Board Spotlight: Dan Petty

Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

Contact: LinkedIn

Graduation Year: WG'22 (West)

Concentration: Finance and Strategic Management

What do you do professionally? I am the director of audience strategy for ProPublica, a non-profit, non-partisan investigative news organization headquartered in New York with offices around the U.S. Our mission is to expose abuses of power and betrayals of the public trust by government, business, and other institutions, using the moral force of investigative journalism to spur reform through the sustained spotlighting of wrongdoing. I oversee a 12-person team responsible for expanding the reach and resonance of that journalism to local, national, and international audiences. Our group includes specialists in email, social media, including short-form video such as TikTok and Instagram, headline writing, search engines and data. The role is functionally like marketing, though we call it “audience development” in the news industry.

What are some interesting or exciting things about you? I moved to Denver in 2009 to be a summer intern at The Denver Post and then didn’t leave. I mostly worked in the digital department on social media and digital initiatives before detouring to the sports department, where I helped cover the Broncos, Nuggets, Avalanche, Rockies and Olympic and endurance sports. I worked my way up to leading a breaking news team there before jumping to the Post’s corporate parent company, MediaNews Group, in an audience development role. It was in that environment — working with people in finance, operations, and executive leadership — that I became interested in getting an MBA.

My wife and I — we met at the Post more than 15 years ago — have had a photography business since 2011 (so you might see me around Club events with a camera). We live in Littleton and now have two children, Eliza, 4, and Gabe, 1. I ran track and cross country for four years as an undergraduate, mostly 1500 meters on the track, though I greatly preferred cross country (no running in circles, please). I took years off after school and recently picked up serious training again after finishing my MBA. I’ve now run marathons in San Francisco, New York and Eugene, Ore., with Chicago on deck for the fall. I mostly train on the trails in and around Littleton (sometimes pushing a baby stroller), so if anyone is looking for an occasional training partner, please reach out!

How has your Wharton degree benefitted you? I wouldn’t have my current role at ProPublica without my MBA because of how it taught me to assess problems, think critically and analytically, and communicate effectively. I have undergraduate degrees in journalism and biology from the University of Richmond, where I stayed as far away from the business school as possible. I thought I’d end up being a kind of roving correspondent, but the industry began faltering in the late 2000s because of technological disruption.

I gravitated to an MBA initially because our industry has been so challenged by a collapsing business model, and I wanted — as a journalist — to be part of the solution for building a sustainable future for a profession so essential to understanding the world. Wharton surrounded me with amazing professors and bright students with experiences in a variety of industries, and I learned greatly from both. Getting an MBA was an accelerator to learning the core functions of business faster than just through just osmosis at work. Study enough case studies, and you start to recognize patterns in your own industry that suddenly don’t seem as scary because you’ve seen them before. More directly, I still use some of the forecasting models that Prof. Peter Fader taught us in Applied Probability Models in Marketing.

I’ve been fortunate to apply my learnings to consulting with news organizations and newsrooms in the U.S. and overseas for the International Center for Journalists in Kazakhstan and Sri Lanka.

What advice would you offer those alumni who recently completed Wharton? First, stay in touch with your classmates and your professors. It gets harder as life moves along, but I’m still part of group chats, and as I write this, I’m sitting in a hotel in Wyoming ready to run a half-marathon with a former Wharton classmate of mine.

Second: Become more involved in the Wharton Club of Colorado. It’s been a joy to meet so many fellow alums since we started again in 2021, and the Wharton network is unmatched. We have so many people in our group with varied interests, backgrounds and skills.

Is there any support you’d be open to providing to any local Wharton alum? Absolutely. I can speak most fluently about media, but I’ve also hired for a lot of roles in my career (again, mostly in marketing and media-type roles). Please reach out!

Are there any ways local Wharton alumni could help you or your company? We’re always interested in deepening the impact of our work and reaching new and broad audiences. If you have experience in building out successful social media strategies, particularly in video, I’m always interested in hearing about how others do that work.

What are your favorite hobbies? I already mentioned running. In the winter, I try to get some snowboarding in, but I’m looking to switch back to skiing after some 20 years because my daughter has shown some interest. Photography is a big passion, too. You can find me most evenings working through Wordle or spending time (fruitlessly) teaching myself Spanish and French on Duolingo.