Miguel Neves, Editor-in-Chief of Skift Meetings, is here to listen, question, and disrupt the industry’s mirror maze.
He doesn’t hype. He doesn’t hide. He asks the questions we’ve all avoided.
The most powerful person in the room doesn’t always speak first. Sometimes, he listens.
Miguel Neves doesn’t chase headlines. He doesn’t churn out trend reports wrapped in sponsor-friendly euphemisms. He shows up. He watches. He tunes the room. And when he speaks, the signal cuts through the noise.
As Editor-in-Chief of Skift Meetings, Neves has become the rarest of voices in the business events world: a cultural translator with the instincts of a journalist and the ears of a sound engineer. His career is equal parts backstage tech and front-of-house editorial. And perhaps most importantly, he brings a moral clarity to an industry that’s long blurred the line between coverage and commerce.
Raised in Portugal, educated in the UK, and now living in Denmark, Neves grew up in international schools speaking English with what Americans mistake for a neutral accent. “Sometimes I feel most at home in the States,” he says, “because no one asks where I’m from.”
His father is a jazz bassist. Music was the first language he truly understood. Before events, before Skift, before publishing platforms and keynote experiments, there were bands. Not famous ones. Not profitable ones. The kind where people show up because they care about the sound.
“There’s no paycheck, no ego. Just a need to be in sync,” he tells me. “You can have all the money in the world, but if your team doesn’t share the same rhythm, it won’t work. Events are like that too.”
Neves came to events sideways. A role in the production crew at the MTV Europe Music Awards in Lisbon caught his imagination—not the artists, but the build. Hundreds of people, multiple countries, converging to create two hours of pure timing. That’s when he realized he wasn’t chasing applause. He was chasing alignment.
“I’m less interested in performance than I am in orchestration,” he says.
He tried and failed to run his own agency in Portugal. He then studied event management in London, and spent six years at IMEX. And then, as the pandemic truly flipped the industry, he stepped into the editor’s chair at Skift Meetings—an outlet known for travel journalism more than event critique. Until now.
“I didn’t expect to be in media,” he says. “But I knew what good sounded like. And I knew what was missing.”
That’s where the journalism comes in. Not brand marketing. Not industry cheerleading. Journalism.
“If no one’s uncomfortable, maybe we didn’t dig deep enough.”
Skift has published real salary data on DMO executives. They’ve questioned the ethics of pay-to-play panels and named the awkward truth: most major conference stages are filled with vendors, not planners.
“We need to hear from the people doing the work,” he says. “Not just the people selling services to them.”
He’s even redesigned how his own event—the Skift Meetings Forum—is structured. The 2025 edition, taking place on September 15 in New York City, will feature a concept he calls the “keynote listener.” Industry executives and association leaders are invited not to speak, but to listen—and reflect back what they’ve heard at the end.
It’s an act of humility. But also one of power.
“The idea is: show up. Be present. Don’t sell,” he says.
They will be listening dozens of industry heavyweights like Monique Ruff-Bell, Chief Program and Strategy Officer of TED Conferences; Anick Beaulieu, CEO of C2, Tavar James,Vice President, Global Head of Events at Forrester: Tahira Endean, Head of Program at IMEX; Cassandra Farrington Co-Founder and Board Chair Emeritus of MJBizCon and MJBizDaily; Bruce Revman, Co-Host City Manager of FIFA World Cup '26 New York New Jersey Host Committee; Carine Desroches Meetings & Events Director of the National Kidney Foundation; Judy Lee, Senior Director of Global Brand Experiences at Pinterest; Robyn Duda CEO & Co-Founder of RacquetX; Tiffany Kerr, SVP & Chief Marketing Officer of Visit Austin; Chris O’Brien, President of Sail4th 250; Marilyn Jackson President & CEO of the American Alliance of Museums; Alex Casolaro Director, Credential Sales at SXSW; Matt Parlier, Director, Event Initiatives and Strategic Partnerships of American City Business Journals; Martha J. Sheridan President & CEO of Meet Boston; Jessica Charles, Vice President of Programming & Events at Forbes; Kat Tooley, VP of Global Events and Experiential Marketing at HubSpot; Barbara Rohloff of Global Sourcing and Procurement Lead Category Manager at Prudential Financial; Al Hutchinson, Former President and CEO at Visit Baltimore; Howard Givner, CEO at Heathcote Advisory Group; Brendan Brown, Global Head of Strategy & Planning at George P. Johnson; Alice Harrington-Caravello. Managing Vice President, Sales and Distribution, US East at Marriott International; Colja Dams. CEO & Owner at VOK DAMS Agency and Jeanine Kelly, Senior Director, Event Operations at International Council of Shopping Centers
He’s also careful about the language we use. “Personalization” is a term he views with suspicion. “Real personalization isn’t about data. It’s about hosting,” he says. “It’s someone greeting you by name. It’s a card with a question that helps you start a real conversation.”
