‘Product Management for Newsroom Leaders:’ Sign up now for Knight Center’s new online course on ‘product thinking’

Newsrooms around the world have been struggling to restructure and create new positions that require skills journalists were not accustomed to having, but which became essencial for media to be competitive in the markets created by the digital revolution. Product Manager is one of those new jobs for journalists. We are offering another online course to help journalists get ready for this new job.

In the wake of “Product Management for Journalists,” which we offered in November 2017 to introduce the topic, the Knight Center is now offering the new four-week online course “Product Management for Newsroom Leaders,” which runs from April 29 to May 26, 2019.

Different from the 2017 Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), which was free, this new course is a Big Online Course (BOC) and has a cost: $95. MOOCs are open courses that normally attract a few thousand people and focus on more generic and introductory topics, while BOCs are closed and limited to a few hundreds students and focus on more specific and advanced topics.

Registration for “Product Management for Newsroom Leaders,”  is open, so sign up now to guarantee your spot in this new program and learn about some concepts and skills that are increasingly valuable in newsrooms.

This new course is taught by experts in the field, including Becca Aaronson, director of product at Chalkbeat; Shannan Bowen, product manager and audience strategist; Emma Carew Grovum, a multiplatform storyteller and product manager; and Cindy Royal, professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and director of the Media Innovation Lab at Texas State University.

“Product thinking is the ability to connect the dots between disciplines to come up with strategic solutions,” said Aaronson, who later added that journalists already have the needed skills and will just learn a new way to apply them.

The course is divided into four modules:

1.     Product thinking in the newsroom

2.     Ideation: The beginning stages of developing a product strategy

3.     Goal-setting and Prioritization: The tactics of developing and executing a product strategy

4.     Ethical considerations and challenges

It is “is open to newsroom leaders of all shapes and sizes, you don’t need to be a product manager to be a product thinker,” Aaronson said.

“Almost 3,000 people from 132 countries around the world took our MOOC a year and half ago about product management in newsrooms. Many asked us for more instruction on this new area that has been more and more important for news organizations who really want to be competitive online,” said professor Rosental Alves, founder and director of the Knight Center.

“We are thrilled to have attracted Becca Aaronson and Cindy Royal again to this new project, now with two new instructors, Shanna Bowen and Emma Carew Grovum, who also have a lot of experience in this field,” Alves said.

Course activities consist of video instruction, presentations, readings, discussion forums and quizzes.

Like all Knight Center courses, it is asynchronous, meaning you can complete the activities during the days and times that are most convenient for you. We know that most of our students are journalists with busy schedules, so we make the program as flexible as possible.

Register for this exciting new BOC today and be on your way to thinking like a product manager and finding creative solutions for your newsroom.