Find Your Mentor

Ariel Zirulnick is director of news experimentation at LAist. She works at the intersection of engagement, editorial, product, and revenue strategy, exploring new, sustainable ways to serve LAist’s audiences and the broader community.

Prior to LAist, Ariel led the Membership in News Fund and Membership Guide at the Membership Puzzle Project, a global public research project studying membership models in news. As the director of the fund, she provided financial runway and venture support to newsrooms experimenting with membership.

She is passionate about doing journalism with communities and building systems that make that sustainable. She is a sustainability analyst with LION Publishers, and an instructor with the News Product Alliance’s News Product Management Certificate Program and Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program.

She’s an alumna of CUNY’s Executive Program in News Innovation and Leadership, Poynter Women’s Leadership Academy, and Miami Fellows.

On the newsroom side of things, Ariel can help with audience research, applying audience insights to editorial and product strategy, systems and workflows to support engagement, membership, and creating opportunities for experimentation in your organization. She coaches small, mostly local publishers with LION but works in a large, legacy organization herself, so she can offer advice across organizations of all sizes.

In the journalism support space, she can offer advice on designing venture support for newsrooms, building knowledge communities around a subject, and actionable research.

She’s also happy to talk to anyone about windy career paths and creating new roles for yourself.