Eric Ulken

Eric Ulken is vice president of product management at The Baltimore Banner, a digital-only nonprofit local news startup, where he leads the team responsible for the product experience across the web, app and email. During his tenure, the product team’s efforts helped drive a nearly twofold increase in paid subscriptions to 60,000 on the way to proving out a durable business model for what is now Maryland’s largest news organization. He also teaches a graduate-level media entrepreneurship course at the University of Maryland. Ulken was previously senior director for publishing capabilities at Gannett. He has held senior editorial and product leadership roles at The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Seattle Times, and he co-founded the data desk at the Los Angeles Times. He served on the founding steering committee of the News Product Alliance, a community of product-thinkers in the news industry, and was a senior coach in several programs designed to help news organizations carry out change initiatives.  He was a 2013 fellow of the Sulzberger Leadership Program at Columbia University (now known as the Media Transformation Challenge) and a 2009 Arthur F. Burns fellow in Berlin, where he worked for Der Spiegel, Germany’s leading newsmagazine.