Levin Leaders to document best practices in leadership through podcasts

The Cox Institute’s leadership program, which is 14 years old this year, has added a new immersive exercise to its training.

Each of the 10 Levin Leaders are responsible for interviewing a news industry leader and turning the conversation into an episode of the Cox Institute’s award-winning podcast series, The Lead. The new episodes will begin streaming in February 2026.

“As we looked for ways to enhance the experience of being a Levin Leader, we decided to essentially merge the program with our podcast,” said Keith Herndon, executive director of the Cox Institute who also oversees the leadership program. “The work, which is still in progress, is exceeding our expectations. These will be among our best podcast episodes in the long history of The Lead.”

Listeners can expect to hear Sophia Eppley’s conversation with Leroy Chapman Jr., the editor in chief of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, along with Ansley Gavlak’s interview with Alex Mahadevan, director of the Poynter Institute’s MediaWise initiative. The eight other insightful episodes will be hosted by Lily Aldrich, Sophia Davenport, Mckenna Edwards, Taylor Greaves, Clarice Henry, Caroline Newbern, Grant Turnage and Sidney Josephs.

The Lead podcast, entering its 10th year in production, has always relied on student hosts to interview transformative leaders about their roles and perspectives on the future of  journalism. The podcast series is led and produced by Charlotte Varnum, who once was its student host and now teaches Grady’s journalism podcast course.

Varnum explained that an important goal of the podcast is to create content about how to how to get ahead in the media industry by interviewing people who did.

She said the new format of the show featuring the Levin Leaders as hosts will begin Feb. 4 with episodes dropping weekly. The show is produced on the Podbean platform and is distributed on most major podcast services including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

The Cox Institute’s leadership program has been known as the Levin Leaders since 2017 thanks to generous financial support from Adam Levin and his family foundation. Including this year’s cohort, the program has provided leadership education to 181 of Grady’s outstanding  journalism students, infusing in them what it means to lead in an increasingly complex media world.

For more about the Levin Leaders program and past year’s cohorts, visit https://grady.uga.edu/cox-institute-for-journalism-innovation-management-leadership/#journalism-leadership-lab

Author: Cox Institute