2019 IAB Podcast Upfront

Rund Abdelfatah is the co-host and producer of Throughline, a podcast that explores the history of current events. In that role, she’s responsible for all aspects of the podcast’s production, including development of episode concepts, interviewing guests, and sound design.

Abdelfatah joined NPR in 2014 as an intern and went on to become a producer on a number of NPR’s most popular podcasts, including How I Built This, TED Radio Hour, NPR Politics Podcast, Code Switch, and Pop Culture Happy Hour.

The concept for Throughline, launched in February 2019, was developed by Abdelfatah and her co-host, Ramtin Arablouei.

Abdelfatah got her start in journalism covering local and domestic politics at the Washington bureau of the BBC. She previously earned a Bachelor of Arts in anthropology, with a minor in Spanish, from Princeton University.

Jad Abumrad is the creator of More Perfect, the critically-acclaimed podcast exploring the Supreme Court’s most significant rulings and how they impact our lives. Abumrad is also the creator and co-host of Radiolab, the Peabody Award-winning cult sensation heard by millions around the world, blurring the lines between science, philosophy, and the human experience. Abumrad is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (also known as the Genius Grant) for “inspiring boundless curiosity within a new generation of listeners and experimenting with sound to find ever more effective and entertaining ways to explain ideas and tell a story, and is also a musician and composer. Having grown up in Tennessee, Abumrad now lives in New York.

AG is the Executive Producer and Host of Mueller, She Wrote. In addition to being a veteran, PhD, and a federal government executive, she’s a comedian, author, and staunch advocate for the resistance. Her mission with the show is to employ her expertise in the absurd amount of Trump Russia news and wrap it up into tasty bites for human consumption; committed to doing it weekly until House Trump falls. Additionally, she’s very dedicated to the separation of facts and theory, and working hard to make sure everyone knows which is which.

Kelsey Hallerman and Mike Amico go together like podcasts and rush hour traffic, like public radio and Obama voters, like true crime and white women. Together they host ‘So I Heard This Interesting Podcast’, the podcast about podcasts. In 2018, these two Los Angeles natives decided to stop annoying everyone they know with their endless podcast knowledge, and instead annoy everyone they don’t know by adding a couple microphones to the mix. Each week, Mike and Kelsey make their way through the big bad world of podcasting, one rating, review, or recommendation at a time.

Joel Anderson is a Slate staff writer and host of the third season of the Slow Burn podcast. Before that he was a national college football writer at ESPN. He’s also worked at BuzzFeed News, the Tampa Bay Times, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Associated Press and the Shreveport Times. He’s been a regular contributor to ESPN Radio and Slate’s Hang Up and Listen podcast and his piece, The Two Michael Sams, is featured in The Best American Sportswriting 2015. He’s a native of Houston and currently lives in California’s Bay Area with his wife.

Ramtin Arablouei is co-host and co-producer of NPR’s podcast Throughline, a show that explores history through creative, immersive storytelling designed to reintroduce history to new audiences.

Arablouei got his start at NPR in 2015 with a three-week contract to produce a pilot for How I Built This with Guy Raz, and now produces, reports, mixes, and writes music for such top-rated podcasts as TED Radio Hour, Hidden Brain, Embedded, Invisibilia, The Indicator, Code Switch, Radio Ambulante, and the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Reveal.

A trained audio engineer, Arablouei spent most of his early twenties in recording studios. He contributed sound design and music for films and commercials, including the IMAX trailer for 300: Rise of an Empire. He’s written music for many award-winning podcasts including “Los Cassettes del Exilio” (Radio Ambulante) and the “All Work. No Pay” episode of Reveal, which won the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi award for investigative reporting.

Born in Iran, Arablouei emigrated to the U.S. with his family as a child. He graduated from St. Mary’s College of Maryland with a Bachelor of Arts in psychology and history.

Jody Avirgan is host and senior producer for 30 for 30 Podcasts from ESPN Films and ESPN Audio. He also developed FiveThirtyEight Podcasts, which launched during the 2016 presidential campaign. Prior to arriving at ESPN, he was a producer at WNYC radio, and has worked with shows such as On The Media, Marketplace, Freakonomics, and many more. On the side he hosts the comedy and storytelling series Ask Roulette.

Lisa Baird is Chief Marketing Officer at New York Public Radio (NYPR) where she leads the marketing and audience development, data, membership, sponsorship and communications teams. In addition, she is also responsible for raising substantial revenue, increasing audience size and diversity across all programs and platforms, cultivating audience loyalty, and amplifying digital membership.

Prior to joining NYPR, Baird was Chief Marketing Officer at the United States Olympic Committee (USOC). During her almost 10-year tenure, she oversaw all commercial activities including the USOC’s media assets, sponsorship, licensing, advertising, hospitality, events and marketing and branding. She launched the Team USA brand, which is one of the most active digital sports brands, collaborated on the launch of an OTT channel with NBC and the International Olympic Committee, and achieved record revenues benefiting national governing bodies of sports and America’s athletes.

Earlier in her career, Lisa was the Senior Vice President, Marketing and Consumer Products, for the National Football League (NFL). She has a rich and extensive background in leading branding, development and marketing for several Fortune 50 companies, including managing iconic brands at IBM, General Motors, Warner-Lambert Company (now Pfizer), Bristol-Myers Squibb Company, Johnson & Johnson Consumer Products, and the Procter & Gamble Company.

Lisa is member of the Board of Governors for the International Hall of Fame of Tennis and serves on the Board of Directors for Elite Sportswear, a Riverside Company and Soundview Paper, an Atlas Holdings Company.

