Damon Kiesow is a digital media pioneer who specializes in aligning community information needs and business strategy in support of sustainable local journalism

He is a co-founder of the international News Product Alliance and serves as an advisor to the non-profit and as a member of its GNI/Knight supported mentorship program for emerging product leaders. Since 2018, he has supported a diversity internship program in collaboration with the Institute for Nonprofit News, placing students in product and audience engagement roles in INN member newsrooms. He is currently authoring the first textbook for News Product Management, due to be published in the Summer of 2023.

Prior to joining the Missouri School of Journalism, he was director of Product for McClatchy in Raleigh, North Carolina where he reorganized the Product group to better align business goals with reader needs and created the company’s first Product Design and User Experience Research teams. Before that, Kiesow was a senior product manager at The Boston Globe, a Digital Media Fellow at the Poynter Institute, the managing editor/online at The Telegraph in Nashua, New Hampshire, and the Principal Photo Editor with AOL News in Dulles, Virginia.