Joanne Griffith, Chief Content Officer

Joanne Griffith is the chief content officer for APM Studios, the podcast-production division of American Public Media. She has creative oversight of original and acquired podcasts. She is also the founder of En(title)d! Leaders, a conversation and coaching space for leaders of color in media. She was the founding managing editor of the California Newsroom, an NPR regional news hub, and was lead producer for the ESPN "30 for 30" podcast: "The King of Crenshaw." She has also worked at "Marketplace," Southern California Public Radio, and the BBC. Twitter: @globaljourno

Alex Schaffert, Chief Operating Officer

Alex Schaffert is the Chief Operating Officer at APM Studios, American Public Media's podcast division, overseeing production of the shows Brains On, Smash Boom Best, The Splendid Table, Terrible Thanks for Asking, Too Beautiful To Live, The Slowdown and Spectacular Failures. She previously served as Chief Digital Officer and Sr. VP of Strategic Planning at Southern California Public Radio, where she led the acquisition of LAist.com and architected the business plan for LAist Studios, the station’s podcast arm.

At LAist, Schaffert secured talent deals with Walter Thompson-Hernández of CA Love and Nick Quah of Servant of Pod, and oversaw the launch of The LAist Round Up, the station’s first daily show in response to the COVID pandemic.

On the national stage, she co-founded the MAC, a nationwide group of public radio leaders aimed at supporting increased national/local collaboration. Examples include the launch of NPR’s Consider This and a successful strategic partnership with Google, projects that have unlocked new distribution paths for local journalism in an effort to meet Americans’ changing information needs. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their two sons. 

Tom De Napoli, Managing Director

Tom is the Managing Director of APM Studios. He orchestrates APM Studio’s go-to-market strategy and creates revenue-generating advanced marketing solutions that span podcast, livestream, digital video and social media. Tom also develops strategic commercial partnerships for APM Studios IP that include content distribution and licensing, production collaborations and consumer product lines. He recently launched a full-season launch partnership of APM’s newest series, Million Bazillion, with Greenlight Financial Technology and announced a deal with multicultural content studio, reVOLVER, to produce a 12-episode season of the hit kids’ series, Brains On!, en Español. 

Tom joins APM Studios from ViacomCBS, where he launched its first-ever social media branded content offering, operated its first-ever influencer marketing team, experimented with new technologies to create the first-ever augmented reality (and gender neutral) Moon Person for the VMAs and incubated partnerships with leading digital video publishers to produce award-winning campaigns promoting everything from racial justice to sustainably made burritos.