WSJ names Linebaugh, Knutson co-hosts of new podcast

Anthony Galloway, global head of video and audio at The Wall Street Journal, sent out the following announcement on Wednesday:

Colleagues,

I’m pleased to share that we have reached a significant milestone in the development of our new daily podcast being produced in partnership with Gimlet. Today, we are excited to name Kate Linebaugh and Ryan Knutson as co-hosts and news editors of this forthcoming podcast. We are also glad to have Andrew Sussman joining the Journal as executive producer of this new program.

Since our initial announcement about the podcast in December, many of you have expressed interest in participating and have had productive conversations with the Gimlet team about your ideas for this new flagship podcast. Thank you for being so excited and welcoming our partners at Gimlet into the newsroom. Through this process, we were able to identify two journalists who represent WSJ and capture the tone of this show: Kate and Ryan.

Kate Linebaugh is the Journal’s deputy U.S. News coverage chief and took on this role after leading the East Coast bureau. She has worked at the Journal for 14 years, starting in Hong Kong, stopping in Detroit, and coming to New York in 2011. As a reporter, she covered everything from post-9/11 Afghanistan to the 2004 Asian tsunami, from Toyota’s sudden acceleration recall to General Electric. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and went back to campus in 2007 for a Knight-Wallace fellowship. Kate lives in Brooklyn with her husband and almost 9-year-old son.

Ryan Knutson is returning to the newsroom after a roughly 15-month foray onto the business side of Dow Jones, where he oversaw the company’s partnerships with tech giants such as Apple, Google and Facebook. Previously, he spent more than four years in the newsroom covering the wireless industry, and was responsible for a string of scoops including Verizon’s $130 billion buyout of Vodafone’s stake in their joint venture, Sprint and T-Mobile’s never ending courtship and a hack of the 911 emergency system that spread virally on Twitter. He was also a regular author of A-heds, including one about millennials discovering TV antennas. Previously, he reported for ProPublica, PBS Frontline and OPB, the NPR affiliate station in Portland, Ore. He grew up in Beaverton, Ore. and graduated from the University of Oregon.

Andrew Sussman joins the Journal after serving for nearly seven years as executive producer of The World, an award-winning international affairs public radio program. The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, WGBH in Boston and PRI, aired on more than 300 stations. Andrew helped develop and launch the original show as a reporter and senior producer. Prior to that, Andrew was based in Moscow, where he oversaw a joint-venture newspaper collaboration with the Russian daily Komsomolskaya Pravda and worked as an editor at the Moscow Times. He also worked as a reporter for Radio France International in Paris. Andrew was a 2001 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.

We are fortunate to have such talented and accomplished journalists joining to launch this new podcast and are already finding our partnership with Gimlet to be a positive collaboration. Gimlet’s expertise making highly-produced audio programs, combined with the Journal’s unparalleled reporting and talented newsroom, forms a strong foundation for success.

We’ll share further updates about timing and format in the coming weeks. In the meantime, please feel free to share story ideas using the email: podproposals@wsj.com and congratulate Kate, Ryan and Andrew on their new roles.

Looking forward,