Listen and Learn — The New Yorker, July 9, 2012

“ … It was 1991. The multimedia World Wide Web hadn’t established itself yet. Cohen and her staff built their computer newspaper in HyperCard and served it locally. (“Stanford students who want to view the ‘newspaper’ will be able to call it up from any high-end Macintosh, from the Classic II on up, that is linked to the campus network,” a 1992 news release boasted. “Readers will be presented with a table of contents, from which they can transfer one or two stories at a time onto their own computers.”) Downloads took three to five minutes. “I was just hooked,” Cohen says. “I wasn’t interested in pursuing traditional journalism anymore.” When she graduated, she turned down a few print jobs of the kind that editors of élite campus dailies used to glide into, and bartended for a year, looking for something more in line with her interests.

That something turned out to be HotWired, the Web-magazine arm of Wired, which launched, in 1994, with a mandate to bring journalism online. Cohen began as an intern and stayed for six years. The experience helped to teach her how readers approached the media world of the Internet. HotWired sold the first banner ad on the Web (“Seriously, sorry,” Cohen says) and was one of the first Web sites to feature reader-comment sections below articles. It also carried her to TED, which she first attended in the winter of 1998. …”

Giving Away Information, but Increasing Revenue — The New York Times, April 16, 2007

“... Yesterday, TED introduced a Web site that offers about 100 of its TED Talks, the polished 20-minute presentations for which the conference is renowned. The new site will generate more advertising revenue for TED, but more important, conference leaders said, it will expose TED’s content to millions of people who would otherwise never attend the event.

In so doing, TED is at the vanguard of a trend in the conference industry, where organizers have begun to exploit assets that in years past evaporated as soon as speakers left the stage.

“I’m so struck by it anytime I’m at a great event,” said June Cohen, director of media for TED, a nonprofit business based in New York. “That was so wonderful, but now it’s gone. It’s a shame they’re not captured and preserved.”

Ms. Cohen said TED’s organizers began posting last June a handful of free videos from past conferences on TED.com, with “fairly aggressive goals for how I thought they’d do. But we blew past those pretty quickly.” By January, the number of TED Talks on the site had grown to 44, and they had been viewed more than three million times.”

A Web That Speaks Your Language — The New York Times, May 16, 2009

“TED began the video-translation project expecting to use mostly professional translators, even though the site had received unsolicited translations from fans of particular talks. “We thought professional translation was the only way to ensure high-quality work,” explains June Cohen, executive producer of TED Media. The shift to volunteer translators came last fall, after Ms. Cohen and her colleagues — the roughly 20 full-time employees speak 14 languages among them, she says — read several volunteers’ translations and were impressed.

“The volunteers are deeply committed to making the best translation, and they don’t care how long it takes them,” she explains. “There is a passion there that you don’t get from hired guns.”

The Oral History of TED, a Club for the Rich That Became a Global Phenomenon: A look at just how ideas go viral. — WIRED Apr 20, 2017

Wait, What Makes A Great Media Company? — June Cohen and Deron Triff Interviewed by Steffi Czerny. DLD Conference (May 2017)

Civil Society & Tech - A Benevolent Partnership?  — June Cohen and Reid Hoffman in Conversation. DLD All-Stars. (Feb 2021)

On The Road  — June Cohen interviewed by Ingrid Vanderveldt (July 2010)