About the NPA
The News Product Alliance is a nonprofit 501c3 organization dedicated to supporting news product professionals. Our mission is to elevate the discipline of news product management and expand the diversity of news product thinkers in decision-making roles. We believe news product thinkers — those with the ability to strategically align business, audience and technology goals while integrating journalism ethics — are the news industry leaders of tomorrow, and key to building sustainable and ethical news organizations.
The future of news as an industry is defined by its capacity to develop engaging and trustworthy products that deliver quantifiable business results. As traditional news revenue models have broken down, today’s most successful newsrooms have embraced product practices from digital industries, and found ways to better serve their communities by connecting their content and business strategy and developing new revenue streams. But many newsrooms, journalists and product leaders are still struggling to create ethical and sustainable digital-first business models.
At the News Product Alliance, we have created a community of over 3,000+ diverse change agents and the largest network of professional news product experts from media and tech companies, offering a space for connection, inspiration, and skill development. We offer training and community support for a diverse set of emerging news product leaders and, crucially, we advocate for and work with news organizations to create the capacity for these emerging leaders to be heard and empowered. Recognizing that there is no single path into this discipline, we also seek to diversify the field of news product thinkers and leaders, breaking down barriers to entry for folks from a variety of backgrounds and experiences. Read more about our strategic vision for transforming the news industry.
Our Staff
Feli Carrique, Executive Director
Feli is an Argentinian journalist and product thinker working at the intersection of media, technology, and sustainability. In her previous role as the Innovation Director at SembraMedia, she worked with news organizations across Latin America, Spain, and the United States to promote innovation and led product design and systems development for the organization. She was also the lead analyst on the recent “Inflection Point International” report published by SembraMedia, which analyzed the innovations, challenges, and threats facing news entrepreneurs across Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. In 2020 she was a chosen ICFJ Professional Fellow, and as a result, she developed Propulsorio’s Product Guide for Latin American media organizations with additional support from SembraMedia. Feli is also a Professor at Universidad Católica Argentina, where she co-created the first news product class in Latin America, and she has led workshops about news product management and journalism business models for several media-support organizations.
Becca Aaronson, Chief Product Officer
Becca Aaronson served as the chair of the NPA’s founding steering committee before taking on the role of interim executive director. Now she serves as an executive consultant for the organization. She previously worked as the Director of Product at Chalkbeat, a non-profit, digital-first network of local newsrooms covering K-12 education in seven cities. At Chalkbeat, she oversaw digital product development and visual storytelling. In 2018, Becca was selected for the Poynter’s Leadership Academy for Women in Digital Media. Becca spent the first eight years of her career at The Texas Tribune, where she became their first-ever product manager. She also co-founded the Tribune’s data visuals team, where she designed, built, and managed several award-winning investigative projects. Becca has a bachelor’s degree in cultural theory from Scripps College in Claremont, Calif.
Sam Leguizamon, Sr. Program Manager
Sam Leguizamón is an Argentinian communicator with experience in project management and digital journalism. She co-created and led the Chicas Poderosas “Leadership Incubator”, a program that trained 75 media outlets in leadership skills throughout Latin America. Sam has also worked as a communications manager for the same organization leading multi-disciplinary teams from across the region, including the collaborative investigative project “Los Derechos No Se Aíslan” about reproductive rights in her country. Previously she worked for a local newspaper and served as a professor in Digital Journalism at the Universidad Nacional de Jujuy.
Contributors
Reese Oxner, Product Notes writer
Reese is writer of Product Notes, NPA’s biweekly newsletter for product thinkers in journalism. He’s also the product manager for The Texas Tribune and a freelance journalist and web developer. He studied communication technology with an emphasis in web development/design at The University of Texas at Arlington. Before switching over to product, Reese worked as a news reporter for publications including NPR, The Texas Tribune and The Dallas Morning News. Reese is really into food, especially Korean cuisine. He was born and raised in Texas and is currently based in Austin.
Margaret Schneider, Community Manager
Margaret Schneider is passionate about making the lives of writers and editors better. She's worked in or adjacent to newsrooms her entire career, serving as a managing editor in city and regional publications, editing books and alt-weeklies, and launching several startup publications. At Newspack, she managed training and documentation for 250 small- and medium-size newsrooms. At Alley, she created the agency's WordPress CMS training program, training hundreds of folks on editorial teams across the U.S. and beyond. Margaret is a Certified Scrum Master with 20 years' experience as a community manager, who has wrangled dozens of launches and redesigns. She is also an artist and musician who's exhibited in New York City, Los Angeles, Miami, and St. Louis.
Bárbara Pereira, Communications Manager
Bárbara Pereira is a journalist currently based in São Paulo, Brazil. She has experience in creating social media content for various platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn. In the past, Bárbara has worked as a hard news producer for two of Brazil's top media houses, CNN Brasil and Estadão. In the last one, she was the newscaster of a daily Instagram program that presented the latest happenings around the world. During her time there, she also was responsible for creating, recording, editing, and distributing videos on social media. Apart from being a journalist, she is also a content creator and digital influencer in Brazil. She hosts the travel and food podcast Por Onde Andei.