Jason Baron is Senior Vice president of Direct Marketing and Podcast Sales for WarnerMedia Ad Sales. Within this role, Baron oversees all direct response advertising across WarnerMedia’s portfolio of leading brands, including managing advertising sales for the WarnerMedia Podcast Network. He is based in New York.
Under Baron’s leadership, the company’s direct response division implemented new strategies, including integrating the direct response teams across linear and digital, which resulted in significant revenue growth across all categories. Baron joined the company in 1997 as a CNN account executive and held ascending positions before being promoted to senior vice president in 2011.

Laura Beil host of Dr. Death and the upcoming mini-series Bad Batch, is a two-time American Society of Journalist and Authors award winning journalist with over 20 years of experience in health and science journalism. She began her career as a medical reporter for the Dallas Morning News eventually moving into print journalism as a contributor to Men’s Health and correspondent to Science News magazine.

Peabody and duPont-Columbia award–winning journalist Andrea Bernstein is Co-Host of the Trump, Inc. Podcast, a co-production with ProPublica, and is Senior Editor for WNYC News. She has previously served as Metro Editor, Political Director, Director of Transportation Nation, and Senior Reporter.

Bernstein covers the intersection of Trump and Kushner business and politics, and, with her colleague Ilya Marritz, has broken key stories, including those on how Donald Trump, Jr., and Ivanka Trump avoided criminal indictment, Paul Manafort’s money-laundering and Michael Cohen’s fraudulent business practices.

Bernstein has covered six national elections including the 2016 election, and her beats have included government, politics, transportation, environment, housing, and policing. At various points she’s been assigned to cover Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg, George Pataki, Eliot Spitzer, David Paterson, Chris Christie, Bill de Blasio, and Andrew Cuomo. Her investigative reporting on the Bridgegate scandal with Matt Katz won WNYC News its first-ever Peabody award.

Bernstein was one of 12 US Journalists to win a prestigious year-long 2007 Knight Fellowship at Stanford University. She has won over 50 awards for her work, including the duPont-Columbia Award, the George Foster Peabody Award, the Investigative Reporters and Editors award for radio, the National Press Club award for environmental reporting, and national Murrow (RTNDA) and Society for Professional Journalists awards for investigative reporting.

She has taught journalism at City College, was the Jack Newfield Professor of Investigative Journalism at Hunter College, and led trainings for journalists in several venues, including preparing reporters in Bhutan to cover their first-ever political campaign in that country’s transition to democracy.

She was a political correspondent for the New York Observer for eight years, and her work has also appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, ProPublica, New York Magazine, The Nation, and the New York Daily News.

She graduated from Yale University, cum laude, with honors.

She lives in Brooklyn with her wife and two children.

Matthew Berry is a Senior Fantasy Sports Analyst for ESPN. Berry writes regularly for ESPN.com, hosts the Fantasy Focus podcast with NFL reporter Field Yates, and co-hosts ESPN.com’s live Sunday morning fantasy football program Fantasy Football Now, as well as Fantasy Football Kickoff on Tuesdays during the NFL season. He also appears regularly on ESPN television and radio shows including, Sunday NFL Countdown, SportsCenter, NFL Live, Baseball Tonight, First Take, Mike & Mike in The Morning and more. Berry, also known as the “Talented Mr. Roto,” is an Emmy Award winner for his work on Fantasy Football Now and a five-time Fantasy Sports Writers Association award winner, including a Writer of the Year award.

Berry joined ESPN in February 2007 when his Web site, TalentedMr.Roto.com, was acquired by ESPN.com. Launched by Berry in March 2004 as an online fan group, Talented Mr.Roto.com quickly became known as an online community with quality, timely fantasy news and analysis. Developing as a place for “Personality Driven Fantasy Analysis,” the site earned 51 Fantasy Sports Writers Award (FSWA) nominations (winning 12), and four Fantasy Sports Trade Association (FSTA) award nominations (including Best Site) over its three year existence. Berry also founded (and still owns) RotoPass.com.

Described as “One of the stars of the web” and a “fantasy savant” by the New York Times, Berry has been covered in books, magazines, Web sites and newspapers across the country.

Prior to starting Talented MrRoto.com, Berry was a screenwriter in Hollywood, where, among other credits, he wrote for the sitcom Married with Children and worked on movies including Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles.

He began his professional career as a standup comedian, once opening for Dennis Miller at Goldstein Auditorium at Syracuse. He also spent a year as a production assistant for The George Carlin Show on Fox, before being accepted to the prestigious Warner Brothers Writer’s Workshop, due in part to a recommendation letter from Carlin.

Born in Denver, but raised in College Station, Texas, Berry began playing fantasy sports at age 14 and plays in dozens of leagues every year across multiple sports. He started writing about fantasy sports professionally in 1999 and has been a contributor to many top media and sports outlets prior to joining ESPN, including MLB.com and NBA.com.

He is a graduate of Syracuse University.

Jake Brennan is the writer, host and producer of Disgraceland. He is also the creator of the podcast’s score and theme son g. Jake saw his Dad’s band open for The Ramones when he was 10 years old. Before the show he asked his Dad what The Ramones sounded like. He was told, “they sound like The Beach Boys but louder and faster.” Later that night, Jake learned that his Dad was r ight. He also learned the importance of history in understanding music. Since then, Jake has been obsessed with music. And history. And for whatever reason, the darker sides of both. Disgraceland combines these obsessions. Jake lives in the Boston area wit h his wife and two sons and is surrounded by history and lucky enough to make a living surrounding himself with music. Sometimes it’s louder and sometimes it’s faster but it’s never as cool as The Ramones.

