For two years, I edited MetroTech, WMATA's agency-wide internal publication. About a hundred weekly issues, reaching a workforce of 13,000 across one of the country's largest transit agencies. Most issues carried original reporting on Digital Modernization, the function responsible for the most consequential transformation work at the agency. Open rates climbed from 17% to 27% over that period.
The thesisUse journalism as a change management tool
Every article was a deliberate choice about which moment in a transformation needed celebrating, which needed governance, which needed translation, and which needed forecasting. Editorial wasn't decoration on Digital Modernization. It was part of how DM moved a 75-year-old agency through change.
DM at WMATA wasn't a single project. It was a continuous flow of new tools, new policies, new risks, and new ways of working, all of it landing on employees who had already lived through Kronos, MetroTime, and a dozen other system transitions. Generic internal communications wouldn't move that audience. They had seen too much of it.
What worked instead was original reporting. I interviewed subject matter experts directly. I built recurring sources across DM, Cybersecurity, Station Planning, Rail Transportation, and beyond. The publication employees opened was the one they expected to be worth their time.
The editorial rangeSix modes for six different jobs
Across two years, the publication used six distinct editorial modes, each matched to what the moment required.
Celebration. The Customer Service Tablet Initiative put hand-held devices in the hands of Station Managers across the Green Line. I framed it as a milestone story tied to a 2024 Sustainability Challenge Award nomination, with cross-departmental collaboration as the lede, not the technology. 300 sheets of paper saved per day was the kind of concrete detail that made the story stick.
Profile. The GIS Atlas 2.0 was a Station Planning–DM collaboration on the second-edition Pedshed and Bikeshed Atlas. I built the article around the two experts doing the work, a Senior Planner and a GIS Enterprise Architect, letting their voices carry the substance. The article elevated expertise across two departments without privileging either.
Policy translation. When DM's AI Task Force produced a governance framework for generative AI, the raw document was compliance language. I translated it into four operational sections: Collaboration and Approval, Content Management, Reporting and Ethical Use, Data Security. All written so a 13,000-person workforce could read, internalize, and act on the protocols.
Campaign integration. Data Privacy Week 2025 needed more than coverage. I anchored the article in a named executive voice from the Cybersecurity team, framed it around a forward-looking news hook, and built it around calls to action driving employees to specific lobbies on specific days. The article didn't report on the campaign. It was part of it.
Crisis recovery as capability demonstration. When the MetroAlerts system collapsed catastrophically due to a vendor failure, DM rebuilt it in-house on Microsoft Power Platform and Azure. I covered the recovery to position DM not as a department that recovered from a vendor's failure, but as a function strong enough to absorb the failure and build something better.
External event as internal lesson. When the Central Contra Costa Transit Authority disclosed a data breach, I used the incident as a teaching moment: Steps We Can Take to Avoid Being Hit Next. The article borrowed urgency from a real peer-agency breach to drive the security behaviors the Cybersecurity team was already promoting, with a concrete checklist employees could act on the same day.
The signalThe numbers reflected the choices
Over two years, open rates climbed from 17% to 27%. That's a ten-point lift on a 13,000-person internal audience, during a period of significant organizational change and persistent change fatigue.
The lift reflects editorial choices, not luck. Original reporting over recycled press releases. Named experts over agency-speak. Structural variety matched to strategic moments. Forward-looking framing on technical work that other publications would have buried. And consistent voice across roughly a hundred issues, in a function most agencies don't recognize as strategic until someone runs it well. Internal editorial for transformation.
This is the work.