Heartstrong brings generations of experience from the heyday of television news.
A combined 71 Emmy Awards, National Edward R. Murrow and many more.
Producing all content to move hearts and win them.
Legendary talent, unheard-of speed, world-class standards.
Collaborating with your team to produce the exceptional, in all formats to fit every platform where people live.
Michael Cogdill
HeartStrong is the vision of 32-time Emmy Award winning journalist, writer, and entrepreneur Michael Cogdill, who also holds the National Edward R. Murrow Award for television storytelling. Michael sprang from the good ground of hard working people in Western North Carolina to become one of the most honored media professionals in the world. Telling irresistible stories, with devastating honesty and magnetism, ranks among his high callings.
Michael knows non-celebrities harbor great value the world tends not to see. Sure, his interview and coverage credits include presidents and vice presidents of the United States. The names vary like the human race itself: Barack Obama, Abbie Hoffman, James Brown, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Strom Thurmond, Mitt Romney, Henry Kissinger, and plenty more of the big-media, starlit types. Yet the best of his stories rouse people to celebrate the humble, the quietly wonderful, and the undervalued. With HeartStrong, Michael vows not just to tell even more irresistible stories. He vows to serve the undervalued around the world.
As a driven student and professional, Michael believes most of us undervalue ourselves. HeartStrong will ignite the hidden value others tend to miss.
Michael is a cum laude graduate of the University of North Carolina at Asheville, where he transferred after excelling at the University of Georgia. He’s a lifelong learner who’s done on-line continuing education from the Harvard Extension School and Stanford University.
Michael is also a powerful and in-demand public speaker, committed to using that skill and his other still sets as a broadcaster and writer to promote the company and its products around the world.
Chip Baysden -Director of Photography
Chip is one of the most honored photojournalists in America. He holds 6 National Murrow Awards for storytelling and videography. His 38 Emmy Awards and 10 White House News Photographers Association First Place awards speak of a devotion to the deeply human story. In 2016, Baysden was named White House Photographer and Editor of the Year.
This honor remains exclusive to Chip, who won both Photography and Editing categories for the first time in the WHNPA 100 year existence. Baysden’s career as a photojournalist began in the city he grew up in, Charleston, SC. In 2000, He graduated from the College of Charleston and began a career that continues to make history. Michael and Chip have teamed for years in a collaboration that made awards history in television news and, later, in client-centered television content.