Fashion

Vogue names Irishwoman Anne-Marie Tomchak as digital director

Condé Nast’s British fashion title recruits former Mashable editor and RTÉ journalist

Anne-Marie Tomchak: the Irish journalist will be responsible for editorial content on British Vogue’s online platforms

Deirdre McQuillan's face
Deirdre McQuillan
Fri Mar 22 2019 - 10:18

The Irish journalist and broadcaster Anne-Marie Tomchak has been appointed digital director of British Vogue, a new role that gives her responsibility for editorial content across all of the fashion magazine’s online platforms.

Tomchak will report to Edward Enninful, British Vogue’s editor-in-chief, and Simon Gresham Jones, chief digital officer at Condé Nast Britain, the magazine’s publisher.

Her appointment follows that last year of another Irishwoman, her friend Samantha Barry, as editor-in-chief of Glamour magazine's US edition. "She's a fantastic journalist", " a huge talent" and a "brilliant hire", Barry posted on Instagram.

Formerly UK editor of the digital media site Mashable, Tomchak oversaw many stories that went viral, including a record-breaking 1.3 million visitors on Apple News in a single day. In 2013, in another former role, she launched BBC Trending, the British broadcaster’s social-media investigative unit. At the Web Summit in Dublin in 2014 she spoke about social media in war and conflict. “I was always socially aware,” she told an interviewer last year. “As a journalist I think it’s our responsibility.”

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From a farm in Drumlish, in Co Longford, Tomchak comes from a family of well-known musicians. Una Healy of The Saturdays is a cousin, and the country singer Declan Nerney is an uncle.

After a degree at Dublin Institute of Technology, during which she also took night classes in music and played in an orchestra, she freelanced at RTÉ 2FM, on late-night shifts at the radio station. It was the start of five years at the broadcaster, including a period working with Sean O’Rourke and, later, making television documentaries, including Will a Robot Steal My Job? and Cloud Control: Who Owns Your Data?

After joining the BBC, in 2010, she met an American producer, David Tomchak, there; they married six years ago. He is now digital editor-in-chief of the London Evening Standard.

Tomchak, who is now 36, once explained: “I feel like I fully became myself – which is a very proud Longford woman – when I moved to London. I have not lost some of the things that make me who I am, a girl from Longford with traditional values and proud of them.”

Her new job, according to Enninful, “will be pivotal in ensuring that British Vogue remains at the forefront of engaging and diverse digital content”.