CNBC editor in chief David Cho sent out the following on Thursday:
Team,
I’m excited to share that Ken Brown is joining CNBC as Managing Editor of Digital and Editorial Strategy.
In this role, Ken will lead CNBC Digital and help elevate the ambition, distinctiveness and impact of our journalism across platforms. He will play a key role in ensuring our digital reporting is essential, exclusive and closely connected to the strengths of the broader CNBC newsroom.
Ken will also help accelerate our digital strategy and sharpen how we cover the forces reshaping business, markets and the economy. From the capital demands of AI and the pace of innovation to the resurgence of dealmaking, major shifts are rapidly transforming industries. We see enormous opportunity to deepen our reporting, break more news and grow our audience around these stories.
Just as importantly, Ken brings a creative and collaborative approach to the relationship between television and digital. He will partner closely with TV editorial leadership to ensure CNBC’s greatest strengths — our journalism, personalities, access, and analysis — have a powerful presence across digital platforms and resonate with digitally native audiences.
Ken is an outstanding journalist and editor, with exceptional instincts for identifying major story opportunities and developing ambitious enterprise reporting. His career has spanned some of the biggest financial, corporate and investigative stories of the past two decades. He joins us from The Information, where he helped drive coverage at the intersection of technology, finance and business. Before that, Ken spent many years at The Wall Street Journal in a variety of leadership positions across investigations, finance, climate, markets and global coverage. He also spent two years on the buyside at Pzena Investment Management.
At The Information, Ken expanded coverage of the financing of AI and the growth of data centers. At the Journal, he helped lead the paper’s award-winning work reporting on the global financial crisis and reported extensively on the bursting of the tech bubble. He has led investigations into crypto, the Trump family’s finances, the Mormon church’s massive wealth and the Malaysian investment fund 1MDB, which ensnared Goldman Sachs, Middle Eastern royalty and Hollywood stars. Ken is also an adjunct professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, where he teaches investigative reporting.
Ken understands the subscription business and has a strong sense of how journalism creates lasting value for audiences — not only through individual stories, but through broader editorial strategy, exclusives and differentiated reporting readers cannot get anywhere else.
Ken starts on June 8th, and I hope you’ll join me in welcoming him to CNBC. We look forward to getting the team together for an informal welcome soon after he arrives.
Dave
