INMA announces winners of ‘30 Under 30’ Awards for rising stars in global news media

At the ’30 Under 30’Awards, members of the INMA’s Young Professionals Committee and the governing INMA Board of Directors reviewed applications and voted on six winners in five categories—Advertising, Audience, Business Intelligence, Content + Product, and Leadership. Within the list of 30 winners, six overall ‘Grand Prize’ winners from six regions were selected.

Criteria for selection included being every professional under 30 years of age, early career achievements, insights into innovation, ability to influence, and likely management skills. The winners in each of the five categories from 20 countries are listed here.

Advertising

• Maggie Campbell, Account Director, NZME, New Zealand
• Lina Hebert, Performance Marketing Manager, Consumer Revenue, Condé Nast, US
• Weijun (Jenny) Lu, Account Manager, Marketing Solutions, South China Morning Post, Hong Kong
• Simone Mainprize, Group Digital Manager, News Corp Australia
• Sade Muhammad, Director, Representation and Inclusion Partnerships, Forbes, US
• Erin Rettew, Digital Sales Manager, LNP Media Group, US

Audience

• Lovisa Bergström, Data Scientist and Team Lead for Analytics Team, Dagens Nyheter, Sweden
• Lily Cloake, Marketing Director, The Wall Street Journal/Dow Jones, US
• Ronan Doyle, Acquisition & Lifecycle Manager, Independent News & Media, Ireland
• Taneth Evans, Head of Audience Development, The Times and Sunday Times, UK
• Mansi Panchamia, Marketing Manager, Corporate Marketing and Strategy, Mid-Day Infomedia, India
• Naomi Wills, Customer Success Manager, Business Insider, US

Business Intelligence

• Shotaro Ishihara, Data Scientist, Nikkei, Japan
• Kartikay Khosla, Deputy Manager, Jagran New Media, India
• Stephanie Lievano, Business Development Manager, Corporación La Prensa, Panama
• Arthur Rückert, Head of Data and Strategic Planning, Grupo RBS, Brazil
• Virginia Stagni, Business Development Manager and FT Talent Director, Financial Times, UK
• Robert Tidball, Head of Data, Australian Community Media, Australia

Content + Product

• Utkarsh Arora, Group Product Manager, The Economic Times, India
• Mara Corbett, Creative Operations Director, Gannett, US
• Jostein Larsen Østring, Vice President Development, Amedia, Norway
• Adar Rahman, Sub-Editor, Prothom Alo, Bangladesh
• Michael Sommer, Project Lead Interaktiv, Kleine Zeitung, Austria

Leadership

• Zack Korman, Lead Architect, Aller Media, Norway
• Siyavuya Mzantsi, Editor, Independent Media, South Africa
• Nicholas O’Connor, Publisher and Chief Revenue Officer, América Economía, Chile
• Sophia Phan, Deputy Digital Editor, The Sydney Morning Herald (Nine), Australia
• Taras Prokopyshyn, CEO, The Ukrainians, Ukraine
• Bente Zerrahn, Head of Innovation, Axel Springer, Germany

Grand Prize winners

Within the ‘30 Under 30 Awards’ judges selected six young professionals as regional Grand Prize winners.

• Africa: Siyavuya Mzantsi, Editor, Independent Media, South Africa
• Asia/Pacific: Shotaro Ishihara, Data Scientist, Nikkei, Japan
• Europe: Virginia Stagni, Business Development Manager and FT Talent Director, Financial Times, UK
• Latin America: Arthur Rückert, Head of Data and Strategic Planning, Grupo RBS, Brazil
• North America: Mara Corbett, Creative Operations Director, Gannett, US
• South Asia: Utkarsh Arora, Group Product Manager, The Economic Times, India

Earl J Wilkinson, Executive Director and CEO of INMA, says that they are profoundly proud of this inaugural class of the

’30 Under 30′ Awards competition. He adds, “These winners are future leaders of the news media industry, and INMA is grateful for our Young Professionals Committee and the judges for shining a light on their early career achievements and leadership potential. The judging process was rigorous, and we look forward to tracking the success of all winners and applicants.”

Besides the recognition with the prestigious titles, winners of ‘30 Under 30’ Awards will receive access to INMA master classes, INMA membership benefits, and more. In addition, all 163 applicants have been provided access to an INMA Young Professionals Initiative Slack channel for ideas-sharing and networking.

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As a 6-year-old, Maggie asked her mom if she could have a haircut matching the female news anchor she saw on TV. After four quick successive promotions early in her career, Maggie now holds the lead sales role at NZME, where she recently ran into that same hairstyle inspiration during a content partnership campaign in which the newscaster was the talent. Maggie delivered a NZ$5 million deal with a local supermarket client — the largest deal in MediaWorks history.

