Hal Koss

Chicago-based editor and writer with a decade of experience in storytelling, strategy, and building stuff audiences love. I’ve shaped thousands of articles, led high-performing teams, and launched editorial products and projects from the ground up.

About

I’m an editor, writer, and content strategist. I’ve served as senior editor at Atlas Obscura, a travel media company where I led the strategy and team behind the site’s place-based editorial products, including itineraries, guides, and a user-generated database of 30,000 amazing places.Before that, I spent several years at Built In, a media-meets-hiring platform serving the tech and startup world. I began as a reporter covering marketing and technology. Later, as senior associate editor, I managed and edited a team of writers, launched a successful SEO-focused updates program, and made sure our content was both high-performing and actually useful to readers.My work has also appeared in publications like OneZero, The Weekly Standard, and Bright Wall/Dark Room, where I’ve written about tech, culture, and film.Somewhere along the way, I grew a film-focused TikTok account to 13k+ followers and 1M+ likes, and before that built a satirical Twitter account that, at its peak, had 18k+ followers.The through-line: I’m obsessed with figuring out what audiences love.

Selected Stories

Why Aren’t Social Media Managers More Respected? (Built In, 2021)
Inside Pandora’s Voice-First Ad Experiment (Built In, 2020)
In Defense of Selfies (OneZero, 2019)
Bubble-Gum Happiness (The Weekly Standard, 2018)
Don’t Eat Your Neighbors (Bright Wall/Dark Room, 2017)

Testimonials

TK

Selected Stories

Stories Edited

Selected Stories

Stories Edited

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