Draft Four: A journalism of hope

Doing work by a new formula: hope = goals + road map + willpower.

Numero Zero is a restaurant in the center of Perugia in Italy, where 50% of the staff benefit from mental health services. It’s a beautifully laid out place in one of the city center’s old buildings, and their pasta with asparagus and guanciale was to die for (so was their hazelnut cream). The project was started by a local group whose mission is “to develop innovation in the psychiatric field, accompanying severe and medium-severe psychiatric patients on the path to building life projects centered on autonomy, self-determination and inclusion”.

Their theory of change is one I deeply resonate with: “Only by creating opportunities for direct relationships with those who experience mental disorder can we combat the prejudices that accompany it, finding the true antidote to the indifference, marginalization and fears we carry within us. Diversity is not a threat to the community; on the contrary, it is what makes it richer.”

Autonomy, self-determination, inclusion, combating prejudice, providing antidotes to marginalization, reducing fear, embracing diversity, providing hope. It’s what many of us want for our world.

Which is I can’t stop wondering: can we do the above a little better in our journalism?

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I was at Numero Zero with other Romanian journalists, from Recorder, Panorama, Iașul Nostru, Átlátszó Erdély, and a couple of former DoR colleagues. It was a fitting end to this year’s International Journalism Festival, almost a weeklong of panels, and talks, and networking, and celebration of this profession. Imagine an Italian citadel perched on the hills of Umbria, centuries-old city walls snaking up and down, encircling thousands of journalists from all over the world.

The festival, now in its 17^th year, is where I feel most at home every April.

The main reason is that it’s one of the few places where journalism is not a zero-sum game. There are outlets ranging from world-wide powerhouses like the BBC, to a duo covering the intimate lives of African women. There are panels on how you finance startups, and on how to build queer indie media. There are talks about autocrats and funding, and strategy sessions on understanding user needs or doing more (and better) data journalism. There are legacy names, bootstrapped non-profit outlets, and out of the box challengers. And then there are the dinners, coffee dates, and late-night drinks.

Whatever you’re looking for, Perugia will provide. Many years ago, I first came here for new ideas. Then I came for strategy tips, then to network, then to fundraise and so on.

This time, I came for hope.

Sala dei Notari, arguably my favorite venue at the festival.

I don’t feel hopeless for our profession. And while I am struggling with personal and professional transitions at this point in my life, I’m far from hopeless myself.

But I do think that we, as journalists, often make people hopeless about the world. One way I know that is by looking at my own news consumption, which has plummeted over the years. Yes, I find ways to catch up with the world, but I don’t follow the news as I used to because most of it is a litany of doom: war here, crime over there, corruption, too, and yes, dear public, don’t forget to get angry about this or that.

I turn away for two reasons, and I suspect many of you do as well. First, my day-to-day life is not like that. There is sadness, disappointment, sometimes anger, but there is also joy, beauty, generosity, contribution, and awe. I was at a panel about young media outlets on the African continent, and the editor of a local travel magazine said a similar thing. Yes, there’s famine and terrorism, and there are also beautiful places to discover, and fantastic local artists to meet. The latter rarely make the cut. It’s not that the media don’t spotlight them at all: but the ratio doesn’t match our life, and the execution often doesn’t reflect lived experience.

The second reason I turn away is to preserve agency. News avoidance has been on the rise, and it’s getting staggering to look at in reports. The main reason people turn away? We make them feel bad. We rob them of a probable future where things might be different, and most importantly, we rob them of a sense of agency and participation in that future.

In the latter years at DoR, we aimed to do journalism that centered storytelling as a tool for good (and healing), that was informed by our public’s needs (connection, discovery, serendipity, participation), and that was oriented towards solutions. Our aim was to create a sense of possibility: in a world with many ills, there are ways to better futures, and here are some of the potential ones.

We were never “happy” or “positive” journalism; that’s not what engaged journalism and solutions journalism are about. People often joked about how DoR was their crying prompt, or told us we wrote about a lot of sad stuff (poverty, discrimination, abuse, and so on.) But they also told us – often about the same stories – that they had a sense of a better possible future. Yes, we served a bittersweet cocktail, but it did leave an aftertaste of hope.

I still believe we need more of this kind of journalism.

And not in a zero-sum game kind of way, which is how some colleagues look at this kind of work. They don’t agree with the premise, so they believe this kind of work should either not exist, or not be part of Journalism as they define it.

What I always found beautiful about journalism is that it’s not just any one thing. There is a space for news, there is a space for make-you-angry investigations, there is a space for escapist entertainment, and there is a space for journalism that – as Numero Zero put it – tries to build autonomy, self-determination, inclusion.

At this moment in my career, I’m interested in the latter.

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Just before Perugia I read a recent essay by Amanda Ripley, an American journalist who, for the past few years, has argued for complicating the narrative on the issues we cover, for understanding how we journalists are often “conflict entrepreneurs”, and for updating our roles to include mediation, facilitation, and conversation.

