Hi, I’m Markham Nolan. I’ve led digital teams in the greater New York area and in Ireland. I drive operations & innovation where technology meets content & strategy.
HOW I THINK
I build teams to find, understand & enthrall users, & turn them into loyal visitors. I assemble groups across disciplines, divisions & timezones to make you more focused, efficient, happy & creative.
I help companies develop and refine go-to-market & digital strategy and build effective content operations. I speak fluently to designers, developers, marketeers and sales teams.
WHAT I’VE DONE
NOAN
2023 - present
Recount Media
2022 - 2023
WWE
2019 - 2021
CBS News Digital
2016-2019
Vocativ
2013-2016
Storyful.
2010 – 2013
I’m co-founder of NOAN. NOAN is the AI-powered business-building platform. It basically gives small businesses the strategic power of a global consultancy like Accenture or McKinsey. It also stores all your company strategy and deploys it like a custom LLM, meaning you can create all your content at speed, and at scale, all aligned to that strategy.
I was Chief Operating Officer at Recount Media. Founded in 2019, The Recount was acquired out of Recount Media in early 2023 by The News Movement. I joined in early 2022 to lead audience & product development initially, but soon assumed the role of COO to effect a major restructure and strategic realignment, prepare the company for sale, and lead the due diligence process.
I was VP of Media Operations at WWE. I led six teams managing strategic programming of WWE content & its delivery to all digital platforms. That included the award-winning 1.5-million subscriber WWE Network, a 77-million-subscriber YouTube channel, and a network of social accounts with more than a billion followers. I worked on international distribution deals, product and delivery tech enhancements, original and PPV scheduling strategy, monetization & metadata strategy and ensured it all came together the right way to drive acquisition and retention around the globe, around the clock.
Editorial, Growth & Engagement at CBS News Digital. I brought together teams of journalists, product specialists, engineers, marketers and more to grow digital audiences for the streaming OTT news product CBSN & the hugely underrated CBSnews.com (a 4-billion-PVs-a-year giant). For a little over a year, I also ran the CBSnews.com news team directly, making daily coverage decisions.
In order to drive significant change in how CBS News used content to reach more and more news consumers, I bridged gaps between divisions: digital-to-legacy, product-to-editorial, marketing-to-everybody. I rolled out Slack across the news organization (helpful after I left, when COVID hit!), worked on email newsletter roll-out, push notification and cross-platform distribution strategy and generally wore a lot of hats. I learned a lot about broadcast, and how to help it relate to digital users more effectively. CBS News is a complex, storied institution full of amazing people dedicated to explaining America to America. CBS Interactive, similarly, brings magic to millions every day.
I was Head of Visual Storytelling at Vocativ, having started there as Managing Editor. Again, a lot of hats. My primary role was bridging gaps between cultures and divisions and levels of technological experience to create unique and effective newsgathering and storytelling workflows. I managed teams in New York and Tel Aviv; one team was largely post-military-service digital analysts, the other made up of dyed-in-the-wool American journalists. I built a data journalism & visualisation team there from scratch before leaving. I’m proud of that. It was a great introduction to American media and a steep learning curve
Before that, I lived in Dublin, Ireland, where I helped build Storyful, the world’s first social media news agency and did a lot of this. We helped define how the news industry thought about newsgathering via social media and built pioneering, technical workflows that are now part of modern journalism’s best practices.
NewsCorp bought Storyful for $25m, so they obviously liked what we built. If you want to understand more about me, or go deeper into my odd resume, look for Markham Nolan on LinkedIn. (There is one other Markham Nolan out there – we are very different people.) It was group of outstanding journalists who are now off winning prizes for the NYT, CNN and others.
The Rest.
Pre-2010
I bought a basic film SLR camera in 1996, taught myself photography and a few months later, essentially started out in media as a sailing photographer in Dublin, aged 17. After a few tours in newspapers and magazines, and a handful of detours, including leading teen programs in the Caribbean, volunteering in an orphanage in Tanzania, and two years running an embroidery factory (!), I found my way into digital journalism. I have spent my life telling stories & teaching, using images & text to make sense of the world in creative ways.
My career started with content, but what I love most about my role now is building teams. Helping people identify and realize their potential allows me and the teams I manage be more effective, and helps everyone enjoy their jobs, and thus lives, more. I consider myself a constant coach, a high-EQ mentor and a direct, unambiguous workplace communicator. I love working with people to find a better way, to take an opportunity and blow it up into something amazing.
Last but by no means least, I wrote a screenplay for Brendan Gleeson. Do be a dear and pass it on.