Sinéad Burke is an academic, teacher, writer and advocate. Sinéad works towards accelerating systemic change within the domains of diversity, education, inclusion, design, and disability. She consults within the fashion, architecture, technology and design industries to ensure that spaces and products are accessible to all. Sinéad is responsible for the introduction of the term for little person, ‘duine beag’, into the Irish language.

Sinéad is a TED speaker, her talk ‘Why Design Should Include Everyone’ has amassed over one million views and speaking on the topics of design, education and inclusion, she most recently addressed the Business of Fashion’s VOICES conference and was the only Irish female delegate at World Economic Forum’s 2018 annual meeting in Davos and returned as a Cultural Leader of Davos’ programme in 2019. Sinéad was presented with The Leadership Award at Eco-Age’s Green Carpet Fashion Awards by Gucci CEO, Marco Bizzarri.

She is a Contributing Editor for British Vogue and writes for the Financial Times, Teen Vogue and the New York Times. Sinéad has been a guest on The Moth and DeRay’s Pod Save the People. She is the coverstar of the Business of Fashion’s Age of Influence print issue, a member of the BoF500 and according to British Vogue, Sinéad is one of the 25 most influential women working in Britain in 2018 and is a member of the President of Ireland’s Council of State.

Sinéad’s new podcast, As Me with Sinéad, launches on October 24 from Lemonada Media, in partnership with Westwood One.

Conal Byrne is the Chief Executive Officer of the iHeartMedia Digital Audio Group, which includes the company’s fast-growing and high-profile podcasting business and #1 podcast publisher globally according to Podtrac, as well as the industry-leading iHeartRadio digital service; the company’s digital sites, services, newsletters and programs; and its digital advertising technology companies, including Jelli, RadioJar, Unified, Voxnest and the recently-announced Triton Digital acquisition, upon its completion.

Prior to joining iHeartMedia, Byrne was President and CEO of Stuff Media, Inc., home of the incredibly popular HowStuffWorks (HSW), which pioneered the podcast space with leading shows including “Stuff You Missed in History Class” and “Stuff You Should Know.” Byrne joined iHeartMedia when the company acquired Stuff Media in October 2018. Prior to Stuff Media, Byrne served as Senior Vice President of Digital Media for Discovery Communications, where he ran digital for all of Discovery’s U.S. networks’ sites and social platforms and led the launch of Discovery VR.

Jordan Coburn is a co-host of Mueller, She Wrote. Coburn brings astute observation with a healthy dose of wit to the table. In addition, she is a comedian. Her dry, often tongue-in-cheek contributions are balanced by her solid grasp of the subject matter. In addition to being a successful comedian, she is also an author, performer, and all around awesome human being. She can be found performing at the Comedy Store, the Mad House and any other major comedy home.

Daniel Dopp started as an intern at ESPN in 2013 and has produced the Fantasy Focus Football podcast, Sports? with Katie Nolan, The Adam Schefter Podcast, The Bill Barnwell Show and The Fantasy Focus Baseball podcast. Daniel started producing the Fantasy Focus Football podcast with Matthew Berry, Field Yates and Stephania Bell in 2015. Under Daniel’s helm, Fantasy Focus Football added a digital video element in 2016 which has amassed almost 200 million impressions since its inception and a live Twitter stream in 2018 that currently reaches 250k viewers per show. He is also the co-host of The Fantasy Show with Matthew Berry, a daily tv show throughout the fantasy football season on ESPN+.

Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter and a former columnist and senior editor at the New York Times. Mr. Duhigg is the author of The Power of Habit, which has spent over three years on the New York Times bestseller lists, and Smarter Faster Better, also a New York Times bestseller. His books have sold more than 5 million copies worldwide. Mr. Duhigg currently writes for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, and hosts How To! with Charles Duhigg, a Slate podcast. He is a graduate of Yale University and the Harvard Business School, and a frequent contributor to This American Life, NPR, The Colbert Report, PBS’s NewsHour, and Frontline.

Dana Elmquist develops multiplatform, data-driven sponsorship campaigns for national and global businesses, augmenting Market Enginuity capabilities for client stations and producers. Additionally, he evangelizes the power of public media to marketers not currently considering it in their marketing mix, and introduces brands to new ways of leveraging their marketing spend.

Dana works with blue chip clients in the finance, energy, CPG and automotive categories, bringing sponsor and ad agency together for creative executions that advance both brand and publisher.

Dana’s corporate and business development experience includes roles at New York Public Radio, Brooklyn Public Library and Africa Center. At Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences he teaches: communications and marketing; social purpose businesses; ethics and governance for nonprofit organizations.

Jenna Fischer is best known for playing Pam Beesly on the acclaimed television show The Office, for which she received an Emmy nomination for Best Supporting Actress and two SAG Awards for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble Comedy.
Fischer most recently starred in the ABC comedy Splitting Up Together, from Emily Kapnek. A love story about a divorcing couple, opposite with Oliver Hudson, the series was a critical hit and ran for two seasons.
A trained theater actress, Fischer has also starred in the Off-Broadway play Reasons to Be Happy, written and directed by Neil LaBute and co-starring Josh Hamilton, Leslie Bibb, and Fred Weller. Most recently, Fischer was on stage in the world premiere of Steve Martin’s newest play Meteor Shower, an absurdist comedy opposite Greg Germann and Josh Stamberg, for a record-breaking run at the Old Globe Theatre.
Fischer’s films credits include Mike White feature “Brad’s Status,” in a role opposite Ben Stiller, as his wife, Melanie; “The 15:17 to Paris,” directed by Clint Eastwood; “The Giant Mechanical Man” (which she also produced); the Farrelly Brothers’ comedy “Hall Pass;” “Solitary Man” opposite Michael Douglas; “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story,” produced by Judd Apatow; “The Promotion;” Matt Weiner’s “Are You Here;” and “Blades of Glory” opposite Will Ferrell.
In 2018, Fischer published her first book, The Actor’s Life, from Ben Bella Books.
Jenna currently has 2 million followers on Instagram and 1 million followers on Twitter. In the past two years, she has worked as a social media influencer for JCPenny, Smirnoff Vodka, Blue Bunny Ice Cream, Relay, and World’s Best Cat Litter.
She is currently producing the comedy “National Parker” alongside Warner Brothers for Freeform. She is on the board of directors for the refugee resettlement charity group Miry’s List. She lives in Los Angeles with her family.

