Sam Ford

Sam Ford works with organizations on innovation approaches, audience engagement, cultural intelligence, and media/storytelling strategies. He has provided these services to a wide range of organizations, including Paramount/Simon & Schuster, Univision/Fusion Media Group, MIT, Peppercomm, WNYC, Lowe’s Hardware, WD-40, Kudelski Group, the University of Southern California, MacArthur Foundation, Microsoft, The Coca-Cola Company, Poynter, the U.S. Department of State, and University of Chicago’s Black Youth Project.

In addition to his Tow Center fellowship, Sam is also executive director of the nonprofit AccelerateKY, a research affiliate with MIT’s Program in Comparative Media Studies/Writing, a project co-lead with the University of Southern California Civic Imagination Project, an Innovation and Culture Fellow with the Western Kentucky University Innovation Campus, and project lead with the nonprofit Kentucky to the World. 

Sam is co-author of the 2013 book Spreadable Media, with Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green, an outcome of the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium research initiative Sam co-founded and helped manage. He has been a contributor to Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and Inc. and has written for Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, BusinessWeek, Advertising Age, Slate, The Huffington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, Harvard’s Nieman Lab, Knowledge@Wharton, Columbia Journalism Review, Poynter, and various other publications. He began his career as a reporter and columnist for various rural Kentucky newspapers and, in 2006, won a Kentucky Press Association award for his reporting.

More about his Tow Center projects here.