DAMON KIESOW is a digital media pioneer who specializes in aligning storytelling, innovation and business strategies. He has focused his career on energizing newsroom practices and business strategies with emerging technologies. He most recently served as director of Product for McClatchy in Raleigh, North Carolina, working with a chain of local media companies from California to Pennsylvania. While there 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 team.

Before joining McClatchy, Kiesow was a senior product manager at The Boston Globe helping guide mobile strategy and developing new mobile apps and mobile websites for Boston.com and BostonGlobe.com. He served as the managing editor/online at The Telegraph in Nashua, New Hampshire, where he helped the newsroom pursue a digital-first local news strategy – launching the newspaper’s first mobile app and video journalism efforts. Kiesow worked at AOL in Dulles, Virginia, eventually serving as principal photo editor for AOL News and Sports. His early career included stints at several newspapers in the Northeast.

Kiesow’s career includes several prestigious fellowships. He served as a Knight-McCormick Leadership Fellow, a program run by the Knight Digital Media Center and the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, in 2011. Kiesow was the Poynter Institute‘s first Digital Media Fellow In 2010-11, where he studied and taught the use of mobile and social tech in newsrooms as well as founded the Mobile Media blog writing daily for Poynter.org. Kiesow was a Poynter-McCormick Change Leadership Fellow in a change management teaching program at the Poynter Institute in 2009.

He is a past board member of the National Press Photographers Association, and the New Hampshire Press Association and a former director of the Northern Short Course in Photojournalism.

Kiesow has a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration from Rivier College in Nashua, New Hampshire, and a Master of Science degree in Human Factors in Information Design from the McCallum Graduate School of Business at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Knight Chair in Digital Editing and Producing

The Knight Chair in Digital Editing and Producing was established as a tenured, full professorship in 1997 by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to recognize the crucial role of editors in journalism. A primary goal of the chair is to stimulate innovations in teaching. The Knight Chair was partially funded by the state of Missouri, which provided a $1.5 million matching grant.