Draft:Lisa Napoli

Lisa Napoli is an American author, journalist, and radio host. She has worked at the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, American Public Media, and KCRW. Napoli is the author of Radio Shangri-La, Up All Night, Susan, Linda, Nina & Cokie, and Ray & Joan.

Early life and education
Lisa Napoli was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She attended PS 179, Ditmas JHS, and Midwood High School. Following high school, she attended Hampshire College, where she received a bachelor of arts in 1984. At Hampshire College, Napoli studied liberal arts and news in different media.

In 2021, she was enrolled at the CUNY Graduate Center, pursuing a master of arts in biography and memoir.

Career
Napoli began her career as a journalist in 1981 by joining CNN as an intern. She then became a video journalist at Headline News at CNN’s headquarters in Atlanta in 1984.

In 1986, Napoli was hired as a news producer at WGHP-TV, where she worked until 1988. As a freelance field producer, she worked at a variety of outlets including Medical News Network and The Paula Poundstone Show. In 1992, she covered Bill Clinton’s campaign and, later, the Waco massacre in 1993.

After serving as a founding producer of Q2 Resource Television, a division of QVC, Napoli joined Delphi Internet Services, which had just been acquired by News Corp, as a Director of Content Development. After that she moved to the New York Times Electronic Media Company as a reporter and columnist. She was one of the first journalists in the United States to cover the early dot-com era and the only full-time staff writer at Cybertimes. In 1999, Napoli an on-air internet correspondent and columnist at MSNBC/MSNBC.com, where she wrote "Napoli on the Net." In 2004, she joined American Public Media, where she served as a reporter and substitute host for the public radio show, Marketplace.

Next, Napoli served as an arts and culture correspondent at KCRW.

As an active member of the Biographers International Organization, Napoli helped co-create the group’s podcast. She teaches memoir-writing classes and works to shape and write memoirs for hire. She is a frequent speaker about her books and writing.

For over five years, Napoli led a cooking club at a non-profit organization, Downtown Women’s Center. [iii]

Publications
Napoli published her first book, Radio Shangri-La: What I Learned in Bhutan, the Happiest Kingdom on Earth, in 2010, describing her experiences and society in Bhutan, where she’d been invited to help start a radio station at the dawn of democratic rule.

Her next book, in 2016, was Ray & Joan: The Man Who Made the McDonald’s Fortune and the Woman Who Gave It All Away. The book focuses on the lives of the couple, Ray and Joan Kroc.

In 2020, she published Up All Night: Ted Turner, CNN, and the Birth of 24-Hour News, a biography of the founder of CNN and the history of the development of broadcast journalism in the United States. Napoli next wrote a group biography and the founding story of NPR titled Susan, Linda, Nina, and Cokie: The Extraordinary Story of the Founding Mothers of NPR, published in 2021.