Alex Wright
VP, Product Design at Hearst Newspapers | Author, Empire of Ink: The Printers, Rogues, and Radicals Who Invented the American Newspaper (Basic Books, June 2026)
- Role
- VP, Product Design at Hearst Newspapers
- Location
- Brooklyn, NY, US
- LinkedIn followers
- 500 followers
About Alex Wright
Author of Empire of Ink (Basic Books, 2026), a history of America’s first media revolution — from colonial print shops to Gilded Age media empires.I’m a writer, designer, and researcher working at the intersection of media, technology, and information systems. Over the years, I’ve led product design and research teams, founded startups, and helped build products used by millions of people at Google, Instagram, Etsy, IBM, and The New York Times. Along the way, I’ve also been a teacher, freelance journalist, grill cook, security guard, and bookstore clerk. I’ve never been great at boiling this all down to a neat tagline. As Buckminster Fuller once put it, “I am not a thing—a noun. I seem to be a verb.”
Experience
VP, Product Design
Apr 2026 — Present · New York, NY, US
Leading a design team working across Hearst’s portfolio of ~80 daily and weekly newspapers.
Education
Brown University
B.A., English and American Literature
Carnegie Mellon University
PhD, Design
2016
Simmons University
M.S., Library and Information Science
Skills
- Design Thinking
- Information Architecture
- Content Management
- Usability Testing
- User-Centered Design
- Research
- Omnigraffle
- User Scenarios
- Human Computer Interaction
- User Experience
- Content Strategy
- Publishing
- Heuristic Evaluation
- User Experience Design
- Wireframes
- Writing
- User Interface
- Media History
- Persona
- Card Sorting
- Cms
- User Interface Design
- Interaction Design
- Ethnography
- Creative Direction
- Design Strategy
- Public Speaking
- Digital Media
- Wire Framing
- Paper Prototyping
- Information Design
- Web Design
- Experience Design
- Teaching
- User Research
- Mobile Design
- Usability
- Usability Engineering
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