At his own events, Skift staff don’t stay backstage. They’re at the door. They walk the floor. They pay attention. Because how can you build belonging if your own people are hiding from the experience
Neves is quick to praise his editorial partners—senior editors Andrea Doyle and Barbara Scofidio—and his broader Skift infrastructure. But he’s equally quick to point out the stakes.
“We’re not here to make events look good,” he says. “We’re here to make them better.”
That means clear language. It means honest feedback. And it means calling out the soft rot of buzzwords, bias-ridden research, and internal teams who don’t attend their own sessions.
“The finance guy who never walks into a keynote, the IT lead who doesn’t know what the event’s about—that’s a systems failure,” he says.
He wants to fix it. Not with scolding. With listening.
And maybe that’s the essence of Miguel Neves. He doesn’t measure success by applause. He measures it by resonance. A room that hums. A story that lands. A planner who finally hears their own voice onstage.
“Support doesn’t mean being positive,” he says. “Support means being honest.”
And in this business? That’s rare.
The Bigger Problem He Wants to Solve
Before we get to that, it’s worth asking: what exactly does Skift Meetings do?
It doesn’t just aggregate press releases. It doesn’t parrot trade show talking points. Under Miguel Neves’s editorial direction, Skift Meetings has become something sharper—an editorial brand willing to publish what others gloss over. His team reports on the business of business events: who’s funding them, who’s speaking, who’s missing, and what the data actually says (or doesn’t).
“Too much of the industry is salespeople talking to salespeople,” he says. “We need objectivity. We need journalism.”
While the broader Skift brand covers public companies and investor movements in the travel space, Skift Meetings exists to bring that same rigor to the insular world of meetings. That means examining the budgets behind the keynotes. It means calling out inflated economic impact claims. It means asking: where’s the data—and who benefits from the version we’ve been sold?
Neves isn’t interested in fluff. He wants precision, context, and editorial nerve. He wants the meetings industry to stop quoting billion-dollar impact stats without showing receipts. And he’s tired of research reports that confirm exactly what the sponsoring organization wanted to hear.
“We’ve stopped covering some of those,” he says. “If the study isn’t methodologically sound, or it’s cooked to sell a tool or strategy, it’s not journalism. It’s just PR.”
Ask Miguel what keeps him up at night, and it’s not budget cuts or tech fatigue. It’s the deeper identity crisis of the event industry itself.
“We don’t know how to explain ourselves to people outside the bubble,” he says. “To investors. To policymakers. To the public.”
The language is part of it. The inside-baseball acronyms. The templated ROI claims. The inflated impact reports that no one outside the trade press believes.
“But more than anything,” he says, “it’s a refusal to treat what we do as serious. Strategic. Structured.”
His long game? Help the events industry grow up without losing its spark. Bring rigor to the rhetoric. Show the receipts. And make sure that when someone asks, Why do events matter?, the industry doesn’t fumble the answer.
“This isn’t about exposure,” he says. “It’s about clarity. It’s about giving the event world the narrative architecture it’s always deserved—but never quite claimed.”