Bill Hankes

Bill Hankes is the Chief Communications Officer at Forbes. A longtime communications executive and entrepreneur in the journalism space, Hankes is responsible for developing and executing an integrated global corporate communications strategy that successfully reinforces the company’s business objectives. He works closely with the editorial, human resources, marketing, product, sales and technology teams to ensure all external and internal messaging aligns with the Forbes brand strategy and mission. In the entrepreneurial spirit that Forbes champions, Hankes is an entrepreneur himself and is founder of Sqoop, a news discovery service used in newsrooms around the world. Before founding Sqoop, he served as the senior communications executive and spokesman for both emerging growth and publicly traded technology and media companies. Most recently he was Director of Bing Public Relations at Microsoft and before that Vice President of Corporate Communications for RealNetworks. He has spoken regularly at journalism conferences including the SABEW Government Data Immersion Workshop, NICAR and IRE. Hankes has experience overseeing hundreds of global product launches, high-stakes litigation, crisis and reputation management, corporate acquisitions worth more than $1 billion, public-equity transactions worth more than $500 million and working on campaigns in more than 20 countries.