Jake Cox
News product manager. I work on the things an audience touches — games, newsletters, feeds — and the measurement, email and personalization plumbing underneath them.
I'm a product manager at Michigan Public through The Magpie Project, working across audio and podcasts, personalization, analytics, newsletters and games. Before that, I sent Block Club Chicago's newsletters to 130,000 readers and ran digital at The DePaulia. The reporting I did along the way won four Peter Lisagor Awards and earned two Chicago/Midwest Emmy nominations.
Available for full-time & contract work →Featured project
During Operation Midway Blitz, I launched a WhatsApp channel that put Block Club's verified immigration coverage on the app Chicago's immigrant communities already used. It grew to 3,200+ subscribers in six weeks, and the Knight Foundation, the American Journalism Project and Medill all wrote about it.
Read the case studyReporting
5Civic, arts and LGBTQ+ stories from Block Club and The DePaulia.
Newsletters
3Editions I wrote and built at Block Club, where I sent to 130,000 people and watched what happened.
Experience
- Manage product across five areas: audio, video and podcasts; personalization and recommendations; analytics; newsletters; and games
- Own the roadmap for an unannounced game product built with an outside dev partner: scoping, launch tracking, content pipeline, QA and the call on what ships at launch versus after
- Built newsletter and Apple News infrastructure: a redesigned Mailchimp template, production SOPs, a UTM taxonomy, and ANF article templates with custom CTAs
- Turn reporting and stakeholder meetings into scoped, owned work in Notion, and run the tracking that keeps launch dates honest
- Launched and grew a WhatsApp broadcast channel to 3,200+ subscribers in six weeks, delivering verified immigration coverage to communities most affected by federal enforcement; written up by the Knight Foundation, American Journalism Project and Medill, and cited by Reuters
- Produced and published daily newsletters to 130,000+ subscribers, making real-time story selection and placement calls against deadline
- Analyzed open rates, CTR and CTOR across daily sends to A/B test subject lines and optimize story hierarchy for engagement lift
- Reported breaking news and enterprise features across civic, arts, LGBTQ+ and weather beats for a nonprofit hyperlocal newsroom
- Worked with editors and reporters to rework editions as coverage priorities shifted during the day
- Led data analysis, fact-checking and structural editing on two long-form investigations produced with NBC 5 Chicago's I-Team
- Built a Python web scraper to extract Illinois GA witness slips, surfacing opposition patterns that powered an investigative report
- Developed an interactive news app showing bettors how Illinois' per-wager sports betting tax hits them
- Packaged investigative findings for multi-platform publication and produced vertical video for Facebook, Instagram and YouTube
- Both reports won Chicago Headline Club Peter Lisagor Awards and earned 2026 Chicago/Midwest Emmy nominations
- Grew Instagram followers 53% (+2,000) and drove 250K+ organic views by rebuilding the social strategy around short-form video, platform-native formats and a repeatable content workflow that outlasted my tenure
- Directed live breaking news coverage, including a student encampment live blog that won the Peter Lisagor Award for deadline writing
- Led a digital staff of 25 across web, social and newsletter, setting editorial priorities and coaching reporters on deadline
- Relaunched the paper's newsletter, social and search strategy; grew newsletter subscribers to nearly 1,000
Selected projects
Recognition
- College Student Production: Sports
- College Student Production: Public Affairs/Community Service
- Chicago/Midwest NATAS
- Deadline Writing (Small Newsroom)
- Best Education Reporting (Student)
- Best Politics & Government Reporting (Student)
- Best Sports Reporting (Student)
- Chicago Headline Club
- 4th Place, Best News Story
- 6th Place, Best of Show Website
- HM Breaking News Story
- HM Best In-Depth News Story
- HM Social Media Reporting
Education
Graduated June 2026
Coursework: Data journalism, GIS and spatial analysis, media law, investigative reporting
Skills
WhatsApp Channel Launch
When federal immigration agents arrived in Chicago for Operation Midway Blitz in fall 2025, Block Club's reporters published more than 230 immigration stories in three months. Months earlier, I'd pitched WhatsApp as a way to reach Spanish-speaking readers on the Southwest Side. The raids made it urgent.
Pew found Hispanic Americans use WhatsApp at 46%, far above other groups, and it mirrors how many residents already organize: family threads, group chats, local broadcasts. A broadcast channel is one-way, so readers get the news without it turning into a group chat.
- Set the channel up on a newsroom phone so it wasn't tied to one staffer's number, with editor review before every post
- Settled on a format of one to three already-published stories plus a strong photo, which one person could build in minutes
- Only shared reporting that was verified and live on the site, and didn't promise readers more security than our other platforms
- Posted daily at the height of enforcement, then a few times a week as things settled
- Promoted it through our newsletters, a launch story and social
WhatsApp only shows 30 days of reach and follower data, and subscribers are anonymous. I'd build our own tracking into the links from day one. I'd also set a recurring reminder once we dropped below daily posting, because a channel that isn't part of the daily workflow slips.
The American Journalism Project, Northwestern's Medill School and the Knight Foundation each wrote about the channel, and Reuters mentioned it in a report on student journalists covering ICE.
Newsletter Production
- Wrote and edited daily editions, packaging reporters' stories for people reading on a phone in line for coffee
- A/B tested subject lines against open rate, CTR and CTOR, and kept what worked instead of what sounded clever
- Made the hierarchy calls: what leads, what gets a callout, what context a reader needs before the link
- Built custom designs for large features and original service, arts and civic pieces
Sports Betting Tax Calculator
Illinois added a per-wager tax on online sports bets. A charge on every bet is hard to picture from a story alone, so the calculator lets readers see what it would cost them based on how they bet.
- Led data analysis and fact-checking on the investigation with NBC 5 Chicago's I-Team
- Built a calculator that lets a bettor enter how they bet and see what the tax takes
- Shipped it alongside the story so readers could go straight from the reporting to their own numbers
The investigation won a Chicago Headline Club Peter Lisagor Award and was nominated for a 2026 Chicago/Midwest Emmy in College Student Production: Sports.
DePaulia Instagram Growth
- Created short-form videos and grid posts for breaking news, explainers and feature stories
- Adapted stories for platform-specific formats as industry standards changed
- Built a repeatable content workflow for a student newsroom that outlasted my tenure
