Missouri School of Journalism’s Damon Kiesow publishes first-ever textbook on news product management
COLUMBIA, Mo. — Damon Kiesow, the Knight Chair in Journalism Innovation at the Missouri School of Journalism, has authored his first book: a textbook on the increasingly important field of news product management published last month.
But that’s not the only first. “An Introduction to News Product Management: Innovation for Newsrooms and Readers” is the first textbook ever published about product management in journalism — the concept of bringing audience-centered business strategies together with editorial content, two disciplines that have historically been separated.
“I feel like we’ve all been wandering in the forest looking for clues,” Kiesow said of the lack of standardization in the field. “I think this puts a stake in the ground that allows people to cement their thinking on the topic and build on it.”
The book takes students from the concept, history and ethics of product management to practical approaches to research and other processes that go into the creation of products like newspapers, newsletters and advertising.
A key concept is that news should be data-informed, not data-driven — Kiesow noted that some in the industry are concerned audience-centered news products could result in publications simply producing whichever content is most popular (a data-driven scenario). A data-informed approach would ensure that content is always consistent with the public service mission of journalism even as data helps publications ensure audience needs are met.
I feel like we’ve all been wandering in the forest looking for clues. I think this puts a stake in the ground that allows people to cement their thinking on the topic and build on it.
Damon Kiesow
The work is informed by Kiesow’s decades of experience in a variety of roles in the news industry, from reporting, photojournalism and newsroom management to director of product at McClatchy.
Since joining the School in 2018, he has sought to use that experience to help the industry make better decisions that benefit both audiences and the fiscal health of news organizations.
“I became painfully aware fairly quickly that we were repeating the same pattern over and over again with new technology,” Kiesow said of his early experiences at newspapers. “Hey, there’s something new. What do we do with it? Let’s launch a new website, a new app. And that pattern wasn’t paying off in terms of revenue, engagement and audience growth — all the same stuff we’re struggling with today. So I pivoted to thinking, ‘let’s not focus on technology, let’s focus on reader needs.’”
That path led him to product management, a concept that had previously only been applied to unrelated industries such as consumer packaged goods — though according to Kiesow, news organizations had been performing the work for decades without knowing it had a name.
While he has strived to build a stronger human infrastructure of product thinkers through his work with the News Product Alliance’s Mentor Network (he is a co-founder of the NPA) and the annual Knight Nonprofit News internships, he leapt at the opportunity to introduce some standardization to the teaching of product management by writing a textbook. In fact, he said the book helped him improve his own teaching.
“I’ve been teaching product management for the past four years, but not systematically enough that I knew which parts I needed to be teaching first, second and third,” Kiesow said. “The book forced me to spend three years figuring out how to put this into a teaching framework that takes into account what students know — where they are on that maturity scale of understanding the basics.”
“An Introduction to News Product Management: Innovation for Newsrooms and Readers” was published by Routledge and is available now.
Updated: January 30, 2024