Lauren Rabaino

Lauren Rabaino is a Cal Poly alumna (Journalism 2009) who now works as the Chief Operating Officer at Vox Media, where she uniquely spans the intersection of journalism, design, technology, data, and revenue. Vox Media hosts a portfolio of eight influential brands focusing on key passion points — from politics to technology to food — that engage hundreds of millions of people monthly. She defines key areas high level operational focus, coordinates strategic planning, and organizes the execution of the company's priority initiatives that span all disciplines.  
 
Prior to working at Vox Media, Lauren was the news applications editor at The Seattle Times, and worked at various journalism startups aimed at reinventing the industry: Publish2, a peer-to-peer business seeking to replace the Associated Press; Spot.us, a crowd-funded journalism site that was one of the inspirations for Kickstarter; and CoPress, a student-created startup aiming to move college newspaper websites to open source software so they could sell their own advertising. 
 
She got her start in digital journalism as a high school student, where she founded her school's digital-only newspaper, learned to code and podcast, leaned on the community newspaper to learn about journalism, and led her school to win national news awards by the time she was 16.