media-executive
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Linda Yaccarino Keeps Choosing the Difficult Room
From television's bundle to X's permanent storm and now eMed, Linda Yaccarino has built a career by walking into industries at the moment their old rules stop working.
Edward Lastes Built a Billboard Company by Leaving the Local Operator in the Picture
The Fusion Media Group CEO spent years joining capital to local billboard know-how. His record suggests a durable operating idea: grow the platform without erasing the people who built it.
Edwin Eisendrath Keeps Choosing the Difficult Room
Across four decades, one Chicagoan has moved from classrooms to council chambers, public housing, patents, newspapers and radio. The job titles change. The recurring assignment is to enter a complicated institution and make it useful again.
Terry Kroeger Bought the Next Chapter Instead of Retiring Into the Last One
He started near the bottom of a newspaper company, kept sneakers under his desk for emergency lawn duty, and eventually ran Warren Buffett's newspaper group. Then Terry Kroeger traded the publisher's office for an Omaha agency with a future to write.
Naila Bhatti Has Built Brands in Every Kind of Weather
From a homegrown children's channel to cricket's loudest commercial stage, Naila Bhatti has made a career of turning complicated operations into brands people can see, buy and believe in.
John Loughlin Has Spent a Career Rebuilding the Container
From TV Guide to Texture to Zenfolio, John Loughlin keeps returning to the same difficult assignment: preserve what people value while rebuilding how it reaches them.
Alison Moore Built Her Career on the Next Screen. Now She’s Betting on the Room.
After helping television, publishing, music, and philanthropy find their next audience, Alison Moore is taking on a more intimate design problem: how senior women build power together when the old career ladder no longer fits.
Bimal Kapadia Is Building a Media Company That Knows Where Stories Travel
After two decades inside the machinery of sports media, Meadowlark’s CEO is betting that one sharp idea can move from a podcast to a documentary, a series, and a wider public conversation.
Anne Droste Sold the Channels Nobody Knew They Wanted
Before streaming made distribution look effortless, Anne E. Droste spent decades persuading gatekeepers, building unlikely partnerships and turning small networks into channels millions of homes could actually watch.
Shane Smith Built VICE Twice - Once Into an Empire, Then Back Into a Question
VICE began as a free Montreal magazine, became a multibillion-dollar wager on youth media, and collapsed under the weight of that wager. Its co-founder is back behind a microphone, chasing the one asset no bankruptcy court can sell: attention earned by curiosity.
The Marketer Fox Handed Its Streaming Future
He built subscriber machines at Hulu and FanDuel before the streaming wars got loud. Now he has to convince America to pay Fox directly.
Jes Wolfe Is Building the World Beyond the Bedtime Story
She took a storybook company into apps, audio, events, and women's sports. The operating idea is simple: confidence grows when girls can see more lives available to them.
John Skipper
John Skipper is an American media executive who co-founded Meadowlark Media in 2021 with broadcaster Dan Le Batard, building a sports-focused content studio around podcasts, documentaries and the 'Sports Explains the World' franchise. Best known as president of ESPN from 2012 to 2017, where he greenlit 30 for 30, Grantland, FiveThirtyEight and The Undefeated and negotiated multibillion-dollar rights deals, Skipper began his career in magazines at Rolling Stone before spending two decades at Disney. He later served as executive chairman of the streaming service DAZN and stepped back from day-to-day leadership at Meadowlark in 2025 while remaining on its board.
Janice Min
Janice Min is the CEO, editor-in-chief and co-owner of Ankler Media, the Hollywood insider newsletter-turned-media-company she built with Richard Rushfield starting in 2021. Before The Ankler, she spent two decades reshaping celebrity and entertainment coverage: as editor-in-chief of Us Weekly (2002-2009) she turned a struggling weekly into a cultural juggernaut, and as editorial director and later co-president of The Hollywood Reporter and Billboard she engineered one of the most celebrated print relaunches of the era. She has won an Emmy and multiple National Magazine Awards, and CNN named her one of the most consequential media figures of 2023.
Sarah Personette
Sarah Personette is the CEO of Puck, the journalist-owned media company often described as 'Vanity Fair for the Substack era.' She took the top job in January 2024 after a career spent on the revenue side of media's biggest platforms - head of ad sales and Chief Customer Officer at Twitter through its 2022 sale, VP of global business marketing at Facebook, COO of Refinery29, and U.S. president of Universal McCann. At Puck she is betting that journalists are the original influencers, fusing the financial incentives of the creator economy with old-school reporting rigor, and pushing the company toward profitability while expanding into fashion, sports, and live events.
Jed Jeong
Jed Jeong runs OnDemandKorea, the first and largest legal Korean streaming service in North America, and is CEO of KOOLi Inc. and Head of OTT at ODK Media. He turned a single legal Korean OTT service into a multinational Asian media hub spanning OnDemandKorea, OnDemandChina, OnDemandViet and OnDemandLatino, plus digital magazines, e-commerce, content metadata production and international content IP distribution across 36+ countries. A Daum veteran from Korea's early internet era, he now builds streaming for diaspora audiences who want their stories in their language, wherever they live.
Paul Slavin
Paul Slavin is the CEO of Skillshare, the New York online-learning marketplace, a role he stepped into in August 2025. He arrived by an unusual route: 33 years at ABC News, where he ran worldwide newsgathering, executive-produced World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, and collected a dozen Emmys and a Peabody before pivoting fully into digital. He went on to lead web video at Everyday Health, run the digital book publisher Open Road Integrated Media to profitability, advise on media M&A at Oaklins DeSilva+Phillips, and now steers a 30,000-class platform for creative learners and teachers worldwide.
Stephen Chao
Stephen Chao is the co-founder and CEO of WonderHowTo, the Santa Monica how-to video network he launched in 2008 after a combustible career in television. He created the reality formats America's Most Wanted and Cops at Fox, rose to president of Fox Television Stations, and was fired ten weeks later for hiring a model to strip during a speech about censorship in front of Rupert Murdoch. He later ran programming at USA Network. A Harvard classics major and former National Enquirer reporter, Chao built a second act around free, searchable tutorials covering everything from food hacks to augmented reality.
Jim Daily
Jim Daily is the CEO of OpenWeb, the audience-engagement and conversation platform for digital publishers. He took the top job on April 1, 2025, arriving after almost a decade scaling Teads in North America from a standing start to roughly $275 million in annual revenue, and after a detour founding LinksDAO, a golf-community venture he grew to $11 million in ten months. A Boston University hospitality grad turned adtech operator, Daily is the rare media leader who pairs go-to-market discipline with a near-religious belief that healthier online conversation is good business and good for society.
Julie Hansen
Julie Hansen is Chief Revenue Officer and US CEO of Babbel, the language-learning company. She joined in 2017 and turned the US into Babbel's largest market, crossing one million US subscriptions in the first half of 2022. Before Babbel she was the fifth employee at Business Insider, where as President and COO she helped grow it into the most-visited business news site online. Her earlier career spans CBS Interactive, Conde Nast, Time Inc., and Penguin Books. She keeps German vocabulary notebooks, rows on the water at dawn, and was named to the 2025 ASU+GSV Power of Women honor list.