Josephine Andrews is Founder, The Thought Partnership. A founding member of Chief, past roles have included Executive Marketing Director of The Wall Street Journal.
Who is your digital hero?
Can it be a brand? Coming from the media world, I have enormous respect for reputable news organisations right now. It’s an incredibly demanding space, not only editorially but commercially and it is held up by passionate people who are determined to keep trustworthy information flowing.
My digital hero at the moment is The News Movement, because they are actively reimagining what a credible news brand can look and feel like for a new generation.
What have they done to win hero status in your eyes?
The News Movement is creating genuinely approachable news and lifestyle content that helps young people make sense of an increasingly complex world, without ever talking down to them.
By meeting audiences on the platforms they already live on and packaging stories in smart, digestible formats, they are rebuilding habits and trust among a generation that has often felt ignored or misled by traditional news brands.
How has their heroism helped drive digital?
The News Movement has shown that you can be both audience‑first and values‑driven in digital without compromising on quality journalism. By building a social‑native newsroom around younger behaviours and mobile formats, they are proving that credible news can thrive in the same feeds as creators and entertainment.
In doing so, they have created a blueprint for how to rebuild trust in a digital ecosystem that often rewards speed and outrage over nuance. Their work pushes the wider industry to rethink everything from storytelling formats to commercial models, so that “doing the right thing” for audiences becomes a source of growth, not a barrier to it.
What are the biggest challenges in digital we need another hero to solve?
Attention. Our attention is increasingly fragmented across platforms, formats and algorithms, it’s overwhelming. We also expect personalised, high‑quality content. It’s table stakes. We need heroes who can design digital experiences that respect people’s time and data, but still feel genuinely useful, engaging and even joyful.
The other major challenge is trust. Audiences, especially younger ones, are rightly sceptical of what they see and who is funding it. The next generation of digital heroes will be those who bake transparency, inclusion and accountability into products and storytelling from day one, rather than as an afterthought.
What is your most heroic personal achievement so far in digital?
My biggest achievement in digital is actually what could be seen as its polar opposite: IRL. But digital and events are now inseparable, they amplify each other and feed off each other and, at their best, turn a moment in a room into a long-tail of content, conversation and community. That’s the space The Thought Partnership lives in helping brands and agencies turn powerful, real‑world events into an engine for their content marketing and digital presence.
The standout chapter for me was the digital transformation of The Wall Street Journal’s Live Journalism events.
Overnight, we were challenged to reimagine what a WSJ‑calibre experience could look like online – not just “streaming a stage,” but creating a genuine sense of community, delivering value for sponsors, scaling globally and dramatically extending the life of the content. In 2020 we doubled audience numbers, diversified formats and we set a new benchmark internally for what live journalism could be in a digital‑first world.
It was a small yet mighty taskforce, we moved at pace, experimented hard and weren’t afraid to borrow from unexpected places, dating apps, gaming platforms, online learning environments, social feeds, anything that could help us make the experience more human and more interactive.
Sometimes tests failed, often they flew, and together we built something that felt genuinely new, not just a stopgap. That, to me, is the most heroic part proving that when you put curiosity, craft and a bit of bravery into the mix, digital can elevate live experiences rather than dilute them.
