POLITICO announces new social video team and hires

Announcement from Vice President of Audio & Video Ben Reininga, Managing Editor of Global Audience Zainab Khan, Executive Vice President, Product, Audience and AI Francesca Barber, and Global Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Greenberger:

We’re excited to announce several changes designed to ensure POLITICO’s journalism travels even further and faster. Starting this week, the global social team — Danielle Woodward, Kara Ellis and Sashko Shevchenko — will join the audio/video team under Ben Reininga.

We’re also pleased to announce several new hires. Georgena Mierow and Jackson Barton both join us as associate producers to anchor our growing social-video team. Georgie was a producer for The Hill, among other outlets, where she specialized in storytelling for Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Jackson led social video efforts for Bloomberg Opinion and, prior to that, worked for the Washington Post. In addition, Rachel Ishikawa, an experienced audio producer, will be overseeing the Playbook DC podcast and will work to continue building that show into a truly multi-platform product. All three will be based in Rosslyn.

These moves reflect the increasing importance of social and video in how audiences discover and engage with our journalism. We’re growing and restructuring this team to better align our efforts on social media video and accelerate the reach of POLITICO’s reporting across platforms. This initiative is just beginning, but we’ve already launched POLITICO on TikTok in the US, offered the first of a series of social-video trainings to empower reporters across our newsrooms, and began producing daily hosted videos.

In the short term, the social team’s existing responsibilities and functions will continue unchanged, so please continue to work with them as you have been. Over time, we’ll be exploring new workflows and ways to supercharge our efforts.

Zainab Khan will continue to run the Audience team under Francesca Barber. Zoha Qamar, Emma Krstic and Jordan Muller remain key members of the Audience team. The team will focus on Helix, product launches (like Australia, Magazine and Energy), coverage analytics and audience tools for our newsroom.

We’re excited about this next step and the opportunities it creates to better serve audiences and extend the impact of our journalism.