Ahead of the Daily Show with Trevor Noah’s debut next month, today The New York Times reports that they’ve hired standup, author, podcast host, and former Onion digital director Baratunde Thurston to lead the Daily Show’s digital production team. Thurston will work as a supervising producer and told NYT the digital team will work to embrace “all this media that has become highly fragmented and swipe-able and annoying in ways that Edward R. Murrow could never have imagined.†He also explained the potential for The Daily Show to expand beyond its 22-minute format: “There’s a lot of pent-up demand here to do some really fascinating things, and as we shift that focal point of the lens, beyond cable video news into other realms, the show itself will change. What can we say that is the Daily Show take on a space like Instagram? These places are real communities. They’re not just technical platforms. They’re like Soylent Green — they’re people.â€
The Daily Show with Trevor Noah premieres on Monday, September 28th.