Breaking down silos: what real editorial-product collaboration looks like

In many newsrooms, editorial and product still feel like distant cousins – they meet politely, briefly, only when the calendar forces them to. But the most forward-looking news organisations are proving that real collaboration isn’t just possible. It’s transformative.
This session brings together The Atlantic’s Executive Director of Product, Mariah Craddick, Zetland’s Director of Product & Growth, Sebastian Winther, and Zetland’s Culture & Society Editor, Thomas Aagaard, for a concrete, example-driven conversation about what it looks like when editorial and product actually build together.
Mariah Craddick draws from her own work at The Atlantic where collaboration across the organization has enabled the storied brand to continuously modernize its product offering while remaining true to its core editorial values. Mariah also spent the past year interviewing news publishers from around the globe, including Zetland, about how tight newsroom and product collaboration is enabling success and resiliency, particularly in the face of generative AI disruption. This research, published earlier this year by the News Product Alliance, surfaced tangible ways this collaboration is happening in newsrooms like Svenska Dagbladet in Sweden to The New York Times in the U.S. She’ll bring these insights to the session, along with ways this partnership is happening at The Atlantic, to help news organizations of any size begin to close the gap.
From Zetland, Thomas and Sebastian will show how a tight editorial-product partnership has reshaped both the journalism and the business. They’ll share practical examples: co-creating serialized audio formats; building user needs and onboarding flows together; aligning editorial planning with product roadmaps; designing experiments around member retention; and sitting in on each other’s meetings so user needs and editorial values stay connected to product decisions. The result has been a shared strategy that moves Zetland from standalone articles to more participatory, community-driven formats.
This isn’t a philosophical session. It’s a look at what teams did, how they worked, which structures mattered, and what actually changed. The underlying message: strong editorial-product collaboration doesn’t just improve process – it strengthens journalism and is good for business, too.
What attendees will learn:
> How newsrooms like The Atlantic, Zetland, and others have structured real cross-functional partnerships
> How to strengthen journalism by embedding product strategy inside editorial decision-making
> How to set up workflows, rituals, and shared goals that keep teams aligned
> How to co-own experiments, from early scoping to post-launch learning
> How to organise teams so they’re not just working together but thinking together
This session is ideal for editorial leaders, product managers, audience editors, newsroom operations, and anyone working to rebuild the connective tissue between teams.