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Alliance for Women in Media announces 2026 Gracies Leadership Award honorees. Sep 23, 2026, 10:13 ET Zenia Mucha to Receive Inaugural Gracies Vanguard Award; Kristen Welch to Receive AWM Legacy Leadership Award; Industry Leaders Recognized for Excellence and Impact NEW YORK, Sept. 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ - The Alliance for Women in Media (AWM) is pleased to unveil the distinguished honorees who will be recognized at the 2026 Gracies Leadership Awards on Monday, November 16, at Tribeca 360° in New York City. The annual event honors visionary women whose leadership, achievements and influence continue to shape the media landscape. Zenia Mucha, Chief Brand and Communications Officer at TikTok, will receive the inaugural Gracies Vanguard Award. The new award honors individuals whose foresight and ability to anticipate change help define the future of media and the audiences it serves. Throughout her distinguished career, Mucha has demonstrated how strategic leadership, powerful storytelling and cultural relevance can create lasting impact. As the inaugural recipient, she embodies the spirit of a true vanguard: expanding what is possible while helping set the course for those who follow. Kristen Welch, Chief Financial and Operations Officer at Illustrative Mathematics, will be honored with the AWM Legacy Leadership Award for her longstanding commitment to AWM and her contributions to the organization's mission to advancing all women in media. The following media leaders will be recognized for their accomplishments and visionary leadership: * Marilu Galvez, President and General Manager, ABC7/WABC-TV * Tina Perry, President, OWN TV Network & OTT Streaming * Julie Talbott, President, Premiere Networks * Erin Underhill, President, Universal Television "The women we honor through the Gracies Leadership Awards have not only achieved extraordinary success in their own careers, they have helped shape the future of media through their vision, leadership and commitment to excellence," said Becky Brooks, President of AWM. "For 75 years, AWM has championed the advancement of women in media, and we are proud to recognize leaders whose impact extends far beyond their organizations, opening doors, fostering innovation and inspiring the next generation of industry changemakers. We look forward to celebrating their remarkable achievements in New York this November." Tickets and additional information are available at allwomeninmedia.org/events/gracies-leadership-award. The Gracies Leadership Awards will also spotlight the next generation of women in media through the AWM Foundation Student Fellowships. The program provides female students pursuing studies and careers in journalism, broadcasting, digital media, communications, content creation, production and related fields, the opportunity to attend the luncheon and connect with influential leaders. Applications open September 29 and close October 16. Additionally, the luncheon will recognize the recipient of the 2026 AWM Foundation/NCTA - The Internet & Television Association Student Scholarship, with applications currently open through September 25. About the Alliance for Women in Media (AWM): The Alliance for Women in Media connects, recognizes and educates women across the media industry. AWM is a diverse community that facilitates industry-wide collaboration, education, and innovation. Established in 1951 as American Women in Radio & Television (AWRT), AWM is the longest-established professional association dedicated to advancing women in media. AWM harnesses the promise, passion and power of women in all forms of media to empower career development, engage in thought leadership, and drive positive change for our industry and societal progress. SOURCE Alliance for Women in Media

Should you use TikTok's new voice comments and polls? TikTok now lets you reply with 60-second voice notes and run polls in your own comments. What's actually worth the time, and what isn't. The short answer. Turn on TikTok's new comment polls if you already reply to comments regularly - they are low-effort and give you a live read on what your audience wants next. Voice comments are worth trying selectively, on posts where a spoken reply adds something text can't, but they are not a replacement for text replies and they take real time to record, listen to and moderate. Neither feature changes your content strategy. They change how much attention the comment section now deserves. What actually launched. TikTok announced a set of comment upgrades in early September 2026: voice comments up to 60 seconds long, comment polls with up to five options, and photo carousel comments that let someone attach up to nine images to a reply. Voice comments are restricted to accounts registered as 18 or over, and the rollout is staged globally over several weeks, so don't panic if you can't see the microphone icon in your comment box yet. The polls feature has a deliberate limitation worth noting: creators