Elite Truong joins API as Vice President, Product Strategy
Elite Truong, an experienced journalist, product owner and project manager, will join the American Press Institute as its first Vice President, Product Strategy. Truong most recently worked as director of strategic initiatives at The Washington Post.
“Elite is a remarkable leader with a product mindset who has worked at the intersection of news, revenue and technology,’ said Michael D. Bolden, the CEO and Executive Director of the American Press Institute. “As our Vice President, Product Strategy, she will help our news partners develop meaningful opportunities to broaden their audiences and shape the future of journalism. Elite is also a champion of diversity and developing talent. I look forward to working with her to support and grow opportunities for our terrific team.”
Truong will manage the existing American Press Institute product portfolio, which includes Metrics for News, an analytics tool that aligns journalism metrics with an organization’s editorial values and business model, and Source Matters, a tool that allows publishers to track and improve the diversity of their organizations. As head of the Product Strategy team, she will help strengthen and expand the product portfolio, while also serving as a product coach and thought leader for the news industry.
“API’s work is vital to the health of the news industry,” Truong said. “With the breadth of its reach, it can help news organizations of all kinds reach diverse new audiences, create accessible news products and pursue multiple paths to sustainable revenue. There is so much potential in this new era for API to help the industry by connecting like-minded change agents with each other and serving them with strategic products that align with where their organizations are trying to go.”
Truong is already board secretary of the News Product Alliance, a nascent community of support and practice for news product thinkers.
At The Washington Post, Truong led the newsroom R&D team to create projects and products driven by emerging technologies, including machine learning, artificial intelligence and 3-D and augmented reality. She also initiated and managed newsroom partnerships, including with Google, AT&T and IBM. Before joining The Post, Truong spent four years at Vox Media, three as the product manager for off-platform storytelling. She set product strategy and led the launch of nine editorial networks on new platforms, including Apple News, AMP and AMP Stories, Facebook Instant Articles, live blogs and newsletters.
Truong has also been an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland, where she created and taught an entrepreneurship class for journalism students, which covered product development and project management basics for enterprise media projects, negotiation, pitching and public speaking skills.
Truong earned a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from Roosevelt University. She is a member of the Asian-American Journalists Association and the Online News Association, where she taught as guest faculty and coached participants in the Women’s Leadership Accelerator. She formerly served on ONA’s board of directors and was a member of the inaugural 2015 ONA-Poynter Leadership Academy for Women in Digital Media. She was a 2022 fellow in the Sulzberger Executive Leadership Program at Columbia Journalism School.
Truong will begin her role with the American Press Institute on July 13.
About the American Press Institute
The American Press Institute advances an innovative and sustainable news industry by helping publishers understand and engage audiences, grow revenue, improve public-service journalism, and succeed at organizational change. We believe that for democracies to thrive, people need accurate news and information about their communities, the problems of civil society and the debates over how to solve them. That requires an economically sustainable free press that reflects the diversity of American society and understands the needs of its communities. API is a national 501(c)(3) nonprofit educational organization affiliated with the News/Media Alliance.
