Research

My primary interest in in News Product Management: the application of the work in newsrooms and with communities; and the theory and teaching of the practice as an emerging discipline that is still in need of significant definition and development.

I am also working with researchers at Mizzou in collaboration with other universities to standardize the study of local news ecosystems as part of the Local News Impact Consortium.

Product Management

Journalism (Ethics) in the Loop: Software Development as a Cultural Competency for News Organizations

As news organizations continue to adapt to the digital economy, they must integrate technological solutions aligned with journalistic ethics and values. Too often, the uncritical adoption of digital tools and services imposes potential risks to journalistic norms or community well-being.

A proactive and digitally-native approach is required whereby journalistic values are actively embedded in purchased or locally-produced technological solutions. With the integration of software developers and other technologists into the organizational culture, news organizations can assess, avoid, or mitigate ethical risks to better achieve their business goals and their mission to their communities.

Kiesow, D. (2024). Journalism (Ethics) in the Loop: Software Development as a Cultural Competency for News Organizations. Digital Journalism, 12(7), 1059–1067. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2024.2396068

An Introduction to News Product Management: Innovation for Newsrooms and Readers

Drawing on innovations in the business of journalism, this first-ever textbook for News Product Management offers a comprehensive guide to using the human-centred design methods of product management to serve readers and bolster digital success in news organizations.

The book sets out how “product thinking” should be used in news organizations and practiced in accordance with journalistic ethics and customs. Beginning by looking at the history and theory behind the profession, this book builds a foundational understanding of what product management is and why news is a unique product. In the second unit, the author discusses how the human-centred design philosophy of product management aligns with the mission and ethics of journalism, and how that influences the view of audiences and frames strategies. The third unit of the book focuses on the daily use of product management in news organizations, providing students with a guide to its use in researching, prioritizing, and building sustainable projects that deliver news to readers and viewers. Written in an accessible style, this book features input from industry experts and draws on global examples to provide practical guidance.

Kiesow, D. (2023). An Introduction to News Product Management: Innovation for Newsrooms and Readers (First). Routledge.

The Business of Digital News: Understanding the Cross-Functional Orchestra

This invited chapter for a 2021 edited collection exploring practical journalism research is the extension of a 2016 blog post that discussed the challenges of navigating complex organizational and cultural structures when implementing strategic change.

News organizations are full of what were once semi-independently operating business functions that are now rapidly reconfiguring and renegotiating their digital existence. What once was a set of small jazz ensembles has become a cross-functional orchestra. And for the business of journalism to prosper, news workers must both influence and adapt to these changes and find their new seats on the stage. And for scholars to understand the music, it is not enough to just study the string section or woodwinds in isolation.

Kiesow, D. (2021). The Business of Digital News: Understanding the Cross-Functional Orchestra. In V. Bélair-Gagnon & N. Usher (Eds.), Journalism Research That Matters (pp. 131–136). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/0s0/9780197538470.003.0010

From Boundary to Bridge and Beyond: The Path to Professionalization of Product Roles in Journalism

I made some contributions to the discussion of innovation bias in this paper which is otherwise largely based on Dr. Cindy Royal’s study of the early membership of the News Product Alliance

New roles in news organizations have emerged supporting media products that demonstrate a range of digital features. Along with the requirements of these products come a new set of skills and competencies to coordinate, develop, manage and support them. Thus, product-related roles, previously considered on the periphery of a media organization, become more critical and central to an organization’s success and introduce challenges in their integration with traditional roles and processes. This study identifies those performing product roles, the networks and boundaries across which they work and the ways in which they make meaning across functions. Perceptions of those in these roles highlight a field of contradictions, in need of career development, respect within organizations and role standardization, while maintaining the professional flexibility and agility that is necessary for innovation.

Royal, C., & Kiesow, D. (2021). From Boundary to Bridge and Beyond: The Path to Professionalization of Product Roles in Journalism. Journalism Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2021.1944277

Product Management in Journalism and Academia

The business of news and the role of product management specifically are underappreciated areas of focus within journalism studies. Dr. Cindy Royal assembled an invited forum in JMCQ to discuss and reflect on the need for more attention on these topics.