Holly Frey is an Executive Producer and a cohost of Stuff You Missed in History Class. Her true historical passion is fashion from all eras. She lives in Atlanta with her husband and a small herd of cats. When she’s not obsessing over comma placement or talking about the past, she’s sewing, running, watching television, visiting a Disney park, rescuing animals, going to the movies, traipsing around town in a ridiculous costume or obsessing over delicious food. Sometimes, she does several of these things at once.

Cardiff Garcia is a co-host of NPR’s The Indicator from Planet Money podcast, along with Stacey Vanek Smith. He joined NPR in November 2017.

Previously, Garcia was the U.S. editor of FT Alphaville, the flagship economics and finance blog of the Financial Times, where for seven years he wrote and edited stories about the U.S. economy and financial markets. He was also the founder and host of FT Alphachat, the Financial Times’ award-winning business and economics podcast.

As a guest commentator, he has regularly appeared on media outlets such as Marketplace Radio, WNYC, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, the BBC, and others.

Gina Garrubbo is President and CEO of National Public Media (NPM), a subsidiary of NPR owned in partnership with PBS and WGBH. As a full-service corporate sponsorship organization, National Public Media supports the continued growth of NPR and the public media system via funding from corporate sponsors across multiple platforms, from broadcast radio and podcasts, to the NPR app and NPR.org. National Public Media includes NPM Creative, its in-house creative studio offering brands long-form custom audio production, including branded podcast production. NPM Creative won the 2022 PR Daily Content Marketing Award for Best Branded Podcast in partnership with YouTube.


Outside of National Public Media, Garrubbo sits on the IAB Executive, IAB Finance and IAB Audio Committees, working with leaders across the industry to build industry standards, best practices and resources for audio marketing.


Prior to NPR, Garrubbo spent more than 20 years growing marketing and sales teams, launching brands and building companies, with extensive experience in both legacy and emerging media. She was one of the builders of women.com, one of the first websites for women, and BlogHer, a network of bloggers which brought independent voices to millions of readers. Garrubbo built advertising sales teams for Oxygen Media, Discovery Communications and in syndicated television. She sits on the Board of Directors of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), and Glen Highland Farm.

Brooke Gladstone is best known for the …pause…that Bob Garfield inserts before mentioning her name in the credits for On the Media. Among her other accomplishments, she was an NPR Moscow-based reporter, its first media reporter, senior editor of NPR’s All Things Considered, and the senior editor of Weekend Edition with Scott Simon. As the years progress, she grows ever more senior.

She’s the recipient of two Peabody Awards, a National Press Club Award, an Overseas Press Club Award and many others you tend to collect if you hang out in public radio long enough.

She is the author of The Trouble With Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time (Workman) and The Influencing Machine (W.W. Norton), a media manifesto in graphic form, listed among the top books of 2011 by The New Yorker, Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus Reviews and Library Journal, and among the “10 Masterpieces of Graphic Nonfiction” by The Atlantic.

Ira Glass is the host and creator of the public radio program This American Life. The show is consistently one of the top three most downloaded podcasts anywhere, with 3.6 million downloads per episode. Another 2.2 million listeners hear the show each week on more than 500 public radio stations.

The team that creates This American Life also created Serial, the most listened-to podcast in the history of the medium, with over 19 million downloads for each episode of its first season. Glass is an editor on the show. Serial is widely credited for changing the face of podcasting. As The New Yorker put it: “Serial was the first show to induce advertisers to take podcasting seriously. The creative and economic accomplishment of Serial has spawned countless imitators, and many have shamelessly echoed its tropes.”

The style of narrative journalism invented by This American Life and Serial – emotional story arcs, compelling characters, humor, surprising ideas, all delivered in a chatty conversational tone – have been copied by a generation of podcasts. The team’s programs (including S-Town) have won the highest honors for broadcasting and journalistic excellence, including ten Peabody awards.

Rayna Greenberg is the co-host of Girls Gotta Eat. She is also a writer and photographer.

Suzanne Grimes is a dynamic executive with a strong record of growing media brands across outdoor, mobile, social, digital, print, and experiential platforms in the public and private sectors. Successful at developing integrated revenue models through cross-functional collaboration, leveraging sales, marketing and data tools to drive growth.

Grimes is the EVP of Corporate Marketing for Cumulus Media, she is responsible for marketing strategy, branding, solutions and insights for Cumulus Media’s 447 owned-and-operated stations broadcasting in 90 US Media markets. As the President of Westwood One, the #1 radio network in the US, where she oversees the strategic direction and execution of the network’s operations, programming, and advertising partnerships for more than 8,000 broadcast radio stations and numerous digital channels reaching a quarter of a billion people each week.

For over three decades, Grimes has led some of the world’s top media companies and brands, building and directing companies to deliver strength in building and motivating high performance cultures, combining an entrepreneurial approach with the discipline and communication required in large, matrixed organizations. Throughout her career, she has consistently shown she is passionate about the convergence of media, technology and entertainment, and bringing the critical thinking and enthusiasm necessary to lead brands and teams through change.

