• by Sara Guaglione , August 2, 2017

Gizmodo Media Group has hired Susie Banikarim as its next editorial director. She will oversee Gizmodo, Deadspin, Jezebel, Jalopnik, Kotaku and Lifehacker, as well as Splinter and The Root, which Katie Drummond, her predecessor, did not oversee.

Drummond left in April to become the first executive editor at The Outline, a startup digital publisher.

Banikarim has held senior editorial roles at ABC News, Newsweek, Daily Beast and Vocativ, where she was chief content officer until January 2017.

Most recently, she has been a filmmaker-in-residence at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, where she is producing and directing a documentary on media coverage of the 2016 presidential election.    

On Twitter, Banikarim wrote she is looking forward to working with a team “to build on GMG's important legacy of challenging, aggressive journalism.”

In a statement, she reiterated the importance of the coverage at Gizmodo Media Group: “The value of journalism that speaks directly to a diverse set of communities, while holding the powerful to account, challenging the status quo, and exposing hypocrisy cannot be overstated.”  

Starting Sept. 5, Banikarim will report to Gizmodo Media Group CEO Raju Narisetti, who joined the company last fall.

Narisetti stated Banikarim will work to "strengthen and reinforce our newsroom and its ethos, while finding smart ways to get our journalism—be it blogs, podcasts, video, television shows—in front of more audiences across more platforms.”

Gizmodo Media Group is the rebranded group of Gawker Media, which Univision Communications bought at a bankruptcy auction from Nick Denton for $135 million last year. Gawker has since shuttered.

Gizmodo Media Group is part of Fusion Media Group and a division of Univision.