Comm Lead Alumni Newsletter

Jess: Hi everyone! Jessica Partnow here. I am so glad you’re here to listen to the great conversation that Anita and I had for the alumni newsletter. Before you listen I just had to say: I had an issue with my recording setup for this and some of my audio is really blown out and I just wanted to apologize to you all. It is not up to my standards. But I think it was a great conversation and so I apologize for the quality and I guess you can see that it happens even to the pros sometimes! Thanks so much for listening. Enjoy.

Anita: I'm just so thrilled that we can have this conversation and that you can be a part of the spring 2025 quarterly alumni newsletter! One of my favorite features is that we take a faculty member at Comm Lead and ask them a couple questions as a way of introducing them to the broader alumni population. So thank you for talking to me today. We always like to kick it off by asking, if I was to run into you at a cocktail party or a picnic, How would you describe the work that you're doing now? And what's going on in your life?

Jess: Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be chatting with you about this stuff. Right now I'm really in my happy place of working on a bunch of different things. I have a handful of podcasts that I'm working on. I love it because they really and truly run the gamut. Like one is a B2B podcast for the Virginia Mason Institute about just super stuff that I'm interested in because it's all about process improvement and business practices within the healthcare industry.

I also produce a few Microsoft podcasts, but I think the most interesting one has been, Behind the Tech with Kevin Scott, the CTO of Microsoft. I've been producing this podcast for the past three or so years. So that's really exciting. I'm also doing a handful of other things. I just produced my first audio book for someone. I'm doing a little bit of executive director coaching, as you well know, Anita, I have a background in nonprofit leadership. I am finding that I really enjoy coaching with executive directors.

I'm also the treasurer of the board of Young Women Empowered, a wonderful nonprofit organization here in Seattle, serving women and gender expansive youth, young women. I'm also facilitating a brand new advisory board for Comm Lead that is super exciting. We just had their first meeting, last week, and it was fascinating.

Anita: I want to come back to the Comm Lead Advisory Board. I think our alums would be interested to hear about that. And I'm thrilled to hear that you're helping to manage that. As I was listening to you, first of all, I'm just impressed that you've created a life that feels like you are able to answer your intense curiosity about the world.

Before we get to that, teaching at Comm Lead has been something you've been doing for many years. You're really one of our, the pillars of our veteran faculty.

Anita: Tell us a bit about when you joined Comm Lead to teach and what you've taught over the years and what you're teaching now.

Jess: I was just thinking back to my early Comm Lead days when you and I first met. I think the first time I taught in Comm Lead was in the winter quarter of 2010. And at that time I was team teaching with Sarah Stuteville and Alex Stonehill, now one of the co directors of the program. A video storytelling class.

I can still remember some of the students that we had that very first quarter. And of course, ensuing quarters as well.

Anita: There's nothing like your first class. I feel the same way.

Jess: Totally. And so my background is in audio journalism and podcasting, and so I often was supporting like, especially the audio storytelling parts of that video class, which I personally would argue, audio storytelling is 90 percent of video storytelling. Absolutely. You need good audio. We will tolerate bad pictures, but we will not tolerate bad audio, right?

Jess: What I'm teaching now and what I really, really love to teach is audio storytelling. I’ve taught it many times, I think in the winter 2018, was the first time I taught it and I've taught it quite a few times since then. You know, oftentimes just once a year, sometimes twice a year. There was one year right after or like kind of during the pandemic still where I think I taught it four quarters in a row. Which was interesting.

Anita: Well, it also shows the uptick in interest that our students had. It went from being something that wasn't in the curriculum at all to something that had not only you know, keen interest from the students who took classes with you. But as you know, we have a roster of a number of people that now teach different kinds of audio storytelling.

Jess: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It's great. Yeah. And it's, I mean, I love teaching in Comm Lead so much. The students are incredible. And I just feel like with a class of Comm Lead students, this has always been true, even though I think we've seen like several different sort of generations of students come through, they're always, you can just basically, you assemble this like brilliant group of people in a room, you know, and say like, Hey, here's some interesting stuff, you know, read this, listen to this, like, Talk about this. What an honor to get to teach in this way.

Each quarter we highlight professional updates from our global community that showcase the talents, breadth, and moxie of our graduates. If you’d like to be included in future newsletters, please use the form below to let us know of your latest milestone! In the meantime, congratulations to the following people:

• Tom Moskal has launched a new company, Lap Cat Media, where he’ll help clients bring digital projects to life.

• Faculty member Melissa Schwartz had joined Democracy Forward as their Chief Public Affairs & Policy Officer.

• Yvonne Xiao is now a Senior Content Designer at Robinhood.

• Comm Lead instructor Claudia Chang has been invited to join the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council, a body that provides feedback to the HBR on how they shape content.

• Mike Burlin has joined Surfline as Head of Growth Marketing.

• Kathryn Kamin is starting a new position as the Global Content Strategist of Sustainability at SAP.

• Ryan Xiong is starting a new position as a Senior Product Manager at Uber.

• John Hickey is now the Director of Brand Marketing at Magic: The Gathering.

• Andrew Mitrak launch a podcast called The History of Marketing (and you can learn more by attending the Comm Lead Alumni Spotlight in May!)

• Mason Kelley is starting a new position as Event Content Specialist at Lions & Tigers.

• Toni Del Rio and her wife, Natalia, have launched Del Rio Living, a company that helps facilitate homeownership with a mission to help its clients navigate the process, understand their fair housing rights, and help them create wealth.

• Shannon Perry’s audio drama, Oz 9, was nominated for a Golden Lobe.

• Jessie (Jiaxi) Yu has started a new role as an Account Coordinator at KlientBoost.

Do you or a peer have an update we missed? Let us know here!

The rise of generative AI technologies is reshaping how we tell stories, express creativity, and engage with each other. And with that, important questions are emerging. From ethical use to job stability, from authenticity to efficiency, we're in the middle of a fast-moving shift in the marketing and communication industries. These concerns are opportunities for us to shape into impactful precedents.

As a program grounded in empathy, strategy, and adaptability, we take these shifts seriously—it is crucial for us to be involved in these conversations. This includes recent feedback on our social media content around AI use. It reminded us how important it is to lead with transparency and intention. We are actively discussing internally how we can continue using emerging tools in ways that reflect our values of empathy, strategy, and human-centered leadership. You will see this evolve into something tangible in the near future.

This is a critical inflection point—both relevant and timely.