How a small team in São Paulo embraced product thinking to improve their coverage of local arts and culture
Karoline Pinheiro found that her team at Emerge Mag were eager to implement new ideas and expand their product offerings
When Karoline Pinheiro began in the Product Immersion for Small Newsrooms Program at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism in January, she was working as a reporter for her eight-person newsroom in São Paulo, Brazil. By the time the program was over, she had convinced her bosses that they needed a dedicated product team — and that she was the one to lead it.
For years, Pinheiro had been looking for new revenue strategies for Emerge Mag, the arts and culture publication where she is also a member of the magazine’s editorial council. But she found that the courses she took as part of a marketing MBA program didn’t apply easily to journalism. Eventually, she dropped out of the MBA due to costs, but kept looking for tips on how to improve the financial health of her newsroom.
When she discovered the Product Immersion Program, she knew it was a perfect fit. The program was free, and offered guidance specifically for small newsrooms like hers. “It was during the Product Immersion [program] that I realized how to align product thinking with revenue strategy and the journalistic mission,” Pinheiro said in a recent interview.
The Product Immersion for Small Newsrooms program, a joint endeavor from the Newmark School, News Catalyst and the Google News Initiative, teaches journalists digital transformation through product thinking. Like Pinheiro, many of the cohorts’ participants begin on the editorial or business sides of their newsrooms, but end up stepping into new product roles during or immediately after the program.
Since participating in the Product Immersion program, Pinheiro has focused on product management. “I am not used to that title of product manager yet,” she said. “I feel like I have a lot to learn. But with no doubt, after experiencing the program, I feel more prepared for this challenge and being a product thinker in my organization.”
Emerge Mag, which launched in 2017, is a nonprofit publication that covers independent artists and social activities in the outskirts of São Paulo who are not often featured in mainstream media. Many of those features are Black, LGBTQ and women who are using culture to help their impoverished neighbors.
“They are creating a network of love, of support, to help their community to live better,” Pinheiro said.
Pinheiro realized that Emerge had been neglecting product thinking in their processes. Inspired by a lecture during the program from Filipino-American journalist Maria Ressa about using business intelligence to increase revenue, Pinheiro has led the creation of a mapping tool to allow area artists to create B2B products for local businesses.
Emerge is also planning to launch a membership program at the end of the year, and looking to hire UX experts to help update and rebuild its website using audience-centric concepts
Pinheiro also took back methodologies of product management that resonated with her team. With such a small newsroom, Pinheiro says it can be hard to set clear guidelines on who is responsible for different elements of a project, so frameworks like OKR (objectives and key results) and MOCHA (manager, owner, consultant, helper, approver) were particularly helpful.
“That’s an example of something that may be insignificant for a traditional and big newsroom organization,” Pinhiero said. “For us, who are small, all change is big. All change can promote a huge impact in our structure.”
Each week during the program, Pinheiro would convey the lessons she was learning to her team and they would strive to integrate them. She said they would test new skills and ideas to see if they were a good fit for the newsroom’s culture and whether they wanted to pursue them further.
She credits the diversity of their team with an open-mindedness to these new ways of working. “It was easy to present new ideas,” Pinheiro said. “These people love new ideas. They were waiting for me.”
Elise Czajkowski is a writer/editor who regularly writes about the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism’s executive and professional education programs. Based in New York, she was previously a Tow Knight Fellow in Entrepreneurial Journalism at the Newmark J-School. She launched a non-profit called Sidewalk News, which uses outdoor advertising to distribute local news.
