Thanks for a fantastic year, News Product Alliance!
The past year has been a monumental one for News Product Alliance—not only for our team but for our community of product thinkers and practitioners worldwide. That is why we wanted to thank you for making our favorite moments from 2022 possible, and for being a part of this generous and talented community.
Before we jump into 2023, let’s take a moment to look back at the most memorable moments of the past year and reflect on what we achieved together:
News Product Alliance turned two years old and our Slack community now comprises 1800+ product thinkers!
We’ve been growing fast, as has your participation in our Slack channel with 531 weekly average users and our newsletter with a 55% avg. open rate.
Throughout the year, we held 12+ monthly Community Zoom events and launched our Slack AMA series.
We hosted the NPA Summit in partnership with Open News, which brought together more than 480 news product thinkers to share ideas, make connections, and learn new skills.
With the support of our sponsors, we awarded 120 NPA Summit scholarship tickets — 90% of which went to women, people of color, and global participants.
We hosted a Student Newsroom that created a series of articles and posts based on conversations at the event. Articles were published on NPA’s blog.
More than 130 people who attended last year’s Summit said the News Product Alliance had a direct influence in helping them achieve their career goals in 2022, including job or title changes!
We quadrupled our budget through a healthy combination of B2B & B2C revenues, grants, sponsorships, and ticket sales.
Earlier this year we announced $900,000 in support from Google News Initiative and Knight Foundation to be used for new programming together with the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY for training initiatives, a mentorship program, and to enhance NPA's operational sustainability.
Thanks to the support, we expanded our program offerings to keep up with our ever-more-engaged community including workshops, networking events, coaching, moderated community spaces, and ongoing training opportunities.
In partnership with the Google News Initiative, we launched the Mentor Network Program, for which we received 310 applications from 50 countries, selected 150 mentees, and paired them with 50 News Product leaders. Part of our mission is to expand the diversity of news product thinkers in decision-making roles, and the Mentor Network is a prime example of this: more than 48% of our mentees and 40% of our mentors self-identified as leaders of color or members of other underrepresented groups in the media industry. These are not only numbers, it is at the core of everything we do to keep including diverse perspectives and backgrounds to build an equitable discipline.
As part of our shared goal of democratizing news product thinking, GNI and NPA also launched the Resource Library, a hub for our community knowledge including curated resources and Learning Paths containing more than 300 resources – many shared and/or authored by our community members! We will continue to make improvements to the platform and are commissioning and editing original content that will be launched within the coming months.
We trained students to get into their first product internships in media in partnership with J-schools across the country including the Missouri School of Journalism and the Reynolds Journalism Institute.
We partnered with the Newmark J-School at CUNY to expand the impact of the Product Immersion for Small Newsrooms, an 8-week-long program that helps journalists bring the Product discipline to their newsrooms. We hosted an online mentorship circle program and a series of culture change workshops for program alumni and supported two new cohorts of the program.
We launched and published 18 guides in Product Kit, and most of them have been translated into Spanish and Portuguese. Product Kit is a growing catalog of community-created product guides for news organizations developed by Jessica Morrison in collaboration with News Catalyst and News Product Alliance. Support for the Product Kit comes from the Knight-Lenfest Local News Transformation Fund.
To reiterate our commitment to taking NPA and its message global, we started building our network of non-English speaking communities. We launched our first national NPA chapter in Brazil earlier this month with the support of Google News Initiative and Marco Túlio Pires 🇧🇷.
Participants of the first national NPA chapter in Brazil design thinking workshop on Dec. 8th, 2022.
NPA is currently on track to becoming our own independent 501(c) (3) non-profit organization! So we made a point to keep learning about your needs to better tailor our programs and initiatives in the years to come.
We conducted our first-ever community survey in partnership with Carla Nudel. We received nearly 150 responses – you rated us a Net Promoter Score of 9/10!
We loved what you had to say about how generous this community is to emerging product leaders:
“Love NPA and how inclusive the community is and open to sharing knowledge. I wouldn't have come across NPA initially if not for the scholarship to the inaugural NPA summit, which included welcoming language for folks like me to join (...). Just this week I was recommending NPA to a fellow journalist of color (a woman) who was interested in building up skills in product development and was unaware of NPA”.
Lastly, we have already started thinking about what is next!
Last month, we held our first-ever in-person team and board meeting in New York City, in which our leadership laid out plans to make 2023 NPA’s best year yet.
News Product Alliance Team & Board of Directors during first in-person meeting, Dec. 1st, 2022. From left to right: Aaron Williams, An Xiao Mina, Tony Elkins, Luciana Cardoso, Anita Zielina, Samanta Leguizamón, Sharon Moshavi, Marcelo Fontoura, Tawanda Kanhema, Felicitas Carrique, Peter Bittner. Not pictured: Becca Aaronson and Elite Truong.
We couldn’t have done any of this without YOU, the NPA community! Thank you for all the amazing support and participation. Here’s to a fantastic 2023, where we will continue to build and expand upon our progress this year, and empower news product professionals and developing news product talent to create ethical and sustainable digital media businesses around the world.
Wishing you happy holidays and an excellent New Year!
Did News Product Alliance support you on this trip around the sun? Do you have ideas or feedback you want to share with us? We want to know! Please let us know by sharing with us via Slack or to hello@newsproduct.org.