Contact Name

Kat Lucchesi

Contact Phone

573 256 9221

Contact Email

lucchesik@missouri.edu

Speaker(s) Information

In his nearly seven years at The Washington Post, Travis Lyles has constantly led new initiatives and been a major part of transformation in the newsroom. In 2017, he was handed the keys to The Post’s main Instagram account. Since then, he has not only changed the strategy and made it into one of the premiere news accounts on the app, he pitched, hired and founded The Post’s first ever Instagram team in 2021, which is now a team of eight. 

 

Early on as the account’s lead editor, Travis pioneered a new type of content on the platform, focusing on shareable posts that prioritized simple, text-based headlines. The Post was, at the time, the first major news account adding text to photos — a content style that you now see across the industry.

 

Through the addition of text and multi-slide posts, The Post’s main account has grown from 600,000 followers to nearly more than 6.8 million in five years. Travis also founded multiple sub-brand accounts under The Post’s umbrella, including @coveringpolitics, @postclimate and @poststyle. Because of he and his team’s work, The Post’s main account won back-to-back Webby awards in 2020 and 2021. It was a finalist in 2022, before winning two more in 2023 for best in news and politics and best vertical video. 

 

This streak of innovation is something that Travis has brought to his current role leading the social team as Deputy Director, social, off-platform curation. In 2022, he became The Post’s youngest ever senior editor, championing strategic growth of the newsroom’s expanding social portfolio.

 

Before The Post, Travis was a social editor at The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Va. and at Business insider in Manhattan.