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Her second job out of college, Lina is the marketing manager of consumer revenue at Condé Nast — her ‘dream job’. Among other responsibilities, she is responsible for the paid media strategy for The New Yorker and is part of the team tasked with future-proofing the brand and keeping The New Yorker on the forefront of the media landscape.

 

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When Sade was just 15 years old, she attended her first National Association of Black Journalists conference. That’s when she knew media would be her future. From an intern at Black Enterprise and a social media strategist for the inaugural Syracuse University social media team, Sade quickly transitioned to post-graduate jobs on the digital media teams at NBC’s Oxygen and Bravo, then to a brand producer at Forbes.

 

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Born and raised in Shanghai, Jenny expanded her horizons quickly in college, studying in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and New York. After a brief position in marketing and PR, Jenny became an account lead at Morning Studio, The South China Morning Post’s integrated marketing solutions teams.

 

 

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Simone was raised by a radio sales representative, so she was exposed to the media industry through her mother from an early age. Today, she is the youngest group digital manager to be appointed within News Corp. She implemented a monthly programme called ‘Pitch Perfect’ that allows her team to hone their presentation skills with each other in a learning environment and work more collaboratively as a team.

 

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Erin spent three years at a small advertising agency. She then returned to her home city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to join the digital team at LNP Media Group, where she now has oversight for almost all digital revenue in the advertising department. After she joined in February 2019, the team reached 129 percent of its digital goal by December, bringing in six figures of new business to the digital team.

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When she was 15 years old, Lovisa got a part-time job for the youth section at her local newspaper, Norrköpings Tidningar. In college, she studied engineering and earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science, a master’s degree in strategy and governance, and did an exchange programme in Taiwan. Her career in the media industry solidified during her Google News Lab fellowship at Dagens Nyheter, where she is now leading the data analytics team.

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As a media planner for News UK, Lily had an idea. She asked for 30 minutes of CMO Katie Vanneck Smith’s time and pitched an idea to sell The Times of London to students. Smith gave her the seed money and, working in her off time, Lily launched the campaign. It worked. Lily quickly moved to The Times’ marketing team then to The Wall Street Journal in New York, where her original idea continues in her role as marketing director for student memberships (a role that didn’t exist until she pitched it).

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Ronan started his career in eCommerce before joining The Irish Times’ digital subscription team in 2017. There, he led a partnership with National Geographic and The New York Times, expanded reader engagement outside of Ireland, and led a tactical initiative to bundle subscriptions with Amazon Echo Dot devices. In the first weeks of 2020, he moved to Independent News & Media, joining the large European group Mediahuis where he escalated.

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In her final year at university, Taneth at a publication created a customer-centric style guide for all digital communications. She introduced them to SEO and social media. Then she joined Hearst publications after graduation and later spearheaded the switch from product-led concepts to audience-led concepts with one of its largest clients. By age 26, she was leading the audience development team of 15.

 

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After graduation, Mansi started her career as a management trainee in brand communications at Radio City, then was transferred to Mid-Day Infomedia Limited, a sister concern of Radio City. Her first project was to revamp Sunday Mid-Day, including the launch of the Mid-Day Digital Tabloid — part of the company’s move from print-only to digital-first during the early days of the pandemic.

 

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Naomi was studying classics and linguistics at Harvard University, then joined a small education start-up in Tokyo after graduation. She was hooked and joined Business Insider’s customer support team as an intern. A year later she was in her current position as a team lead during a sudden company merger. In her first 10 months, she rebuilt her team, streamlined the customer support process, and took ownership of churn initiative and customer insights.

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Shotaro kicked off his media career at the University of Tokyo, eventually serving as editor-in-chief, advertising manager, events manager, and digital manager at the university press while studying data science. He transitioned after university to Nikkei, Japan’s leading economic daily, to join the data science team. He also publishes a personal weekly newsletter with 1,000 subscribers, has more than 14,000 followers on Twitter.

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Kartikay started his career as a quality analyst at Times Internet Limited, then transitioned to the role of product manager at Jagran New Media. During his time in that position, he created an automated in-house tool called Lead Management System, launched to help handle education leads and data efficiently. Kartikay was part of a team that developed an AI/machine learning-based content recommendation engine.

 

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When Stephanie won a scholarship to travel to Panama as part of her Latin American studies at university, her already media-focused career expanded from Kentucky to the country of Panama. She’s spent the past decade creating new businesses, leading government efforts for the first Model UN on a national level, and serving as the liaison between the World Economic Forum and university volunteers.

 

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Arthur started his career at Grupo RBS as a strategic planning specialist. He now leads the company’s data team. The portfolio growth roadmap related to subscriber management and product and technology his team created helped the company reach more than 100,000 digital-only subscribers in 2019. In its fifth year, and during the pandemic, the team implemented new pricing and a new segmented retention strategy for the title. The result, even during COVID, an increase of 14 percent in subscriptions received.

