#WeLeadComms: Justin Joffe

New York-based Justin Joffe is today’s #WeLeadComms honoree.

Joffe is an SME on all things internal and integrated communications. Like many comms leaders, he started as a journalist, covering the arts, PR and media industries for the Observer, PR News, Muck Rack, and AdMonsters. Trade beats put him in rooms with the people who shaped how organizations communicate, before he fully understood that’s what he was witnessing..

That changed at Ragan Communications, where he most recently spent five years as Editor-in-Chief and Senior Director of Learning and Development Content. A job that was editorial on paper meant interviewing, advising, and building learning curriculums for VP and C-suite communications leaders at Fortune 500 companies across industries. He’s built frameworks for executive communications, AI governance models, reputation management, you name it. The way he tells it, being a reporter and editor gave him a master class, but being a strategic advisor taught him how to build one.

This fall Joffe joins the University of Florida as a subject matter expert, redesigning the Introduction to Audiences curriculum for UF’s College of Journalism and Communications’ Master’s Program. He also teaches Design Thinking and Innovation as an adjunct at St. Francis College. The classroom keeps pulling him back for a reason. He thinks the next generation of communications leaders needs to be fortified for what’s coming as automation narrows the creative lane and consolidation shrinks who controls the message. 

In addition to teaching, Joffe writes about the intersection of arts and communication on his Substack, The Tardigrade Times, and his LinkedIn newsletter, The Commtrarian.

The belief under all this work is that the most strategic communicators aren’t just engineering for the audience: they’re also driving behavior, and doing it responsibly. This means creating conditions for audiences to move toward something rather than pushing them there. It means engineering the pull, not just the push. It’s a distinction he thinks the field doesn’t make often enough.

Joffe has bylines in Newsweek, Vulture, Vice, Flaunt, and many more niche arts magazines. He holds an M.A. from CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism and a B.F.A. from Emerson. In 2022 he appeared as an expert commentator on “Ye: It All Falls Down,” an episode of Impact x Nightline, ABC News’ long-running investigative news program on Hulu. 

Away from the work, he’s a theme park historian, roller coaster enthusiast, and merch collector of arguably questionable discipline. He’s also building out a home tiki bar, which his friends have stopped questioning entirely.

If any of this resonates, he’s always down to compare notes.

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