Understanding News Product Management is Key to A Sustainable Future for Journalism

A recommendation for Damon Kiesow’s textbook and teaching product in journalism school

One of the challenges of teaching engagement journalism is that sometimes in our work listening to communities we uncover needs that we can’t realistically meet. It’s important to have clarity about our capacities because otherwise we risk over-promising and under-delivering, which undermines our fundamental goal of building trust. At times, however, it can be difficult to determine how to set priorities and understand how to best use the resources available in our collaborations with communities to meet information needs.

My friend Damon Kiesow, Knight Chair for Journalism Innovation at Mizzou, has written a comprehensive, clear, and practical guide on news product management that helps to solve that challenge and can assist not only people in the field but also journalists that aren’t working in formal product roles but need to make data-informed decisions about the ways they can best serve communities.

Although the word “product” is of course right there in the title, journalism can also and perhaps more aptly described as a service, as my colleague Jeff Jarvis and I have long argued; instead of defining the value of journalism as simply creating content, we can think about it more in terms of what it accomplishes and how it makes people better informed. This book gets that and emphasizes the many ways in which journalists can better understand a community’s goals and develop the best ways of reaching them. Listening is the core of engagement journalism and product thinking: Listening before you build a product, as you refine it, and as you continue to make adjustments to improve over time as contexts change.

This book is immensely practical, offering an array of frameworks to guide decision making and prioritization and workflows. It also has a nice, accessible rundown on research methods that can inform journalism. Surveys can be dangerous in the hands of students that haven’t had comprehensive coursework in understanding their limitations and how to word questions, get an adequate sample, and more. This book does a pretty nice job of laying out some basic criteria for a good audience survey. It does the same for interviews and focus groups.

Many students drawn to engagement journalism have seen the ways in which media has traditionally failed many communities, and they hope to build projects and organizations that will do things differently, driven by listening and collaboration. They need to understand the basics of business and sustainability of news, and this knowledge is applicable across many different kinds of news organizations, including nonprofit startups that hope to usher in a more inclusive future. Even the most exciting models like news cooperatives need to have some kind of framework for decision-making because time is never unlimited and any organization hoping to pay its employees and stay afloat for the long term needs to be armed with a basic understanding of how to allocate its resources. It is also valuable to understand some of the basics of organizational change in existing newsrooms and what can get in the way.

I also think product management training is helpful to engagement journalists who want their reporting to better reflect community needs and are always looking for a few new tricks or insights; human-centered design practices have always been a big part of my journalism teaching and there is good description of those in the book.

There is a news product course as well as an entrepreneurial journalism class in the engagement journalism program at the Newmark Journalism School at CUNY, where I was formerly the founding director, and I think there are many journalism courses that could benefit from having such a detailed resource as this text, not to mention any journalists who are thinking about creating something new or trying something different.

I especially appreciate that Damon emphasizes ethics and mission throughout. As he points out, Pew Research has found that 59 percent of survey respondents in the U.S. believe that the news media do not understand them or people like them. Instead of being a manual for creating new news organizations and products that look more or less just like like the ones that came before them, news product management can help us build better ones.

The book points out that is is important, at every stage of decision-making, to check for the kinds of cognitive biases that have long resulted in journalism that underserves many communities. Among the more subtle but important ones: “We tend to prefer immediate vs. longer-term payoffs; we inordinately trust our instincts even if we have been wrong in the past, and we favor data we have seem more recently or most frequently.” We may have implict or explicit biases against non-subscribers, historically-excluded populations, less frequent news readers, younger audiences, and more.

A few more useful bits:

• Desirability, feasibility, sustainability is a core test for any news product or service. Essentially, is there a real need; do we as an organization have the capacity to meet the need; and can we meet the need over time.
• A core question, which is also what engagement journalists ask ourselves all the time: “Who is our community? What met and unmet needs do they have? Which of those needs align with our org values and mission? Can we develop valuable solutions? How will those solutions be sustained?”
• The mission is always paramount: “For news, creating knowledge is the goal. Our anchor is a close understanding of the information needed for residents to make decisions and act to improve their individual and civic lives.”
• Product management in journalism has grown as a discipline to meet the needs of changing industry. “Over the last 30 years, news organizations have (sometimes grudgingly) moved toward the relationship model — recognizing that understanding reader needs is the safest path to successful innovation and revenue growth. News product management is a formal expression of that realization.”