News product development from exile: a Q&A with 'Product Notes'

This interview was originally published in Product Notes, the News Product Alliance newsletter. As I just joined the NPA board, I'm keeping it here for posterity.

I have so much gratitude for this group of media thinkers. NPA has connected me with so many smart people and shaped my understanding of product thinking in newsrooms. To the day a year into starting Gazzetta, I'm especially grateful for all the guidance and encouragement from NPA community members along the way.

I've been consistently in awe of its impact on newsrooms worldwide, and I'm looking forward to supporting the team in their work.

Could you tell us a bit about your career and work with journalists in exile?

I’ve always been a bit of a journalist at heart. It’s an amazing opportunity to discover the world and keep learning all the time. I was a reporter and editor and managed some newsrooms and went through the traditional career path of someone in journalism over the last years.

I founded Gazzetta almost exactly a year ago. I started it first in Tallinn, Estonia, and now I am based in New York. I started it right after a newsroom job where I worked in a space that thinks a lot about exile media, working with a newsroom that’s like an umbrella organization for many news organizations that were largely in exile or operating underground. I thought, “This is a really interesting space to keep thinking about,” because exile media offers three specific reasons and examples for journalism as a whole.

The first is that there’s genuine, urgent demand for information, because in autocratic governments, the state media typically fails to serve citizens. There are real information needs and a real demand for relevant journalism.

Second, there is  a lot of untapped potential. Many of the organizations working from exile are typically focused on small dissident communities and, frankly, they need to focus on donations and how that drives coverage. They need to do it because there are so few revenue opportunities. So I want to ask, “Is there a way to reframe that conversation and show that if these real demands are met, there are many more opportunities?”

The third reason is, these are the hardest places to work. These are the most challenging conditions for journalism. A lot of the solutions developed in this space would be viable for journalism at large, in open, freer societies. If we can make it work there, we can make it work anywhere. Plus, a lot of the trends we see globally happen in these countries sooner. For instance, the shift from open social media to closed social media, from open posting to closed posting, happened in that space way sooner than it happened in other countries. So I wanted to be part of those trends and use and explore the opportunities in it.

With Gazzetta, I work with some newsrooms and funders, and I work with technology companies. With the newsrooms, it’s often just smaller projects where we focus on figuring things out, and how to stay relevant. A lot of it is providing audience research support, then also technical solutions for the specific challenges they face, and coaching teams to adapt to operating in other conditions, in exile, what have you, and supporting people as they navigate that with the funders. It’s really trying to help them cut through the noise and understand what’s narrative and what’s real service, what’s relevant, and what maybe isn’t, and help them navigate this sometimes contentious space. With the technology companies, it’s helping them think through these extreme scenarios and the possible, sometimes unintended consequences of technologies that they develop.

How do you connect the dots between journalists all over the world facing very different challenges?

On the tactical front, all newsrooms have problems, whether it’s the ones you see on the NPA Slack like changes in Google Analytics, newsletter optimization, social media, etc. — practical things where product thinkers can bring real utility to the newsroom. 

But there’s also the strategic space: What is the value proposition for the overall product that you provide? This keeps going back to audience research. So we’re not simply “the news” or journalism. It's really, “What is the job that you're trying to do for people?” 

I’m hoping that in the future, as more thought is given to strategic considerations, newsrooms shift more resources into that product-considerations space and invest much more heavily in audience research. They should have answers to these foundational questions of why they exist, and who they serve. I’m hoping NPA and everyone who’s part of it are the people to guide these conversations. 

How do you help the journalists you work with realize they should identify a central value proposition instead of just “writing the news” and waiting for people to find it?

The tricky thing is that it can work that way. You can be really lucky in doing something that resonates widely over time — for a while. But you want to make sure that you are really useful to people, not just existing. You need to reflect on who is on the other side and what are they getting out of this, out of this experience of reading, following, watching, or listening to your work. It allows you to be much more flexible in terms of how you meet that need. It can be functional — helping someone save time in making decisions. Or it can be emotional or more personal: This gives me hope, this helps me in my career, or here I feel a sense of belonging. As a media strategist, if you have clarity over this, it allows you to navigate more flexibility around platforms and what your offerings look like at large.

It’s an interesting conversation to have, which at the beginning might be a bit daunting because especially if you come from a newsroom that's a legacy organization, we need to justify that. That only goes so far — at some point you have to build something that meets a need. 

How can we bring utility into the conversation as a metric when we're talking to newsroom execs or other journalists?

I have not perfected my spiel in terms of being able to instantly convince someone. But what I say is, we’re in a moment in which media consumption is fundamentally disrupted. So if you’re only looking at the narrow day-to-day metrics of your indicators — how many page views, your newsletter open rate, monthly active users, etc. — to determine your strategy, you’re not going to be able to prepare for the future. Those metrics are not going to tell you whether you’re successful in preparing for a future where media is going to be experienced in different ways. I don’t necessarily know what that looks like, but I know that search is fundamentally changing. I know that social is fundamentally changing. I know that generative AI outputs are increasingly going to be intermediaries of news creators and music consumers.

What I try to tell them is you can navigate it by being very, very intentional around why you exist and what value you create for people, because it allows you to then let things go or take on new things, but stay true to yourself. And that self is not just dedicated to continued existence, but is rooted in a validated service.

What is your advice for the NPA community in 2025?

This is such a moment of turbulent change and uncertainty in journalism. And this is also an industry where you’re often competing against each other. I think this is not the year to compete. This is the year to collaborate and support each other and be there for each other and help each other. When in doubt, help each other, support each other, and something better will come out of it.

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