Prior to joining Westwood One | Cumulus, Grimes was President and COO of Clear Channel Outdoor North America, where she was responsible for $1.3 billion annual revenue, and developed and launched digital and mobile initiatives. Before that, she was President of the U.S. Lifestyle division of Reader’s Digest Association, responsible for Allrecipes.com, Every Day with Rachel Ray and the Reiman family of brands. During a long tenure at Condé Nast, she served as Senior VP of the Conde Nast Media Group, VP and Publisher of Glamour magazine, Publisher of Allure, and Publisher of Women’s Sports & Fitness. Earlier in her career she was the Senior VP and Publisher for TV Guide News Corporation.


Grimes was the founder and CEO of JOTT, LLC, where she provided strategic advisory support for early to mid-stage companies in the media, technology and entertainment space.
Grimes currently serves on the Board of Directors for Radio Advertising Bureau, Jesuit Volunteer Corps and the Georgetown University Entertainment and Media Alliance.

Grimes has been selected as one of Radio Ink’s 2017 & 2016 “40 Most Powerful People in Radio” & “Most Influential Women in Radio”, Advertising Age’s Women to Watch, Conde Naste CEO Award, and the Irish American Annual Business 100 Award. She graduated from Georgetown University and resides in New York with her husband and two children.

Kelsey Hallerman and Mike Amico go together like podcasts and rush hour traffic, like public radio and Obama voters, like true crime and white women. Together they host ‘So I Heard This Interesting Podcast’, the podcast about podcasts. In 2018, these two Los Angeles natives decided to stop annoying everyone they know with their endless podcast knowledge, and instead annoy everyone they don’t know by adding a couple microphones to the mix. Each week, Mike and Kelsey make their way through the big bad world of podcasting, one rating, review, or recommendation at a time.

Mary Harris is the host and managing editor of What Next, Slate’s new daily news podcast. For the past decade, she has reported throughout the public radio system, for NPR, Marketplace, and WNYC. Her curiosity has taken her to needle exchanges and influenza laboratories; she’s even reported on her own treatments for breast cancer. Before working in public radio, she was a producer at ABC News.

Mangesh “Mango” Hattikudur is the Senior Vice President of Podcast Development for the iHeartPodcast Network. In his role, he courts talent, works with producers and brands to develop shows and creates audio for all kinds of listeners. Mango comes from the Stuff Media team in Atlanta where he worked on several shows including “Committed,” “Happy Face,” and “Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe.”

Before joining iHeartMedia, Mango was the Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer at Mental Floss, a magazine and website he and Will Pearson (“Part-Time Genius” podcast co-host and current SVP of Podcast Operations at iHeart) started as juniors at Duke University. In addition to editing the publication’s print and web properties, Mango led the brand’s expansion into books, video, board games, t-shirts, a live trivia show, and the award-winning children’s imprint SmartyPants. The Mental Floss team was nominated for several American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) Awards, featured as one of TIME’s 50 Best Websites, ranked No. 1 on Mashable’s list of Smartest Twitter Feeds and won several Webby and Digiday Awards.

In his spare time, Mango co-hosts the “Part-Time Genius” podcast with Pearson and is happiest when spending time with his wife and two kids (ages 5 and 8), out with his friends, playing pick-up soccer and tennis, fumbling on his upright piano and doodling. If he does the latter in a meeting, he promises you, he’s still listening!

Ashley Hesseltine is the co-host of Girls Gotta Eat. She is also a standup comedian, writer, and founder of the Instagram accounts Bros Being Basic and Fashion Dads.

Bob Hohler, host of Gladiator: The Aaron Hernandez Story is a sports investigative and enterprise reporter. He also covered the Red Sox and worked in the Globe’s Washington bureau. His book, “I Touch the Future: The Story of Christa McAuliffe,” details the New Hampshire teacher’s life and death aboard the space shuttle.

Kelli Hurley is the SVP, Digital Partnerships for Westwood One, where she oversees podcast talent relations and the acquisition of new shows, partnerships and revenue. Kelli was the early champion of building the Westwood One Podcast Network, which officially launched in April of 2018 and is now the fastest organically growing podcast network in America.

Kelli has amassed a lineup of podcast content, ranging from political talk to sports to comedy to pop culture — and the list of talent coming into the fold is growing by the day. Kelli has been the lead on some of the most successful partnerships to date: The Daily Wire, American Public Media’s Marketplace Minute, and Imperative Entertainment’s portfolio of podcasts.

Kelli is a radio and digital audio veteran with more than a dozen years’ of network radio experience under her belt. She started her career in Los Angeles, successfully managing clients and agencies for iHeartRadio, Premiere Networks, United Stations, and Westwood One. In 2011, she transitioned from network radio to digital audio as a Director of Sales for TargetSpot in Chicago.

Chris Jericho, Host of Talk is Jericho, Westwood One Podcast Network Acclaimed actor, wrestler, musician, author, podcaster, game show host and television personality Chris Jericho, has established himself as a multi-faceted performer with millions of fans worldwide. Jericho is one of the most popular performers in the history of World Wrestling Entertainment. In 2001 he was crowned the WWE Undisputed Champion and in 2017 become the first ever “Double Grand Slam” champion in WWE history. He has been named one of the top five most charismatic performers of all-time by wwe.com. He recently signed the biggest contract of his career with the brand new All Elite Wrestling company. Jericho hosts the hugely popular “Talk Is Jericho” podcast on Westwood One, that has amassed over 220 million downloads. Topics are diverse and past guests include Dennis Miller, Larry King, William Shatner, Donald Trump Jr., Chris Tucker, Stormy Daniels, Method Man, Paul Stanley, Lars Ulrich, Kiefer Sutherland, Mike Tyson, Cheech Marin, and Slash.