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As a student at the London School of Economics, Virginia was writing her dissertation about the sustainability of the news industry and reached out to FT’s leaders via LinkedIn. She joined FT as a programme coordinator for an education start-up before moving into her current role. In this position, she has headed the new ‘FT Talent’ division, giving access and potential job opportunities at FT to a pool of younger talents from diverse backgrounds and countries.

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Robert started his media career in the strategy department of News UK during his university holidays. His first full-time job was on the portfolio strategy team at News Corp Australia, which hooked him on business strategy and analytics. Robert then worked for six months in Peru with an advisory firm, returned to Australia as a management consultant, then realised he missed the news industry. A position with Australian Community Media (ACM) as an analyst providing audience insights to sales teams quickly taught him the process could be much better.

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As a journalism student in his first year of college, Dominik sent an open letter to the biggest commercial TV house in Croatia, volunteering his services just to get into the business. The company accepted and it was a wild ride for almost two years, during which he worked both as a TV and Web journalist before joining a digital marketing agency. He then transitioned to 24sata, where he was a video marketing specialist before moving to become the youngest editor-in-chief at JoomBoos, its Generation Z brand.

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Uktarsh was promoted to a senior manager position within 15 months of joining The Economic Times, making him the youngest person to reach that level. Under his leadership, ET’s subscription revenue and subscribers have grown 3.5 times year-over-year for the past six quarters with an 80 percent decrease in marketing spends and significantly increasing average reader per user.

 

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Mara moved to Texas with everything she had stuffed into her car to work as an intern on a new media innovation team tasked with bettering Gatehouse Media’s digital journalism (Gatehouse and Gannett subsequently merged in 2019). Her first project was to create a digital simulator to share the experience of a wind turbine.

 

 

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While he was still in high school, Jostein began working part-time as a journalist. He was recruited at the age of 19 to work as a full-time journalist for Nordlys, and after three years, in 2014, he moved into the news editor’s spot and set about digitising the newsroom. His efforts led to a position as vice president of editorial development at Amedia.

 

 

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Adar became sub-editor at the age of 20 and, just two years later, attended the 71st Cannes International Film Festival as a journalist on behalf of Prothom Alo, making her the first female journalist from Bangladesh to cover the prestigious event in Cannes, France. Covering the event, she wrote human stories — not just celebrity stories — like the one of a student who travelled 100 miles to see the festival without a ticket.

 

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After being accepted by one of Austria’s best journalism programmes, Michael dropped out of software development studies and ultimately found his calling in data journalism. In early 2019, he wrote the final thesis about the introduction of an interactive storytelling team at Kleine Zeitung and, by summer, the company was implementing the step-by-step strategy he had outlined in his paper. One year later, storytelling has become a staple at Kleine Zeitung, the second-largest Austrian daily, and as the year comes to a close, he will take a new role as lead product designer.

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With a law degree from the University of Edinburgh and a master’s degree in law and finance from the University of Oxford, Zack was hired by Aller Media to do ‘something useful with data’. He has more than answered that challenge by helping create Xavier, the innovative data platform and personalisation engine that has transformed operations for Aller Media and is at the heart of its technology ecosystem.

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Siyavuya launched his journalism career as an intern at Independent Media and has quickly climbed up the ranks since then. Before being named the first Black African Editor of the Cape Times in its 143-year history last year, he had shown his versatility as a journalist by serving as a multimedia reporter, content producer, news editor, and assistant editor. His appointment to editor at the age of 26 also makes him the youngest editor in the news media group.

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Nicholas was 23 when he started his newspaper career in the marketing department at AméricaEconomía. He began collaborating on small pieces for the website and soon was participating in editorial meetings and pitching ideas. Within a year, he was working with sales teams and took an active role in commercial operations. This year, he was named publisher and chief revenue officer, and has been instrumental in helping teams organise virtual events and generate revenue from them during the pandemic.

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Sophia was just 19 when she started her career at Sydney Morning Herald and has been appointed to several senior positions since, including social media editor at age 23 and deputy digital editor at 26. She has worked on numerous high-profile news stories, including the MH370 disappearance, terror attacks, the coronavirus pandemic.

 

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Although he earned his degree in sociology, he was drawn to media and in 2014 founded The Ukrainians, an online magazine about successful Ukrainians. That project, which began with zero investment, has grown into a professional media ecosystem that now includes four brands, a brand studio, and educational projects. Next, it will venture into online radio.

 

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After working at a cyber security start-up in Tel Aviv for a year, Bente returned to her native Germany and realised how overlooked cyber security was. She also recognised an opportunity to solve that problem. She pitched her ideas to the chief information security officer at Axel Springer and, in June 2019, the company created the position of cyber security analyst.