Our Board of Directors
Anita Zielina, Board Chair
Zielina’s work is focused on training the next generation of news executives to address the demand for innovation, business sustainability and new leadership in the industry. She is currently heading the Strategic Initiatives team at Newmark J-School at CUNY in NYC. Before that, she held various management roles in media organizations who were seeking to transform themselves, such as Chief Product Officer and member of the executive management team at NZZ media group in Switzerland; managing editor and deputy Editor-in-Chief at Stern, the German weekly news magazine published by Gruner + Jahr in Hamburg, and reporter and editor at the newspaper Der Standard in Vienna, Austria. She is an alumna of the Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California; holds an Executive MBA from INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France and a Master in Law from Vienna University.
Luciana Cardoso, Vice Chair
Luciana began her career at IBM in Project Management for Latin America and later became a CPO at Estadão Newspaper in Brazil, leading the company's digital transformation. Then she joined Quartz as a Senior Product Manager, achieving significant results such as increasing readership and creating a successful podcast. Currently, she is the Director of Product and Data at Grupo Bandeirantes in Brazil.
Tawanda Kanhema
Kanhema is a journalist and product manager based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Kanhema has worked as a journalist in Africa and in various product strategy roles in Silicon Valley, most recently at Mozilla, where his work with the Pocket and Firefox teams focused on connecting millions of readers with high quality content from a broad range of reputable publishers.
Sharon Moshavi
Moshavi oversees new project development, innovation, research, and impact at the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ), the premier global network of journalists. She has led the design of projects ranging from newsroom transformation efforts in India to investigative reporting collaboratives in Latin America to global efforts that have spurred innovations in combating misinformation and health crisis reporting. She also created and directed ICFJ’s first-ever studies on the State of Technology in Global Newsrooms, conducted in 14 languages. Prior to ICFJ, she worked as communications manager at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and before that, she spent a decade as an international correspondent, based in New Delhi, Jerusalem and Tokyo. She has written for The Boston Globe, Newsday, BusinessWeek, Forbes, and U.S. News & World Report, among others. She also produced radio documentaries and essays for NPR, KQED, BBC and CBC.
Elite Truong, Secretary
Elite Truong is the Vice President of Product Strategy at American Press Institute, where she manages data products that help local newsrooms make strategic decisions. API’s mission is to unite communities and uphold democracy through rebuilding trust with local news organizations and supporting news leaders in doing so. She serves as the Board Secretary for News Product Alliance and is on the advisory board for Democracy Day.
Formerly, she was the Director of Strategic Initiatives at The Washington Post, where she led the newsroom R&D team to capture younger and more diverse audiences by creating projects driven by emerging technologies, including machine learning, artificial intelligence and 3-D and augmented reality. Before joining The Post, Truong spent four years at Vox Media, three as the product manager for off-platform storytelling, primarily negotiating with tech platforms to create user experiences that benefited news consumers.
Aaron Williams
Williams is a data journalist, analyst and visualization expert tackling inequity in data and design. He's a senior visualization engineer in Netflix's Data Science and Engineering group and previously spent a decade as a data and graphics reporter—most recently at the Washington Post.
An Xiao Mina, Treasurer
AX Mina (she/they) is a strategic consultant and leadership coach with over a decade of global experience in organizational strategy and leadership, technology development, public speaking and media development. She’s coached and trained news entrepreneurs and managers through programs with LION Publishers, The Self-Investigation, The OpEd Project and the American Press Institute. She was a founding board member of the News Product Alliance and is a Senior Civic Media Fellow at the USC Annenberg School for Journalism and Communications.
Upasna Gautam
Upasna Gautam is a Senior Product Management leader on the Platforms team at CNN, where she leads the development of the content management technology that delivers breaking news to the world. Prior to her role at CNN, Upasna has spent 15 years in the tech industry building technical, data-informed solutions for brands such as Ford Motor Company, Valvoline, PCMag, Mashable, Mars Corporation, and Kimberly-Clark. Upasna is also a Community Lead with Google Women Techmakers, an angel investor, and a freelance writer at CNN.
Nick Petrie
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.
Our Founders
Becca Aaronson, Daniel Alvarez, Shannan Bowen, Brian Boyer, Kim Bui, Tyler Fisher, Joe Germuska, Mike Orren, Hassan Hodges, Eric Ulken, Emily Withrow, Sharon Pian Chan, Damon Kiesow, Rebekah Monson, Aron Pilhofer and Hal Straus in Dallas, April 2019.
The News Product Alliance was founded in 2020 in response to a larger movement within the news industry with the support and participation of more than 250 people. In April 2019, fifteen news product thinkers met in a Dallas hotel conference room to talk about building a community for people like them. That conversation led to SRCCON:Product, the first conference explicitly for news product people in February 2020. Afterwards, an enthusiastic group of conference participants elected the NPA steering committee to carry that momentum into the creation of a new organization — what would become the News Product Alliance.
We are incredibly thankful for the work of our founding steering committee members: Becca Aaronson, Emma Carew Grovum, Anita Zielina, Kim Fox, Eric Ulken, Luciana Cardoso, Ryan Nakashima, Tony Elkins and Brian Boyer, with assistance from Shannan Bowen, Damon Kiesow, Aron Pilhofer, Cindy Royal and Marco Túlio Pires.
Our Funders
The News Product Alliance is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. Donors can deduct any contribution made to the organization under IRC Section 170.
The News Product Alliance has received initial institutional support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Google News Initiative, The University of Missouri School of Journalism, the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and News Catalyst. We have also received funding from our News Product Alliance Summit event sponsors.
We are currently seeking additional financial support. If you’d like more information about supporting the News Product Alliance, contact Feli Carrique at feli@newsproduct.org. And check our Ethics & Fundraising policy.