The past year has been a memorable and exciting one for News Product Alliance—not only for our team but for our community of product thinkers and practitioners worldwide. The start of 2023 has offered some hints that this year will be no different. We are now an official IRS-approved non-profit corporation and will be expanding our Board of Directors to keep up with the opportunities and responsibilities of becoming our fully independent organization. 

Last year we set up to become our own independent organization as this would allow us to expand News Product Alliance's capacity to train, connect and identify job opportunities for an emerging network of journalism product specialists whose roles sit at the intersection of business, editorial, technology, and audience.

As we prepared for 2023, we learned that we had been granted 501(c)(3) status by the IRS, which means donors can deduct any contribution made directly to the NPA, and we are qualified to receive any tax-deductible requests, grants, transfers, and gifts. This is a huge opportunity for growth but it also entitles the responsibility of establishing resilient operations for the future.

In that same line, we decided to expand organizational expertise by incorporating two new members to our Board of Directors and we now welcome Upasna Gautam and Nick Petrie. 

The NPA Board’s role is to help set high-level strategy for the organization, in collaboration with our Executive Director, and provide financial and governance oversight. Board members often chair or join committees to help implement initiatives and goals.

The latest additions bring the board size to nine directors up from seven. Anita Zielina, NPA Board Chair shared: “For a rapidly growing global nonprofit like NPA an engaged, passionate, diverse, and knowledgeable Board is crucial. We’re thrilled to add 2 new board members to our organization after a thorough search process – further setting up the organization for success!”

Meet Upasna and Nick! 

Upasna Gautam is a Product Management Leader on the Digital News Platforms team at CNN, where she works with CNN's engineers, designers, editors, and journalists to develop and optimize the content management technology that delivers breaking news to the world. 

Upasna has been working in the tech industry for the last 15 years, where she has been an integral part of delivering technical, data-informed solutions for brands such as Ford Motor Company, Valvoline, PCMag, Mashable, Mars Corporation, and Kimberly-Clark. Outside of her day job at CNN, Upasna is an avid public speaker, tech career coach, meditation teacher, and Community Lead with Google's Women Techmakers. In 2022, Upasna was awarded a Top Product Coach honor by Reforge, Products by Women, and Scale Higher. 

“I am thrilled and honored to join the NPA Board of Directors to drive our unified mission forward: To elevate the discipline of product management and expand the diversity of product thinkers in decision-making roles. Technology plays a key role in the success and sustainability of media, and I'm excited to support the building of meaningful new products with the NPA community”, said Upasna.

Nick Petrie has spent the better part of 12 years working in the News Product space for major publishers including The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Times and Sunday Times and now for Reuters. 

Nick has extensive experience building diverse, high-performing teams that cross the editorial/product divide and in breaking down silos to make sure readers are at the heart of newsroom commissioning and product development. He is a mentor to both early career journalists and product managers and firmly believes in finding ways to help anyone seeking to make publishers sustainable, impactful businesses. 

He lives in London with his wife, baby boy, and dog, Toby, who is featured on Twitter regularly.  

"I'm delighted to be invited to join the board of the NPA. It's a community I enjoy participating in and its mission, 'to elevate the discipline of news product management and expand the diversity of news product thinkers in decision-making roles' is one I wholeheartedly believe in”, said Nick. 

Nick and Upasna will be joining the sitting Board made up of Anita Zielina, Luciana Cardoso, Elite Truong, An Xiao Mina, Aaron William, Sharon Moshavi, and Tawanda Kanhema. The Board and leadership team could not be more excited to welcome them into the organization to work together toward building a more sustainable and equitable future for the News Industry.