Politico Names Two South Asian Americans to its Magazine and Global Audience Teams

Journalist and former federal prosecutor Ankush Khardori is joining Politico Magazine as a senior writer, and will “helm a reported legal column and reported stories,” the comply announced earlier this week. In a separate announcement, the publication appointed Zainab Khan to lead the Global Audience team as managing editor. She will “manage a team of editors across the Atlantic tasked with bringing data-led thinking to our editorial priorities to better understand our target audience, find them, encourage and incentivize them to come to our platforms and products, and stay for longer,” the Politico announcement said. 

Khardori’s appointment was published in Editor & Publisher by Politico communications director Melissa Cooke. She described the Indian American as “one of the most significant voices in analyzing this unusual moment in legal and political history.”

Born in 1982 in New York to parents who immigrated from Kashmir, India, Khardori spent his early years in New York City, after which they moved to Springfield, Illinois. Before entering the media industry in early 2020, he was a federal prosecutor who specialized in financial fraud and white-collar crime. Prior to that, he worked at a law firm in New York City doing standard law firm things in both commercial litigation and white-collar corporate defense. He clerked for a judge in the Southern District of New York. He graduated from Columbia University with a law degree and a B.A.

Khan most recently worked with Luminary, a podcasting company., where she was vice president of Strategy & Growth. Before that she was at the New York Times where she led video audience strategy on and off platform. “This included growing the YouTube, Instagram and X channels and producing the initial work to launch on TikTok,” Politico said. 

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Prior to The Times, she worked as an Audience Strategist at AJ+, Al Jazeera’s digital-first publication, working on Apple News & Youtube. As a graduate student at UC Berkeley, she launched her own digital media publication called Mozzified Muslim Pop Culture and a production company called Mozzified Studios, which “attracted a substantial online audience within its first year,” Politico said. She currently serves as a member of UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism’s Board of Advisors.