ELIZABETH SPIERS is a digital media strategist and entrepreneur who was the cofounder of Gawker and later, Breaking Media. She consults to media companies, digital startups, and progressive organizations. She is currently a contributing writer to the opinion section of The New York Times, a co-host of the Slate Money podcast with Felix Salmon and Emily Peck, which covers finance news of the week, a co-author of Slate’s Paydirt column, and she teaches a class on innovation in media in the Studio 20 program led by Jay Rosen in the Graduate School of Journalism at NYU. She is also a co-founder of and advisor to The Barbed Wire, a progressive Texas media company.

She was formerly the editor in chief of The New York Observer and editorial director of Observer Media Group, where she oversaw the flagship newspaper and its digital analogs, and a variety of print and digital trade and lifestyle publications.

As a journalist, she has been a columnist at Fast Company and Fortune and contributed to a variety of publications, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Daily Beast, The New York Review of Books, New York Magazine, The New Republic, and GQ. She is the co-author of Slate’s Pay Dirt column about the ethics of money.

She is a Young Leaders Forum Fellow alumna of the National Committee on United States-China Relations. She previously taught for six years in SVA’s Design Research MFA program.

She also serves or has served on the advisory boards of Flavorpill Media, Counsyl, OfAKind, Selfie, Clade, and Wall Street Cheat Sheet, and is a mentor in the Techstars program. She was named one of Fast Company’s Most Influential Women in Technology in 2010.

Prior to the Observer, she was the founder of Breaking Media, a digital media company, where she launched Dealbreaker, AboveTheLaw, and Fashionista.com.

She was also the founding editor of Gawker, Gawker Media’s flagship site which she launched with publisher Nick Denton in December of 2002. Gawker grew to become the largest blog network in the United States, before its untimely demise in 2015.

As a consultant, she has developed, launched, and grown new media products for a variety of brands and companies, including Casper, b5Media (acquired by Alloy), Condé Nast, McGarryBowen, and Flavorpill among others.

Prior to Gawker, Spiers was a buy-side financial analyst focusing on small cap tech equities and early stage venture capital.

Spiers earned a B.A. in Public Policy Studies and Political Science from Duke University.

She has spoken at various media and technology conferences and been a guest commentator on CNN, MSNBC, and NPR, and guest lectured at Columbia, CUNY, NYU, Duke, and the International Center of Photography.