Today, I’m thrilled to finally announce that Betsy Morgan, former CEO of The Huffington Post and most recently CEO of TheBlaze, is joining the Chartbeat Board of Directors.

I say finally because it feels as though Betsy has been advising me and Chartbeat since day one. She’s been an incredible partner, sharing her experience and expertise generously with the Chartbeat team.

In fact, years ago, Betsy contributed a guest post for Chartbeat in which she said something that I think about often:

“Data needs to be used as a conversation starter – a way of getting people to think about things in a different way.”

I think of Betsy as the conversation starter for the media industry. She gets us to think about content, data, and business in a different way. There are few, if any, people in the same league as Betsy in our industry. Her experience is unparalleled.

Betsy led TheBlaze for the last five years, where she grew the site’s audience from five to thirty million uniques a month, while simultaneously building TheBlaze TV’s IP-delivered subscription model, which has since become the industry standard for many celebrity-based content businesses. Prior to leading The Huffington Post, Betsy spent ten years at CBS where she was Senior Vice President for CBS Interactive and the General Manager of CBSNews.com.

We share Betsy with LearnVest, Goldieblox, Zemanta, TheSkimm, and Sidewire, among others where she’s an advisor and with Colby College and Mentoring USA where she’s on the Board of Trustees and the Advisory Board, respectively. As well, she serves on the Media Council of Springboard.

Unsurprisingly, Betsy has been repeatedly listed on Business Insider’s “Silicon Alley 100,” as well as named one of 27 Business Insider’s “Game Changers” of 2011. In 2012, she was named one of “20 Women to Watch” by Columbia’s Journalism Review.

To say we’ll learn a lot from her is an understatement.

Thanks for coming aboard, Betsy.