Grzegorz (Greg) Piechota is researcher-in-residence at the International News Media Association (INMA) where he heads up the Readers First Initiative. This industry initiative aims to surface global best practices in the art and science behind digital subscriptions for news media companies and create a road map toward the next generation of consumer monetisation through 2020. The Readers First Initiative positions INMA as the world’s leading association focused on media subscriptions with newsletters, video meet-ups, Webinars, reports, workshops, discussion groups for INMA members.

In the years leading up to his stint heading INMA’s Readers First Initiative, Greg served as a senior researcher at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and Harvard Business School in the United States, where he studied technology-enabled disruption patterns across industries, including news media.

His research work at Harvard focused on digital business model innovations. His project at Oxford's Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism examined the impact of digital platforms on paid content models of news organisations. His studies at Oxford positioned him as having one of the broadest knowledge bases of what publishers are doing worldwide in the emerging space of digital subscriptions. Specifically, as a senior visiting research fellow at the Reuters Institute, he ran a research project, “Paid Content in the Age of Platforms,” that examined the impact of digital platforms on paid content models with the aim of identifying lessons to be learnt by the news industry.

Synthesising all of this work, Greg is in the final stages of a book, News For Sale: The Guide to Media Subscriptions, which will be released in 2019.

In addition, Greg serves as a digital strategy adviser for Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza (Agora) and consults with media companies worldwide on a variety of topics — notably digital subscription strategy.

He is a member of the INMA Board of Directors and is a past president of INMA’s Europe Division.

Greg is an experienced editor and news media executive. He began his career at Gazeta Wyborcza in 1996 as a reporter in one of the smallest local offices rising to a news editor and a vice-president of Agora Foundation. A 2016 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, Greg explored the transformation of the media business and the future of work in creative industries. Piechota graduated in law.