Getting started with Product in News: A glossary, a roadmap for transition and definitions around audience

This article was produced as part of the NPA Summit 2022 student newsroom. Learn more about this year’s students and the event.

During the 2022 News Product Alliance Summit, experts, newcomers and everyone in between came together to discuss what Product looks like in the news industry.

Here is an intro to news-product thinking, how to think about your path to make the jump from other newsroom roles to product and how to start defining your target audience.

Product thinking 101

One dizzying part of product work can be the terminology. As a newcomer, many can be lost when it comes to terms like “minimum viable product” and “net promoter score”. But you’re not alone — more than a third of attendees who attended the ABCs of Product Thinking workshop said they weren’t comfortable using terms commonly used by product managers.

Mary Tyler March, strategic planning editor for WAMU/DCist, Washington DC’s NPR news station, and Adriana Lacy, digital and audience engagement editor at the Nieman Foundation, broke down many examples of the jargon that are commonly used in the product thinking space.

Many phrases within product management are derived from tech but can also be seen mirrored in editorial terms. 

Take the term “release” for example. In product or tech it means to launch a feature or product, but it’s essentially the same thing as publishing content on the editorial side. Sometimes it’s not totally new concepts, but instead it’s just a reworking of similar concepts.

The presenters identified several complicated terms within Product including dependency, iterative process, workflow management style, Key Performance Indicators, Objectives and Key Results, prioritization, stakeholder management, usability testing and Minimum Viable Product. 

Turns out, there are dozens of terms like these. But newcomers shouldn’t worry if many of them sound unfamiliar. Many of the concepts overlap with ones already used in a news organization. The News Product Alliance has also broken down dozens of these common terminologies as a free glossary.

Lacy said there is one process borrowed from product thinking that is lacking in many newsrooms: documentation. Documentation is a record of procedures, workflows, processes and how they all work together. 

“Documentation is underutilized by the newsroom,” said Lacy. “A lot of times you may come into a new role and go like, ‘How do I figure out what to do?’. You don’t have a set rule of what to do. Document those workflows,” she added.

The presenters emphasized the need for newsrooms to document their own processes and projects alongside product professionals. According to Lacy, the key to documentation is keeping a record of workflows as much as possible. 

“A lot of times you may come into a new role and think — how do I figure out what to do? Document those workflows,” she said. “I am pretty much documenting everything I do at Nieman so that people have an idea of what I have done.”

Lacy highlighted a project management tool, Notion, that has good templates for documentation.

One useful part of making the jump from news to product is that you’ve already spent a lot of time learning the same skills as a journalist, the presenters said.  “A lot of times, a journalism background is really important [in product management],” March said.“What’s challenging is to get someone to take that chance on you. I have seen people move on from that and become great product managers.”

From newsroom to product

Editorial and product roles have a lot of overlap. 

So if someone is trying to make a leap from a newsroom role to Product, the key is identifying transferable skills, Rachel Kilroy, a product manager at Gannett, told attendees at her session “From 0 to 100 a journey from Newsroom to Product.”

“You need to have a deep understanding of how a newsroom works to build tools. You need to know how the workflow of journalists is. You need to know what users want, what are their pain points and base decisions off data and analytics,” Kilroy said. “I realized that I have done those things, that I have plenty of experience in data-driven experiences to enhance an experience for users and journalists.”

“A product team is responsible for implementing strategy, building the product roadmap and defining product features. These are the people who choose what gets built,” she said. 

Kilroy went on to highlight some of her “superpowers” that helped her transition from the newsroom to product. She also pointed out that Kilroy said even while in newsroom roles, there are opportunities to adopt product thinking. 

Interviewing and documentation skills that Kilroy learned on the newsroom side particularly helped her transition to her current role.

Talk to readers as prospective users and learn their needs and frustrations when consuming news, she said. Think about how business goals overlap with those of editorial. Build relationships. Ask questions.

All of these strategies can make the transition to product more smooth, Kilroy said.

Mary Tyler March, strategic planning editor at WAMU/DCist, told the student newsroom over Slack that she found it helpful to see the variety of organizations and careers talk about their transition to product.

“What I most loved was the framing of news skills as a ‘superpower’ when it comes to making the leap to Product – so many of those skills are crucial to product thinking, more than people might realize,” March said. The leap from editorial to product may feel daunting, but anyone who makes that leap has a unique set of skills and insights that can help them become a successful product thinker and leader.”

How to think about your audience

What qualifies someone as a “reader?” And why does the right definition for the audience matter?

Those were two questions addressed by Liam Andrew, chief product officer at the Texas Tribune, and Virginia Arrigucci, deputy director of RevLab at the Texas Tribune, during their “Readers, followers, subscribers, members, donors, users??” session at the News Product Alliance Summit. 

The terms we use influence how we think about audiences, design products, monetize content and track metrics and share with other publishers. There are many ways to describe your audience. You can call them a subscriber, follower, supporter, member — or really anything, the presenters said. 

But the way you define your audience is vital to understanding how to offer them value. “Does somebody use your product or are they looking at something?” Andrew asked around 45 participants at the workshop. “What actions are they taking? What verbs are they using?”

Kate Travis, one of the attendees, highlighted a situation where the use of some terminology backfired. “Asking our readers if they were subscribers got super messy when we realized people thought they subscribed because they got our weekly newsletter,” Travis said.

According to Arrigucci, the right term helps the customer understand what the publisher is doing. “It can be chaotic if we are not speaking the same language in the same team,” she said.

The key takeaway from the session is: language will always evolve, but product thinkers should always keep the readers — and their perception of the words used — in mind.

“I love the way this session empowered us to start to reframe, redefine and reimagine some of the language around how we talk about our goals, audiences and actions we want folks to take with the news products we create,’ Margaret Schneider, director of editorial projects at Alley, told the student newsroom over Slack. 

Schneider said the biggest takeaway was to go beyond the default framing that tools or analytics provide and to determine your own goals.

“We can imagine a future in which our ethics and values are foregrounded, where compassion and true connection with our communities is possible in a newsroom setting,” Schneider said. “And that begins with the language we use!”