Meredith Klein of Meredith and the Media interviewed Fortune’s Ellie Austin, editorial director of Most Powerful Women and anchor of Fortune Daily.
Here is an excerpt:
- As editorial director of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women franchise, you lead the editorial direction of the annual MPW Summit. You also host the event and conduct many of its major interviews, including breaking news. What’s driving your coverage in this role?
- What is now an absolute core pillar of the summit that wasn’t two years ago is the Most Powerful Women list. We’ve shuffled around the timing of when the list is published to give us a good run into the MPW Summit. Now, when that list of 100 global women comes out, I and my programming team are inviting all of those women to speak at MPW. Generally, to get on the list, you’re in a very senior role, if not the CEO of, a company that’s bringing in billions of dollars. We always say MPW is not a women’s conference: It’s a business conference that happens to be for women.
- What’s driving my coverage is getting the world’s most powerful business leaders, who happen to be women, on stage, talking about running their companies and the geopolitical climate, and some more personal subjects, as well. But I’m very clear on the fact that we don’t interview these leaders differently because they’re women. I’m always thinking: If these were male leaders, what would they be asked on stage? We stick to that pretty well, but deviate a bit where appropriate.
- Beyond the Most Powerful Women list, we have this brilliant smattering of athletes, celebrities, and philanthropists. When I’m considering who to invitee from sports and entertainment, I’m really asking: Who has a very legitimate business? Last year, I interviewed Selena Gomez. She has a multibillion-dollar business brand. We get pitched a ton of celebrities all the time, but they need to have a legitimate business story to tell about a business they’ve built, or be an A-lister who’s been in the business for 30 years and can come and tell us about how the business of Hollywood has changed. The business story is at the absolute core of everything we do at the Summit.
Read more here.
