CAPITAL: What are your major responsibilities as social media lead? What is your day-to-day like?

LORENZ: My responsibilities are pretty varied. My No. 1 goal is to promote and edit Daily Mail editorial content on established and emerging social platforms.

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I define and manage our editorial approach to new social platforms, oversee a team of social media editors who curate and edit our stories for social media platforms (around the clock across multiple time zones), I identify digital trends and bring them to the attention of our publisher and product team and I develop strategies to foster and grow Mail Online community engagement and readership across social networks.

I also work closely with our tech team to develop innovative social integration across all platforms and devices. I provide editorial judgement on sharing mechanisms and work with a team of developers to improve social functionality of our internal systems and technologies (i.e. building a social dashboard into our analytics system, improving our CMS, adding the ability to embed media from social networks, adding social headline field, etc). I also offer POVs on social media related platform changes, API releases, and broad trends in emerging technology.

CAPITAL: Did you start with the Mail in a managerial role? Did you ever run the feeds yourself?

LORENZ: No, I actually started at the Mail as the U.S. social media editor. They initially wanted someone to just edit their U.S. social feeds. So I ran the @DailyMailUS twitter feed all day and managed to build it up from 450 to over 15k followers within a few months. I realized that there was no broadly defined social strategy within the company or cohesiveness to the way we approached social media and emerging networks. I soon took over managing all social media accounts, U.S. and global, until we brought on some social media editors to help.

I still cover shifts and oversee the feeds very closely, but our team of social media editors does the majority of publishing (so I can sleep). I do dictate the majority of what goes out on our Facebook pages though. We have shared Google docs that I populate every morning with stories I think will do well on the platform and I manage it closely.

As my role grew I started to work on more tech and product stuff since it's where my interests lie. It's also important that there's someone thinking about everything as a whole. Social media isn't a silo, it affects every area of the site. You can't just hire a bunch of people to tweet in a corner and expect your social traffic to rise.

CAPITAL: When you ran the feeds, was it difficult to get into the voice of the Mail? Did you ever edit out American pop culture references that an English audience might not get?

LORENZ: The global nature of our audience is something we definitely think about regularly. The Daily Mail is the largest English language newspaper site in the world, and we didn't get there by appealing only to a U.K. audience and no one else. I think it's important to maintain some of our British heritage on our global social channels (we spell things with 'U's on our main Facebook page), but we also try to tailor the stories to fit our audience depending on the platform and channel. We constantly sell the same stories four different ways depending on the channel we're publishing to and the audience there.

It's not as hard as you think though, most of the stories on Daily Mail are just great stories you may not have seen anywhere else, they appeal to anyone anywhere. I've found that people love good stories above all else, even if there are some weird/geo-specific pop culture references in there

CAPITAL: Mail Online is obviously hugely popular around the world. Do you get the sense that a lot of Americans know what it is? Do you feel like there's an opportunity to shape that perception?

LORENZ: The thing is, the Daily Mail is huge in America. We're the second biggest news site in the U.S. We recorded 32.3 million visits in the U.S. in April 2014, more than ABC News, USA Today, Washington Post, LA Times and the Wall Street Journal.

That being said, there is huge opportunity for growth in the states. We opened New York and LA offices in the past couple years and currently there are over 100 editorial staff members in our NYC newsroom.

I don't get the sense that a lot of Americans don't know what the Daily Mail is, but I do think there's an opportunity to shape their perception. Especially with a younger audience. This is something I'm heavily focused on. I try to find out what networks and platforms younger readers are using, research how they're using technology and social media, and try to introduce them to the Daily Mail.

CAPITAL: You’ve previously worked in corporate public relations and marketing, as well as social media strategy. Did you always intend to get into journalism eventually?

LORENZ: I've had a lot of jobs: I dressed Kanye West as a public relations assistant at Ferragamo, I helped manage communications for John Kerry's presidential campaign, I've tweeted for a condiment brand, sold window replacements door-to-door and wrote copy on brochures for a chemotherapy drug. I believe all of these jobs have helped me in my job today. There are a lot of thirsty NYU journalism majors out there who have resumes stacked with media internships (I was an editorial intern at Harper's Bazaar, so I'm sort of guilty), but these internships don't give you perspective on the world. I think that—especially in journalism—the more people you can relate to and understand the better.

I've always been really passionate about the news and fascinated with the way people consume it. If I had had more confidence in my writing early on I would have tried to become a reporter. And to be honest, I've started writing more articles for the site recently and I really, really love it. I was scared to put my name on things for a while because I thought everything I wrote was awful. I think that's why I gravitated toward strategy and copywriting earlier in my career. Eventually I realized everyone is awful starting out, 90 percent of the Internet is awful, and the only way to get better is to try. I feel like I've found a home in journalism/news now and I can't imagine ever leaving it.