Maria Diokno Joins FRONTLINE as Director of Audience Development

Today, FRONTLINE, PBS’s flagship investigative journalism series, announced that Maria Diokno has joined the team as the series’ director of audience development.

Beginning Monday, July 19, Diokno oversees FRONTLINE’s audience development team — working with the series’ social media, publicity and data personnel to ensure that FRONTLINE’s award-winning journalism reaches PBS audiences everywhere, adapting to the rapidly evolving and crowded media landscape.

Coming from KQED in San Francisco, where she served as the executive director of brand and audience development, Diokno joins FRONTLINE as an expert in digital marketing, with extensive experience in audience engagement, social media strategy and digital marketing of original content.

“I’m incredibly excited to join FRONTLINE, since it has been key to making me more curious about the world and feel connected to more people,” said Diokno. “I want to help new audiences find what I did through FRONTLINE.”

“We are so pleased to have Maria join FRONTLINE and oversee our audience development department,” said Raney Aronson-Rath, executive producer of FRONTLINE. “Maria brings the perfect toolkit to FRONTLINE: a breadth of experience in cultivating audience engagement and fostering brand awareness, rooted in the appreciation of public media’s mission. We welcome Maria to our team and look forward learning from her and working with her.”

Diokno’s prior work includes overseeing social media campaigns and audience strategy at Everybody At Once (EA1), where she contributed audience-building strategy for well-known entertainment brands including BBC America, CMT, Starz, Discovery, SundanceTV, WNYC, and for professional sports team AS Roma. She also served as the editor-in-chief of My Damn Channel, where she developed programming and distribution strategy for an episodic web series, growing the series’ YouTube audience to over 1 million subscribers in a year.

Diokno attended Columbia University, in New York, where she studied writing. Her hiring comes one year after Pam Johnston, former director of audience development and strategy at FRONTLINE, was appointed general manager of GBH News.