A key roadblock in both industry and in journalism schools is the lack of a shared definition for “news product manager” as a job title or role. Across news organizations, product functions may be attached to news, development, marketing, or information technology, or it may report directly to the CEO, a challenge also shared by non-media product teams. Each variation endows the team with different expectations, responsibilities, and authority and adds to the complexity of integrating product approaches into the legacy structure of a company. For news organizations to complete their digital transitions, product management and more importantly, product thinking—must develop a standard model of practice as it has in the software industry and become as much a part of journalism as the inverted pyramid or the five Ws.

Royal, C., Bright, A., Pellizzaro, K., Belair-Gagnon, V., Holton, A. E., Vincent, S., Heider, D., Zielina, A., & Kiesow, D. (2020). Product Management in Journalism and Academia. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 97(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/1077699020933872

Affordances and Sensemaking

The Values of Print: Affordances and Sensemaking for Newspaper Consumers

In this first of a series of studies with Dr. Shuhua Zhou, we applied James Gibson’s theory of affordances to explore the implicitly and explicity offered signals inherent in the printed newspaper to understand how readers recognize and utilize different attributes of the medium to make sense of the news.

This paper examines print affordances based on Gibson’s conceptualization. We conducted semi-structured in-depth interviews with long-time newspaper subscribers to understand three kinds of affordances: physical affordances germane to the print medium, perceived affordances utilized by experienced readers, and relational affordances generated in the transactional process of news consumption. We argued that affordances offer a theoretical lens to understand print, or any other media, and in how they facilitate information acquisition in news consumption and sensemaking of the consumption process. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Zhou, S., Kiesow, D., & Guo, L. (2021). The Values of Print: Affordances and Sensemaking for Newspaper Consumers. Journalism Practice, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2021.1910984

Digital in Dispute: Affordances and Cognitive Support for Online News Consumers

Having confirmed the use of print news affordances by readers in our first study, we probed for the digital news readers for the presence of those signals online and find that while many are present, digital news provides a weaker context for understanding of some meta-cognitive tasks such as the understanding of genre and recency.

Each medium of news delivery has a unique set of attributes that facilitate or impede news consumption. In this paper, we examine what affordances of digital news sites are present or absent. Based on the perspectives of Gibson’s ecological psychology and his conceptualizations of affordances, as well as Norman’s theorizing of signifiers, we conducted an exploratory study with loyal digital news readers to query their reliance on a number of perceived affordances. We compared those findings to the affordances realized in print and argued that many signals supporting sense-making of the print news were attenuated in digital. Implications are discussed.

Kiesow, D., Zhou S., Gou, L. (2021) Digital in Dispute: Affordances and Cognitive Support for Online News Consumers. Digital Journalism

Local News Ecosystems

The News Crawler: A Big Data Approach to Local Information Ecosystems

In the past 20 years, Silicon Valley’s platforms and opaque algorithms have increasingly influenced civic discourse, helping Facebook, Twitter, and others extract and consolidate the revenues generated. That trend has reduced the profitability of local news organizations, but not the importance of locally created news reporting in residents’ day‐to‐day lives.

The disruption of the economics and distribution of news has reduced, scattered, and diversified local news sources (digital‐first newspapers, digital‐only newsrooms, and television and radio broadcasters publishing online), making it difficult to inventory and understand the information health of communities, individually and in aggregate. Analysis of this national trend is often based on the geolocation of known news outlets as a proxy for community coverage. This measure does not accurately estimate the quality, scale, or diversity of topics provided to the community.

This project is developing a scalable, semi‐automated approach to describe digital news content along journalism‐quality‐focused standards. We propose identifying representative corpora and applying machine learning and natural language processing to estimate the extent to which news articles engage in multiple journalistic dimensions, including geographic relevancy, critical information needs, and equity of coverage.

Khanom, A., Kiesow, D., Zdun, M., & Shyu, C.-R. (2023). The News Crawler: A Big Data Approach to Local Information Ecosystems. Media and Communication, 11(3). https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v11i3.6789