can only run a poll by commenting on their own video. It isn't a general-purpose polling tool for any comment thread. You post the video, then you comment on it yourself with a poll, and followers vote in the thread. Results track live. Voice comments: where they earn their keep. A spoken reply reads as more personal than text, and on a platform where authenticity is the entire currency, that matters. The obvious use case is a fan asking something you'd normally have to type out in three separate messages - a process question, a "how did you learn this," a correction to something you got wrong in the video. Thirty seconds of talking beats four paragraphs of typing, and it sounds like you rather than a canned response. The case against using them for everything is just as obvious. Voice comments can't be skimmed. You can't screenshot one into a highlights reel, and neither can anyone else, which means a genuinely good reply has a much shorter shelf life than a good text comment that gets liked and pinned for months. They also take longer to produce well - you either record something a bit rough, or you re-record until it sounds right, and that's minutes you didn't spend on the next post. Its working rule with clients: reserve voice comments for the handful of replies each week that genuinely benefit from tone - reassurance, humour, correcting a misunderstanding gently - and keep everything else as text. If a comment section starts turning into an audio inbox, engagement time balloons for no proportional gain. Polls: the better return on effort. Polls cost almost nothing to run and answer a question a lot of creators guess at instead of asking: which of two ideas should I make next, which thumbnail version do you prefer, did this explanation make sense. Because it lives in your own comment section rather than a separate app or a Stories sticker, you don't lose the audience to a different surface to get the answer. The honest caveat is that a comment poll only reaches the people who scroll into your comments, which skews toward your most engaged followers rather than your full audience. Treat the result as a read from your core fans, not a representative survey. That's still useful - your core fans are usually the leading indicator for what the wider audience will respond to a few weeks later - but don't over-index on a 40-vote poll as if it were market research. What this means for a repurposing workflow. Neither feature changes what you post. They change what happens after you post, in the part of the job that's easiest to let slide when you're already stretched thin producing the next piece of content. A poll result or a well-placed voice reply is a five-minute task that keeps a comment section active, which TikTok's own signals reward with more visibility on future posts in that thread and, modestly, on the account overall. The risk is treating a shiny new feature as a strategy rather than a tool. Corefbm has watched creators spend an afternoon recording voice replies to comments from three days ago, on a post the algorithm has already moved past, while the next video sits unedited. Comment engagement has a short window where it actually feeds distribution - respond within the first day or two, not once a week in a batch. If you're already behind on comments, these features won't fix that. They'll just give you a second format to be behind on. Fix the underlying cadence first - a fixed daily slot to clear comments, even ten minutes - and then layer in a voice reply or a poll where it genuinely adds value, rather than because it's new. Where this fits. Comment engagement is part of channel management, not an afterthought to it, and it's one of the first things that slips when a creator is doing everything alone. CORE handles both the repurposing work that keeps the content pipeline full and the day-to-day channel management - including working out which engagement features are actually worth a client's time and which are noise. No comments yet. Get these as they go out. Two a week, on what actually changed and what to do about it. No pitch. Corefbm only use it to send the posts. Unsubscribe any time.

TikTok US joins Lantern, the cross-platform child safety program where Google, Meta, Snap and Discord trade signals on bad actors. TikTok US is joining Lantern, a program that lets member companies pass each other signals about accounts and content tied to child sexual exploitation so the same people can be caught as they move from one platform to the next. Lantern started in 2023 and already has Google, Meta, Snap, Discord, X, Twitch, Microsoft, Apple, Roblox, Reddit and Anthropic in it, and members shared more than 2 million signals through 2025. TikTok US is also putting $2 million into modernizing NCMEC's CyberTipline, the line US companies are legally required to report CSAM to, in a three-year, $10 million project that AWS, Microsoft and Palantir are backing as well. Paul Drecksler is the founder and editor of Shopifreaks, covering the most important stories in e-commerce.