Charlie Kammerer is president of Slate, where he focuses on developing ways for brands to tap into Slate’s audience through editorial content, podcasting, video, and custom programs. Kammerer joined Slate in 2017 after spending 20 years at Time Inc., where he was a brand builder and revenue generator across a diverse portfolio of brands, including Real Simple, Fortune, Food and Wine, Cooking Light, Golf, and This Old House. He’s based out of Slate’s Brooklyn office.

Angela Kinsey is best known for her portrayal of the feisty, tightly wound head of accounting ‘Angela Martin’ at Dunder-Mifflin on NBC’s Emmy winning show The Office. She won a Daytime Emmy for her portrayal of Angela Martin in NBC’s The Office: The Accountant webisode series. She has also won two Screen Actors Guild Awards for Best Comedy Ensemble for The Office. Angela’s recent projects include: starring in the Netflix original series Haters Back Off!, as well as a lead role in the critically acclaimed Hulu Original, Hotwives of Orlando and Hotwives of Vegas. This Fall, you can see her as the host of a new Disney Plus family cooking show, Be Our Chef.

On the big screen, Angela starred in the Chris Colfer-scribed flick, “Struck by Lightning,” and Heather Graham’s directorial debut “Half Magic.” Other films include Ken Kwapis’ “License to Wed,” “Furry Vengeance” with Ken Jeong, Lifetime’s, “Terror in the Woods,” and Lionsgate’s “Weekend at Bernie’s: Keep Hope Alive”. She just wrapped the upcoming Netflix movie, “Tall Girl”.

Angela has 1.3 million followers on Instagram and 558,000 on Twitter and is very active with brands on social media. This past year she has worked as a social media influencer with Target, Kellogg, Heinz, Fab Fit Fun, Disney, And That, Relay Go, Trello, Heineken, Heinz and the Salvation Army. Following a 2-year contract with Clairol as the face of their ‘Nice n’ Easy’ brand, Angela was called upon by Friskies to host their annual award show that honors the best cat YouTube videos of the year. She emceed alongside Michael Ian Black and continued to help Friskies donate over 500,000 cans of wet food to shelters across America with their 2013 holiday campaign. Angela currently co-hosts a baking channel with her husband and baker, Joshua Snyder. You can find them at www.bakingwith [bakingwith]joshandange.com [joshandange.com]

A seasoned public media ambassador and one of the early leaders in the podcast industry, Jim Lally leads national sales to drive results on behalf of Market Enginuity clients.

Prior to Market Enginuity, Jim led the national sales strategy at WNYC and was responsible for revenue from all local and national platforms including broadcast, podcasts and digital. As senior director of media platforms and brand partnerships, Jim’s oversight included a team of 14 that created unprecedented growth for the organization across all platforms.

Jim held senior sales roles at Advance Digital Media, Sherwood Outdoor and The New York Times. While at The New York Times, he was part of the integration team that developed programs for advertisers to purchase digital and print in tandem, and helped make digital advertising a more significant part of the overall revenue stream.

His sales experience includes multi-million-dollar installation sponsorships at 1 Times Square, the iconic building where the ball drops on New Year’s Eve.

Jim graduated from Boston College and holds a M.S. in marketing from Baruch College’s Zicklin School of Business. A passionate music fan, he moved to New York in the early 90’s, to work for TVT Records helping introduce then unknown, pop industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails. Later, in 1995, he became a part of the team that launched alternative arts and culture magazine Time Out New York.

Juleyka Lantigua is the Founder and CEO of LWC Studios, an award-winning digital media studio whose original work reaches rising audiences with programming that has a social-justice vein. She created and executive produces 70 Million, the first open-source solutions journalism podcast chronicling how locals are tackling jail reform around the country. In 2020, LWC Studios received a Peabody Award nomination, earned silver in the audio documentary category at the New York International Radio Festival, and won “The Director’s Prize,” their first Third Coast award, also known as “The  Oscars of Audio.” In 2021, “Driving the Green Book,” which she edited and the company produced for Macmillan Podcasts, earned the inaugural Ambie for Best History Podcast. A Fulbright Scholar, Tory Burch Fellow, and Stanford SLEI alumna, Julleyka holds a BA from Skidmore College, a Master’s in Journalism from Boston University, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College.

Hernan Lopez is Founder & CEO of Wondery, the world’s largest independent podcast publisher. Launched in 2016, and known for its immersive podcasts, Wondery became the fastest network to join the Top 10 ranker by Podtrac, propelled by hit shows like Dr. Death, Dirty John, Business Wars and The Shrink Next Door. Twenty-six of Wondery’s shows have hit #1 on Apple Podcasts. Sixteen of them have been, or are in the process of being, adapted for scripted television. Wondery has gained critical acclaim and commercial success for its immersive approach to sonic, emotionally-immersive storytelling which helps listeners to “feel the story”

Mark McCrery is Founder and CEO of Authentic and Podtrac. At Authentic, Mark leads the team that represents This American Life, Serial, S-Town, This Week in Tech, Motley Fool and 300 other top podcasts, delivering measurable results for brand and direct response advertisers for 13 years. At Podtrac, Mark’s team measures tens of thousands of top podcasts and produces the industry’s only rankings of the top podcast publishers and podcasts by unique US monthly audience.

