Strengthening Our Core: Welcoming Karyne Levy as VentureBeat’s New Managing Editor

I’m thrilled to announce a fantastic new addition to our leadership team: Karyne Levy is joining VentureBeat as our new Managing Editor. Today is her first day.Many of you may know Karyne from her most recent role as Deputy Managing Editor at TechCrunch, but her career is a highlight reel of veteran tech journalism. Her resume includes pivotal roles at Protocol, NerdWallet, Business Insider, and CNET, giving her a deep understanding of this industry from every angle.Hiring Karyne is a significant step forward for VentureBeat. As we’ve sharpened our focus on serving you – the enterprise technical decision-maker navigating the complexities of AI and data – I’ve been looking for a very specific kind of leader.The “Organizer’s Dopamine Hit”In the past, a managing editor was often the final backstop for copy. Today, at a modern, data-focused media company like ours, the role is infinitely more dynamic. It’s the central hub of the entire content operation.During my search, I found myself talking a lot about the two types of “dopamine hits” in our business. There’s the writer’s hit – seeing your name on a great story. And then there’s the organizer’s hit – the satisfaction that comes from building, tuning, and running the complex machine that allows a dozen different parts of the company to move in a single, powerful direction.We were looking for the organizer.When I spoke with Karyne, I explained this vision: a leader who thrives on creating workflows, who loves being the liaison between editorial, our data and survey team, our events, and our marketing operations.Her response confirmed she was the one: “Everything you said is exactly my dopamine hit.”Karyne’s passion is making the entire operation hum. She has a proven track record of managing people, running newsrooms, and interfacing with all parts of a business to ensure everyone is aligned. That operational rigor is precisely what we need for our next chapter.Why This Matters for Our Strategy (and for You)As I’ve written about before, VentureBeat is on a mission to evolve. In an age where experts and companies can publish directly, it’s not enough to be a secondary source. Our goal is to become a primary source for you.How? By leveraging our relationship with our community of millions of technical leaders. We are increasingly surveying you directly to generate proprietary insights you can’t get anywhere else. We want to be the first to tell you which vector stores your peers are actually implementing, what governance challenges are most pressing for data scientists, or how your counterparts are budgeting for generative AI.This is an ambitious strategy. It requires a tight-knit team where our editorial content, our research surveys and reports, our newsletters, and our VB Transform events are all working from the same playbook.Karyne is the leader who will help us execute that vision. Her experience at Protocol, which was also dedicated to serving technical and business decision-makers, means she fundamentally understands our audience. She is ideally suited to manage our newsroom and ensure that every piece of content we produce helps you do your job better. She’ll be working alongside Carl Franzen, our executive editor, who continues to drive news decision-making.This is a fantastic hire for VentureBeat. It’s another sign of our commitment to building the most focused, expert team in enterprise AI and data.Please join me in welcoming Karyne to the team.