HyperVocal - Internet Sherpas

Launched in October 2010, HyperVocal provides engaged Millennials of the so-called Facebook Generation with a comprehensive look at the complete, hyper-frenetic news cycle. We’re purveyors of the vital and the viral, online hunters and gatherers of what’s out there you need to see and read. We’re post-partisan Internet Sherpas, groundskeepers of rationality, arbiters of reality and pseudo-nonsense.

We’re also members of our community who strive to be a force for social good. To do our part, we will be donating a portion of our profits to education and literacy programs to help empower a hyper-literate and informed generation to follow. Every click really does help educate a child.

WHO WE ARE

Before launching HyperVocal, Slade Sohmer (Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief) spent much of the past decade as Lou Dobbs’ consigliere and executive producer, despite his strong dislike of fences and walls and in spite of his being “a liberal puke,” as Lou would remind him. GQ Magazine recently said that Slade “possesses brainpower mighty and flexible enough to enter and inhabit Lou’s mind and exit it unscathed each day.”

Slade helped build one of the fastest-growing syndicated daily talk shows in radio. But in his spare time he created an award-winning music blog that rates in the Top 20 on the web, along with a personal blog featured on several major news outlets and consistently linked to by the major traffic-driving social bookmarking sites out there.

He’s a 2001 graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and briefly attended the School of Hard Knocks before dropping out due to an overwhelming softness.

Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @hypervocal
Lee Brenner (Co-Founder & Publisher) has been a TV news producer (@CNN), a social media innovator (@MySpace) and an e-commerce entrepreneur (@ljbamboo.com). He also co-founded FastFWD Group, a strategic communications firm dedicated to promoting online web 2.0 social media strategies and marketing to often hard-to-reach demographics.

He has appeared regularly on MSNBC, NPR, CNN, and has been featured in a wide array of print publications, radio and blogs, commenting on the state of youth culture and the “new world” of online social/civic engagement & activism.

He graduated from Tufts University and holds a Master in International Affairs from the University of Hong Kong, where he was a Rotary International Scholar.

Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @deepdishpol
Cooper Fleishman (Managing Editor) is not the heir to a yeast-and-butter empire. He’s just a rube from small-town Ohio and the freshest, sometimes-beardiest face on the HV team.

After graduating from Kenyon College in 2009, he moved to New York to follow his dream of book-publishing glory. Once here, he sold dog food on the street and copyedited celebrity-gossip tabloids, finally landing as senior editor of the Good Men Project, where he served for a year before sneaking into HyperVocal.

Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @_cooper

Alex Gangitano (Editorial Assistant) asks the troubling, cynical, or serious questions that we struggle with every day. She responds to politics, pop culture, and day-to-day human interaction with, “Really?”

A Maryland native, she spends a good amount of time in Pennsylvania these days. She also, of course, helps keep the motor running on this here vehicle by working on blogger & social media outreach. A university student herself, Alex additionally oversees HV’s college partnerships.

Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @alexgangitano
James Kotecki hosts “Kitchen Table Politics,” HyperVocal’s live political talk show. Known for his comedic political video blog EmergencyCheese, he has appeared in/on The Economist, CNN, FOX News, NPR, CBS, the BBC, The Washington Post, and many other media outlets.

YouTube: Emergency Cheese
Twitter: @JamesKotecki