for media and publishing companies. But, best practices for building the operations, sales, technology and culture of a commerce content organizations is still evolving.