WSJ names half dozen to senior leadership of video team

Amanda Wills, head of video at The Wall Street Journal, sent out the following:

Hi everyone,

As we enter into an exciting new year of growth for video, I wanted to take a moment to spell out the senior leadership team that will be essential to our success.

I’ll start with our newest leader:

Vaughn Sterling is joining us as Senior Executive Producer, Features and Explainers, backfilling Adam Banicki’s former role. I am thrilled to bring in Vaughn, an incredibly talented producer who will add even more gravitas to our journalism. He was part of the founding show team for The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer. He was in the control room during 9/11, produced seven major election nights, produced Cuomo Prime Time, Democracy in Peril, several special reports and was the EP for breaking news at CNN+. Vaughn has won three Emmy awards, most recently for CNN’s George Floyd coverage. Carmel Lobello’s and Aja Harris’ teams will report into Vaughn, who joins us on January 23.

Other important news about the rest of our senior leaders:

Ben Weltman is now Deputy Head of Video and will add to his editorial duties the oversight of all production, operations, finance for the department. Ben’s team will be one of shared resources, stretching across the department to help us manage teams and projects. Ben’s leadership will help us deepen our journalism and better set up ourselves for a future of exponential growth.

Christina Vallice, as Senior Executive Producer, will now oversee all news production, International teams and specials. As you all know, news is one of our biggest growth areas this year. Bringing International under this team will not only help us better manage a 24/7 news cycle, but it will also allow us to connect our teams when it comes to story assignments and execution. It is crucial we become faster, nimble and more creative in this highly competitive space. Christina’s leadership will drive us there. Robert Libetti’s team will continue to report into Christina.

Adam Banicki, who recently took over as Senior Executive Producer of YouTube, will truly focus on this platform in a way that The Wall Street Journal has never done before. His team, much of which he is currently building from scratch, will focus on building our YouTube presence and developing repeatable franchises that I hope catapults WSJ into becoming a major publisher on this platform. Journalists as Creators moves under Adam so that all YouTube creative is under a single leader.

Joanna Stern will continue to report to me as Executive Editor, Video, and Senior Personal Technology Columnist. Joanna has been an essential part of this team for years as an award-winning journalist and mentor. Her on-the-screen and behind-the-scenes contributions to this department are felt throughout the organization on a daily basis. I am excited to see what she does this year not only with her current body of work, but also exploring new formats and projects.

Dan Rosen is now VP of Video and Audio Strategy and Studios. In this role, Dan will continue his success defining our audience reach and growth strategies. Beckey Bright will now report to Dan as we lean into our programming, planning and newsroom coordination efforts. By combining programming with audience strategy, we will be able to effectively measure, execute and tell the story of success when it comes to video on and off platform and build a long-term strategy around this. Dan will also continue his strategy work with the Audio team, WSJ Studios, and managing newsroom relationships with outside vendors.

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Amanda Wills