Lauren Everitt on Okta's Newsroom-Driven Content Strategy

Aug 12, 2025

In this engaging discussion, Lauren Everitt, Director of the newsroom at Okta, shares her expertise in transforming content teams into dynamic editorial engines. She emphasizes a 'story first, channel second' approach and introduces the concept of 'second-day coverage.' Lauren discusses blending executive insights with customer narratives, while also using AI to enhance but not replace the human touch in content creation. Her experiences at Slack and her journalistic background lend a unique perspective on storytelling in the tech industry.

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INSIGHT

Journalism Trains Storytelling Instincts

Journalists bring an instinct for narrative and the 'money quote' that marketers often lack.
Lauren Everitt says that storytelling hunches are harder to teach than marketing tactics.

ANECDOTE

Reporting In Southern And East Africa

Lauren Everitt spent months reporting across South Africa, Rwanda, and Kenya and ran a career magazine as a sandbox for learning content and promotion.
She learned to test distribution, measure performance, and iterate quickly in that early, scrappy environment.

ANECDOTE

From Rwanda To Slack's Content Team

After Rwanda, Lauren applied to Slack because she loved the product and secured an editor role through an editing test and interviews.
She describes joining Slack pre-IPO and the experience as a wild, formative ride.

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How to turn an enterprise content team into a true newsroom? In this episode, Lauren Everitt explains how she built Okta’s in-house editorial engine on journalism-grade storytelling, data-driven analysis, and hard results. She shares her “story first, channel second” philosophy, the team’s unique “second-day coverage” approach, and the guardrails that keep 6,000 employees on brand.

You’ll learn how Okta blends executive insights, threat intelligence, and customer stories into high-impact content, and why they bet on lean, high-touch video. Lauren also shows how they use AI to speed up their processes while humans keep the final say. You’ll leave with a clear plan to scale content, guard quality, and prove real business value.

👤 About Our Guest: Lauren Everitt

Lauren Everitt is the Director of Content Marketing at Okta, where she leads a cross-functional team running one of the sharpest content engines. She leads Okta’s flagship "Businesses at Work" report. The ten-year study, which tracks app use at more than 18,000 companies, proves her knack for turning raw data into compelling stories.

Lauren mixes a reporter’s eye with enterprise skills. She built content programs during Slack’s rapid growth and its acquisition by Salesforce, and earlier reported across Africa and the US. That mix of fieldwork, scale, and data fluency now fuels content that earns trust and drives growth.

📻 About This Season of the Animalz Podcast: Enterprise Content Marketing

This season on the Animalz Podcast, we’re pulling back the corporate curtain to show you how the largest, most complex B2B SaaS teams actually get content out the door. Our mission: demystify these hidden machines and reveal what it really takes to run content at scale.

Hear from content leaders of some of the biggest names in SaaS sharing the systems they've built, the battles they've fought, and the lessons they've learned along the way.

⏳ Timestamps

00:00 – Intro: Why content engines stay mysterious
03:12 – Career path: Journalism to Slack to Okta
11:35 – The Reader: Her empathy playbook
14:46 – Storytelling Beats tactics
24:38 – Proving value and winning headcount
25:33 – Businesses at Work: Data into stories
27:03 – Tapping internal experts
30:41 – Second-day coverage for CISOs and CIOs
33:55 – Executive Exchange: Filming thought, skipping legal bottlenecks
37:18 – AI speeds prep, humans finish
38:22 – Workflow: AI draft, expert polish
43:19 – Voice training at scale
47:15 – Follow Lauren and Okta

🌐 Mentioned Links & Resources

The Reeder (Devin Reid) (01:58): Lauren Everitt’s go-to newsletter for audience empathy and voice inspiration in content creation.
Content Marketing Institute (02:19): An example of strong writing quality in the content marketing space.
Minuscule (02:34): A personal media pick: short, dialogue-free animated stories about insects.
Tim’s Africa Documentary Project (10:58): An early-2000s web series filmed and edited in Africa, capturing a first-time visitor’s perspective through weekly on-the-spot storytelling.
Businesses at Work Report (15:02): Okta’s decade-long flagship data report, now managed by the newsroom team.
Okta Secure Identity Commitment (16:05): The company-wide initiative that guides newsroom content themes after a security incident.
Executive Exchange (17:16): Okta’s short-form C-suite video interview series, sharing insights from industry leaders.
Oktane (23:14): Okta’s annual flagship event, with 2024 coverage featuring broadcast-style video recaps.
Jasper (27:28): The main AI writing assistant for the content team, helping personalize assets at scale.
Okta University (30:54): The internal training platform enforcing voice-and-tone standards and AI-governance modules.
Wickstrom Dairies video (32:51): Slack customer story filmed on a Northern California dairy farm, showing how the farm coordinates milking and operations entirely through Slack.

Connect with Lauren Everitt to follow her work and see how Okta’s newsroom-driven content engine operates in real time.

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