ABOUT MORIAH POLK
I MAKE THINGS PEOPLE ACTUALLY WANT TO WATCH, READ, AND SHARE.
I’m Moriah: a content creator, journalist, host, producer, fashion writer, and occasional enemy of the phrase “good enough.” My work lives somewhere at the intersection of editorial, entertainment, social media, and creative strategy, which is a sophisticated way of saying that I like making good things and figuring out how to make them even better.
My governing philosophy is fairly simple:
Don’t be boring.
The internet is an extraordinarily crowded place. Expertise matters, but expertise without personality is a textbook. Production value matters, but polish without a point of view is expensive wallpaper. Whether I’m developing a video concept, writing about fashion and beauty, hosting on camera, or translating an editorial franchise for social media, I’m interested in the same question: Why would someone care?
Sometimes the answer is a genuinely useful piece of reporting. Sometimes it’s an unexpected format, a sharper joke, a better question, or a celebrity interview that gives its subject something more interesting to do than sit in a chair and promote their latest project. The medium changes, but the imperative doesn’t: make something worth paying attention to.
I’m also fascinated by what happens after the good idea. I have a somewhat inconveniently dual brain: one half wants to make things; the other wants a spreadsheet explaining precisely how we’re going to make them again. I love identifying what works, studying why it works, and building systems around the repetitive parts so creative people can spend more of their time being creative. To me, great content strategy is not a choice between imagination and efficiency. The fun is figuring out how to have both.
WHAT I'M DOING NOW
These days, I work across some of the most recognizable names in fashion, luxury, and lifestyle media, including ELLE, Harper’s BAZAAR, Town & Country, Esquire, VERANDA, and ELLE DECOR. My work spans creative strategy, social video, production, editorial, and the less glamorous but deeply satisfying business of creative operations.
A large part of what I do is translation, though not the linguistic kind. Editorial brands have decades of authority, franchises, reporting, and distinctive points of view. My job is often to ask what that intellectual property should look like somewhere else. How does a recurring editorial column become a social series? How does an idea built for one platform behave on another? What deserves to be replicated, what needs to be reinvented, and what should never have left the group chat?
Then we test. We look at the data. We learn. And when something works, I like to codify the parts that should be repeatable while leaving enough oxygen for editors and producers to experiment. The objective isn't creative work by assembly line. It's eliminating the assembly-line work that gets in the way of creativity.
I write, too. My editorial work has included fashion, beauty, shopping, and travel for publications including ELLE, Harper’s BAZAAR, Esquire, and Town & Country. I approach writing much the way I approach video: authority and personality are not mutually exclusive. A reader can leave knowing more than when she arrived without feeling as though she has accidentally enrolled in a seminar.
Before Hearst, I worked at Condé Nast during the expansion of its entertainment business, including on the first livestreamed Met Gala and Vanity Fair Oscar Party. Working on live social coverage taught me one of the internet’s more brutal laws: during a cultural event, speed is not merely operational. It’s editorial. Capturing, formatting, tagging, and distributing the right moment while everyone is still talking about it requires creative judgment and a rather intimate relationship with the clock.
Across all of it, I’m interested in the same larger project: making editorial ideas travel. From article to video, long-form to short-form, publication to platform, concept to repeatable franchise. Good ideas shouldn't be trapped inside the format in which they were born.
BEFORE ALL OF THAT...
None of this was particularly accidental.
In seventh grade, I made a ten-minute mockumentary about Disney Channel stars in which I played the star, her singing coach, her dance coach, and assorted other characters. There were lower thirds. There were quick cuts. There were credits. There were, regrettably or admirably, production values. I did not yet know the phrase “multi-hyphenate.” I did know how to commit to a bit.
That instinct eventually followed me to the University of Southern California, where I was initially admitted to study acting and comedy before moving into communication and later earning my master’s degree in journalism from the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
USC gave me the chance to become dangerous in an unusually broad number of media disciplines. I performed sketch comedy on USC Comedy Live, hosted entertainment talk show The SCoop, and worked across live television production doing everything from camera operation and audio to graphics and control-room production. In journalism school, I reported and wrote digital stories, produced television packages, edited audio, and coded websites. I know my way around HTML and CSS. I will not be building the next operating system.
Along the way, I also made YouTube videos, contributed quizzes to BuzzFeed during the great quiz-industrial complex of the 2010s, and spent two years as a Victoria’s Secret PINK campus representative. That role became an unexpectedly formative education in social media, experiential marketing, audience development, influencer management, and branded content. I later appeared in PINK’s Girl Power campaign, working on shoots in New York and Los Angeles and getting an unusually early look at how a major brand constructs an identity across platforms.
Looking backward, the resume is less eclectic than it initially appears. I’ve spent most of my life doing variations on the same thing: writing, performing, producing, editing, experimenting, and figuring out how ideas find their audiences.