Tyler Moody is vice president and general manager of WarnerMedia Podcast Network, a division of WarnerMedia Distribution, the domestic distribution arm of WarnerMedia. In this capacity, Moody oversees podcasting for WarnerMedia’s portfolio of brands, leading the publishing and production for all company branded podcasts and assisting with developing and launching new branded podcasts. Moody is responsible for the news, sports and entertainment podcast content as well as providing the brands with content development support, operational management, production assistance, podcast distribution and coordinates with sales to develop a promotional and marketing strategy. Moody is based in Atlanta and reports to Jennifer Mirgorod, executive vice president of partnership management for WarnerMedia Distribution.

Previously, Moody served as vice president at CNN Newsource Sales where he managed the digital audio business for CNN including handling the licensing of CNN Newsource & CNN Wire content to terrestrial radio affiliates. Prior to CNN Newsource Sales, Moody was vice president of CNN Radio where he led the editorial team in terrestrial radio news service and converted the business to all digital audio.

Moody is a member of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Audio Group. He earned a bachelor of arts degree in communications from University of Illinois at Chicago.

Peter Morris is CEO of leading podcast network, PodcastOne, which features a roster of more than 300 of today’s most popular podcasts including Adam Carolla, Shaquille O’Neal, Steve Austin, Kaitlyn Bristowe, Dan Patrick, A&E’s Cold Case Files, Tip “T.I.” Harris, Spencer and Heidi Pratt, Scheana Shay, Heather and Terry Dubrow, Jim Harbaugh, Ladygang, Dr. Drew, Chael Sonnen, Rich Eisen, Barbara Boxer and hundreds more.

Prior to joining PodcastOne, he held senior management roles in business development and business affairs across film, television and digital media, most recently serving as Executive Vice President of Barstool Sports. Morris also previously held posts as EVP of Entertainment at IMAX, and Head of Business Affairs & Strategy and General Counsel at Funny or Die.

Annie Murphy is currently starring in the Emmy-nominated Schitt’s Creek for CBC/ITV/Pop. She stars alongside Eugene Levy, Daniel Levy, Catherine O’Hara, and Chris Elliott as Alexis Rose, the onscreen daughter of Levy and O’Hara and sister to Daniel Levy. Murphy is a three-time Canadian Screen Award nominee in the Best Actress in a Comedy category. In 2019, Murphy was awarded a Gracie Award (Actress in a Breakthrough Role) for her work on Schitt’s Creek. Murphy’s past projects include Rookie Blue and Flashpoint, among others. Murphy has also worked in theatre in Montreal and Toronto, and she is a graduate of both the Canadian Film Centre Actors’ Conservatory and the Theatre Performance Program at Concordia University. Murphy resides in Toronto, Ontario and was born in Ottawa.

Joe Nocera, host of The Shrink Next Door is an American business journalist and author. He has written for The New York Times, NPR’s Weekend Edition and Bloomberg View.

Dan Pashman is the creator and host of Stitcher’s James Beard and Webby Award winning podcast The Sporkful, which he says is not for foodies, it’s for eaters. Since launching The Sporkful in 2010, Dan has used humor and humanity to approach food from many angles, covering science, history, identity, culture, economics, and more. This year Dan embarked on “Sporkful World Tour 2019”, a series of live podcast tapings that has played to sold out crowds across the U.S. (“World Tour” just sounds so much cooler.) Dan is also the creator and host of Cooking Channel’s You’re Eating It Wrong. He has appeared on Radiolab, WTF with Marc Maron, Morning Edition, The Today Show, Guy’s Grocery Games, NPR’s Politics Podcast, Beat Bobby Flay, It’s Been A Minute With Sam Sanders, Freakonomics Radio, and more. Prior to launching The Sporkful Dan was a producer and reporter at NPR, Air America Radio, and Sirius XM.

Mike Pesca is the host of The Gist, a daily news and opinion podcast at Slate magazine, which launched in 2014. Previously he was an NPR correspondent for over 10 years, covering news and sports. He has guest hosted a number of public radio programs including On the Media and The Brian Lehrer Show, and regularly appears on MSNBC, CNN, and NPR. He is the editor of _Upon Further Review: The Greatest What-Ifs in Sports History_, a book on imagined scenarios in the world of sports. The Gist has been named a Best New Podcast by iTunes. It was also featured on the radio program This American Life, and appeared as “20 Across” in the New York Times crossword puzzle.

Geoff Ramsey, one of the original members of Rooster Teeth, is also the founder of Achievement Hunter, one of the most popular gaming channels today. He voices the popular character “Grif” in Red vs. Blue, in addition to appearing numerous other Rooster Teeth productions in various capacities. Prior to his time at Rooster Teeth, Geoff was in the US Army from 1993 to 1998, and was the road manager for a host of New Jersey punk bands. He lives in Austin with his daughter.

David Remnick was named the editor of The New Yorker in 1998. He joined the magazine in 1992, after ten years with the Washington Post, where he was a Moscow correspondent. He is the author of several books, including “The Bridge,” “King of the World,” and “Lenin’s Tomb,” for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. Under Remnick’s leadership, The New Yorker has become the country’s most honored magazine, winning forty-eight National Magazine Awards and, in a first for a magazine, four Pulitzer Prizes.

Dave Rubin is a talk show host, comedian, and TV personality. He is the host of The Rubin Report on Westwood One Podcast Network, a talk show about big ideas and free speech, heralded for it’s politically incorrect and open approach to discussing complex issues and current events. The show has garnered a huge fan base from across the world, by having honest conversations about important topics in a thoughtful and candid manner rarely seen in mainstream media. The show is a top political YouTube channel and leading political podcast on iTunes.

