Product Manager, Email & SMS

About Chicago Public Media

Chicago Public Media is one of the nation’s largest local nonprofit news organizations. Home to WBEZ 91.5FM, the Chicago Sun-Times, and Vocalo. Chicago Public Media reaches more than 3.3 million people weekly across broadcast, print, and digital platforms. As a mission-driven organization, we aspire to be the most trusted news source Chicagoans turn to for understanding the people, events, and ideas shaping our community.

Chicago Public Media is a 100% community-funded newsroom powered by nearly 97,000 members whose support makes our journalism possible. This sustained community investment helped drive nationally recognized work in 2025, including 29 awards from esteemed organizations, including the Public Media Journalists Association, the Edward R. Murrow Awards, and the National Association of Black Journalists.

We believe independent journalism is essential to a healthy democracy and that access to objective, fact-based news is a right for every citizen. We serve the public interest by creating diverse content that informs and enriches our community, supported by a dedicated staff of approximately 250 professionals.

For more information, please see the Chicago Public Media Annual Report.

The Opportunity

Chicago Public Media is seeking a strategic, collaborative Product Manager to help lead the organization’s email, newsletter, and SMS strategy across WBEZ, the Chicago Sun-Times, Vocalo, and

Email and SMS are essential ways we build relationships with audiences, connect people with journalism and community experiences, and advance goals in membership, circulation, engagement, and revenue. This role will partner with editorial, audience, and business teams to turn those goals into effective products and audience journeys while building a coherent strategy across Chicago Public Media.

The Product Manager will combine product strategy, platform expertise, audience insight, lifecycle thinking, and experimentation. They will also help define the emerging email and newsletter strategy for

What You'll Do

• Develop and maintain an organization-wide roadmap for email, newsletters, and SMS, balancing immediate needs with opportunities for audience growth, engagement, conversion, retention, and revenue.
• Partner with editorial, audience, marketing, membership, circulation, events, analytics, technology, and business teams to translate their goals into effective audience products.
• Help define ’s email and newsletter strategy, including audience needs, product opportunities, lifecycle journeys, and measures of success.
• Facilitate cross-functional planning and decision-making, bringing clarity to priorities and tradeoffs.

• Serve as a central resource for email and SMS platforms, helping teams select and implement solutions that meet their needs.
• Oversee platform configuration and standards, including templates, lists, segments, permissions, integrations, automation, naming conventions, and workflows.
• Develop audience journeys across acquisition, onboarding, engagement, conversion, retention, recapture, and reactivation.
• Identify opportunities for segmentation, personalization, dynamic content, and automation that create more relevant audience experiences.
• Help teams coordinate cadence and audience overlap to reduce duplication and subscriber fatigue.

• Establish goals and measures tied to engagement, conversion, revenue, retention, and audience value.
• Monitor list health, deliverability, journey performance, and other key indicators and work with teams to address opportunities and problems.
• Develop a continuous testing program, including A/B testing, send-time optimization,…