Leigh Gallagher is a senior communications executive, veteran business journalist and two-time author. She was most recently Director of External Affairs at Google, a role she was recruited to create in 2019 to deepen relationships with top editors, columnists and newsroom leadership while also serving as a source of media intelligence across Google’s global communications team.
Prior to Google, Leigh spent the bulk of her career at Fortune, where she served in a variety of roles, most recently as Editor-at-Large and co-chair and Executive Director of the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit. She also wrote and edited award-winning, long-form stories, relaunched the Fortune 40 under 40 list and grew it into a marquee leadership community, co-chaired the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference, helped convene additional Fortune events including the CEO Initiative and Fortune Global Forum and hosted Fortune Live, Fortune’s weekly 30-minute live streaming show.
Throughout her career, Leigh has been a sought-after on-air presence on broadcast outlets including MSNBC’s Morning Joe, CNBC’s Squawk Box, CBS This Morning, Face the Nation, CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper and others. For ten years she was a bi-weekly guest with Kai Ryssdal on public radio’s Marketplace. She is also a frequent moderator and keynote speaker.
Leigh is the author of two acclaimed books, The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions…and Created Plenty of Controversy and The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream is Moving.
Prior to joining Fortune, Leigh was a senior editor for SmartMoney magazine and a staff writer for Forbes.
Leigh is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a past visiting scholar for the Business and Economic Reporting program at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. Originally from Media, Pennsylvania, she is a graduate of Cornell University and lives in New York.