Shayla Thiel Stern is a digital media veteran whose career spans 25 years as a leader of multi-platform initiatives, an author and strategist who has worked across disciplines in media, academia, marketing and the nonprofit sector.
Currently, as Vice President of Content Marketing at ServeMinnesota – the organization that oversees AmeriCorps for the state of Minnesota – Thiel Stern leads content, digital and social strategies that help her organization and their partners to engage donors and new AmeriCorps recruits. She previously has worked with clients including Count Chocula, Hormel, Yoplait and Blue Cross Blue Shield with digital and social strategies to reach targeted consumer audiences. She also was the Editorial & Content Director for PBS Next Avenue, a daily digital publication produced at Twin Cities PBS that reached a million baby boomers per month. In the late 1990s, Thiel Stern was a digital producer/editor for the team that launched The Washington Post to the web and supported Gannett newspapers as an affiliate relations manager at Cars.com.
After earning an M.A. in Communication, Culture & Technology from Georgetown University and a Ph.D. in Mass Communication from the University of Iowa, Thiel Stern went on to serve on the faculty at DePaul University College of Communication in Chicago and the University of Minnesota School of Journalism and Mass Communication in the Twin Cities. Her research focused on the intersections of identity and digital media, specifically looking at gender and youth. Her first book, Instant Identity: Adolescent Girls and the World of Instant Messaging, was published by Peter Lang in 2007. Her second book, From the Dancehall to Facebook: Teen Girls, Mass Media and Moral Panic in the United States, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2014. Her research also has appeared in the Journal of Radio & Audio, Girlhood Studies, Women in Mass Communication and several edited volumes, and she served as the editor of The Journal of Communication Inquiry. She has also published articles in The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune and was a nationally-syndicated newspaper columnist for King Features Syndicate.
Thiel Stern was the recipient of the Mary Ann Yodelis-Smith Award for Feminist Scholarship from the Association of Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, and is currently part of the 2019-20 Cohort of Leadership Twin Cities. She was a featured speaker at SXSW Interactive in Austin, Texas, in 2018, and has spoken at dozens of conferences in marketing, journalism and digital culture throughout her career. Thiel Stern also was the bassist in the Chicago rock band Brother Lowdown from 2000-2007, and currently resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with her family, dogs and cats.