ProPublica announced Friday that award-winning journalist Katherine Wells will join the organization as its first executive producer for audio in May. In the role, she will help build a team to develop audio programming and forge partnerships aimed at sharing our reporting with audiences that get their news via podcasts and radio.

In her previous job as audio editor-at-large at Vox, she oversaw narrative shows, including “Unexplainable,” and developed new shows, including “Explain It to Me,” which answers reader questions and showcases Vox’s reporters, and “Good Robot,” which explores complex ethical questions about artificial intelligence.

Before Vox, Wells was the executive producer for podcasts at The Atlantic. There she led the creation of the podcast “Floodlines,” which won a 2021 Peabody award and was described by The New Yorker as a “triumph on every level” when the magazine named it the best podcast of 2020. She also created the weekly show “The Experiment,” which translated Atlantic writers’ pieces into narrative audio.

She has previously worked at Gimlet, where she was the founding executive producer of “Every Little Thing,” and she has produced episodes for Radiolab’s “More Perfect,” “Freakonomics Radio,” “Science Friday” and “The New Yorker Radio Hour.”

“We were looking for someone who had experience building an ambitious audio project from the ground up, and Katherine has spent the last several years doing just that,” said Ginger Thompson, a managing editor at ProPublica. “We feel incredibly lucky to have her aboard.”

“I’ve long admired ProPublica’s work and am honored to join at such a crucial moment,” Wells said. “I’m looking forward to collaborating with so many journalists I admire and bringing their essential reporting to new audiences through audio.”