NAB Announces 2026 Digital Leadership Award Recipient

Industry leader Michael Rosellini to receive recognition at the 2026 NAB Show  

Washington, D.C. — The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) today announced that Michael Rosellini will receive the 2026 Digital Leadership Award. Rosellini will be recognized at the We Are Broadcasters Awards Ceremony, held on the Main Stage of the 2026 NAB Show on Tuesday, April 21, in Las Vegas.

The NAB Digital Leadership Award, created in 2015, recognizes a broadcast executive who has played a pivotal role in advancing digital innovation and transforming traditional broadcast operations into successful multi-platform media businesses.

Michael Rosellini Celebrated for Powering Hearst Television’s Digital Future

Michael Rosellini, senior vice president digital services for Hearst Television, will receive the 2026 Digital Leadership Award in recognition of his transformative impact on local television’s digital evolution.

Promoted to his current role in 2023 after serving for a decade as vice president digital operations, Rosellini leads teams responsible for product development, engineering, data and operations across Hearst Television’s station-branded news websites and mobile apps, as well as its Very Local direct to consumer streaming platform.

He has overseen multiple end-to-end product redesigns, CMS migrations, and continuous modernization of the company’s digital video, data and advertising technology stacks. Notably, Rosellini and his team designed, built and launched a full suite of OTT and CTV applications in-house that power Hearst Television’s expansion into streaming under the Very Local brand. Rosellini also represents Hearst Television’s digital interests within key industry organizations, including the National Association of Broadcasters and Pearl TV, supporting collaborative innovation efforts such as NextGen TV.

Currently, Rosellini is playing a key technology role on the Hearst team working to help the advertising industry understand the fundamentally brand-safe attributes of local-news inventory through better AI driven contextual signals.

Since joining Hearst in 2008 to build its first in-house software engineering team, Rosellini has helped shape the company’s digital strategy from the ground up. An active mentor for colleagues, Rosellini is an alumnus of the Hearst Management Institute, an executive leadership training program. 

Download Michael’s headshot.

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