In addition to hosting The Rubin Report, Rubin started his career as a stand up comedian and still performs around the country highlighting our increasingly polarized political landscape. He recently accompanied Dr. Jordan Peterson on an international speaking tour, and his highly anticipated book Don’t Burn This Book, published by Penguin Random House, will be released in April 2020.

Sam Sanders is an award-winning reporter, radio host and podcaster. He currently cohosts Vibe Check from Stitcher Podcasts, with Zach Stafford and Saeed Jones. In 2022, The New York Times named Vibe Check one of the 10 best podcasts of the year and the show was awarded with a Signal Award in 2022 for best pop culture podcast. Previously, Sam Sanders launched and hosted the NPR radio show and podcast It’s Been A Minute, in which Sam was heard on over 400 public radio stations across the country every week, interviewing luminaries ranging from JLo to Maya Rudolph to Beto O’Rourke. Sanders was also a founding host of the NPR Politics Podcast while covering Election 2016 for NPR. Sanders founded the pop culture podcast Into It at Vulture and New York Magazine, and it was named a best podcast of the year in 2022 by both Spotify and VOGUE. Sanders has been named best podcast host by both the Ambies and the IHeart Podcast Awards, and his work has been honored by the LA Press Club, the National Association of LJBTQ+ Journalists and the National Association of Black Journalists. His written work has appeared in New York Magazine, Politico Magazine, and the Columbia Journalism Review. Sanders has a bachelor’s degree from the University of the Incarnate Word and a Master’s degree in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and has taught radio at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Paige St. John, host of Man in the Window, is an American journalist with the Los Angeles Times. Before joining the Times, St. John was at the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, where she earned the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting.

Shankar Vedantam is NPR’s social science correspondent and the host of Hidden Brain. The focus of his reporting is on human behavior and the social sciences, and how research in those fields can get listeners to think about the news in unusual and interesting ways. Hidden Brain is among the most popular podcasts in the world, with over two million downloads per week. The Hidden Brain radio show is featured on some 250 public radio stations across the United States.

Before joining NPR in 2011, Vedantam spent 10 years as a reporter at The Washington Post. From 2007 to 2009, he also wrote the Department of Human Behavior column for the Post.

Vedantam and Hidden Brain have been recognized with the Edward R. Murrow Award, and honors from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the International Society of Political Psychology, the Society of Professional Journalists, the National Association of Black Journalists, the Austen Riggs Center, the American Psychoanalytic Association, the Webby Awards, the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors, the South Asian Journalists Association, the Asian American Journalists Association, the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association, the American Public Health Association, the Templeton-Cambridge Fellowship on Science and Religion and the Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellowship.

From 2009 to 2010, Vedantam served as a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.

Vedantam is the author of the non-fiction book The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars and Save Our Lives. The book, published in 2010, describes how unconscious biases influence people.

Outside of journalism, Vedantam has written fiction and plays. His short story-collection, The Ghosts of Kashmir, was published in 2005. The previous year, the Brick Playhouse in Philadelphia produced his full-length comedy, Tom, Dick and Harriet.

Vedantam has served as a part-time lecturer at Harvard University and Columbia University. He has also served as a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington.

Tom Webster is a partner at Sounds Profitable, the leading voice of significance for the digital audio industry, devoted to growing the podcast sector through audio insights, education and connections. As a 25-year audio research veteran, he is a trusted advisor to the biggest companies in audio and has dedicated his career to the advancement of podcasting for networks and individuals alike. Tom has been a co-author and driver behind some of audio’s most influential studies, including the Infinite Dial® series, Share of Ear® and The Podcast Landscape. Additionally, he has led hundreds of audience research projects on six continents, for some of the most listened-to podcasts and syndicated radio shows in the world, from Howard Stern to All Things Considered. He’s done a card trick for Paula Abdul, shared a martini with Tom Jones, and sold vinyl to Christopher Walken. With Tom’s partnership at its helm, Sounds Profitable is dedicated to set the course for the future of the audio industry.

Brian Windhorst joined ESPN in 2010, covering the NBA for ESPN.com. He regularly appears on multiple ESPN platforms including SportsCenter, Get Up, First Take, NBA Today and Hoop Streams. Windhorst is the host of the Brian Windhorst & The Hoop Collective podcast where he and a team on NBA Insiders sort out life in and around the NBA world. In 2014, Windhorst began NBA Lockdown Insiders, a weekend show on ESPN Radio. He was also a regular on ESPN’s TrueHoop podcast. Windhorst covered the NBA from 2003-10 for the Akron Beacon Journal and Cleveland Plain Dealer. The Akron, Ohio, native graduated from Kent State University in 2000. He is the author of three NBA-related books

Houston-based Stephanie Wittels Wachs is the author of best-selling memoir Everything Is Horrible and Wonderful: A Tragicomic Memoir of Genius, Heroin, Love, and Loss, which Kirkus called a “penetrating story and powerful debut.” A theater director and well-known voice actor (appearing in countless anime series and movies), she also has a decade of experience as an arts educator. Wittels Wachs now sits on the Board of Directors of Rec Room Arts, a reputable performance space and national artist-residency program that she co-founded in memory of her late brother, Parks & Recreation comedian-writer-producer Harris Wittels. She co-created Lemonada with Jessica Cordova Kramer, who also lost her brother to addiction, because, Wittels Wachs says, “Community is a life jacket.”

Stephanie’s new podcast, Last Day, launched in September. Season one of this show, from Lemonada Media, in partnership with Westwood One, explores the opioid crisis that is now killing more people annually than car accidents. The storytelling has listeners holding their breath, as the show zooms in on a person’s last day of life, exploring how they got there and then zooms out to help us, as a community, understand the big picture and what can be done to help solve the crisis.