In the piece she talks about how sometimes journalists (and other professions) proudly declare that “we don’t do hope”, as if hope was a ridiculous thing to aim for. But hope, as she defines it, is the possibility and practice of a better way to be, with ourselves, and with our communities. “Hope is more like a muscle than an emotion. It’s a cognitive skill, one that helps people reject the status quo and visualize a better way. If it were an equation, it would look something like: hope = goals + road map + will power.” She goes on to quote two researchers who looked at how people with “stronger hope skill” perform better in school and at work, manage pain and loss better, and have higher self-esteem.

“Hope is the belief that your future can be brighter and better than your past and that you actually have a role to play in making it better.”

At Perugia, I had a couple of conversations with some of the staff of the Kyiv Independent, an English-language outlet staffed by brave amazing young journalists. Zakhar Protsiuk is their chief operations officer, and he was living abroad when the war began, running The Fix, a media website that aims to contribute to the diversity of perspective about this industry.

He said he couldn’t stay away in a time of crisis, so he went back to Ukraine, and took on the COO role at the paper. Ukraine has been under attack for 14 months, and yet, he told me, he is more optimistic about the future than he used to be. Ten years ago, there was stagnation in a country dominated by corrupt oligarchs, a Ukraine I visited myself. Now, next to immense suffering and grief, there is also the possibility of a different Ukraine once the war ends. He gave me a tote bag as a gift: it’s black and, in blue, it has the outline of Ukraine, all territories intact.

Zakhar does hope albeit all evidence to the contrary. Whenever he leaves the country, he must apply for a special permit. You could tell how tired and weary him and his colleagues are. But you could also see what Ripley described: hope = goals + road map + willpower.

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Another reason I was in Perugia is to host a ceremony for the European Press Prize, where I chair the Preparatory Committee, a group of about 20 journalists reading hundreds of contest entries from all over the continent. We then pick five finalists in every category, which a panel of judges then reads to pick a winner.

One of our judges is Can Dündar, a Turkish journalist who has been living in exile as the current regime is after him. He lives in Germany, and wherever he goes, he must have security by his side. In our PrepCom we also have Beata Balogová, who runs an important daily in Slovakia and often talks about how her newspaper survived an abusive relationship with an oligarch. Or Bartosz Wieliński from Gazeta Wyborcza in Poland, who needs to pause to come up with the exact number of times his paper has been sued recently by ill-meaning politicians and companies.

In Perugia there were also people with Free Evan pins, referencing the Wall Street Journal reporter currently held in Russia. And back home, in Romania, a young reporter who struggled for years with severe mental illness was found dead earlier this week, and a 24-hour-news channel blamed her colleagues and her employer, in what is actually a dirty smear attack.

So yes, journalism is under siege. We struggle against powerful forces, we struggle for funding, we struggle for balance. And sometimes, understandably, this cocktail makes us cynical. It’s this cynicism we need to guard against.

There are and there will continue to be many problems in our field – from how we stand up for truth, to how we don’t burn out, to what we do with AI, to how we can survive a war. We’re always worried, and intense. Which is why moments of celebration are even more necessary.

There were probably 200 people in a packed room when we announced the EPP shortlist – the sweatiest announcement of finalists in EPP history, I told the crowd. But there was also immense joy, glasses clinking, nominees taking selfies in front of the screen mentioning their work.

We might say we don’t do hope. But looking around that room you could tell how much we ourselves need it to keep going.

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Back home in Bucharest there are a bunch of post-its I put up on a wall over the past few months. They are ideas or thoughts about the journalism I’m interested in. The notes say things like: “a journalism of generosity”. Or “awe”. Or “connection”. The one more concrete idea I’ve been toying with for a few weeks is a project that covers the future – journalism that’s less about today and tomorrow, and more about the day after tomorrow maybe, and what life on that day could look like.

This isn’t new. It’s about optimizing our work to help people lead better lives. It’s about being constructive when we spotlight the wrongs, so that together we can figure out better ways. To me it’s still fits under the umbrella sketched by a definition of journalism I’ve believed in for 20 years: to give people the information they need to be free and self-governing. (It’s from The Elements of Journalism).

That is my current answer to one of the best questions a journalist should ask themselves at least occasionally, if not every day: what is journalism for?

Mine is for hope.

I’d turn it over to you. As a citizen, as the public, as the reader: what do you think it’s for?

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SIDE DISHES:

1. Here are the nominees for this year’s European Press Prize. It’s an amazing list. Enjoy the readings and the interactive experiences. We’ll announce the winner on June 9.

2. A bunch of DoR stories from 2022, our final year, are also nominated for Superscrieri, the most important Romanian journalism contest. They are about the slavery of Roma, the swimming superstar David Popovici, helping kids after a parent is murdered, growing up with debt and shame, and helping Ukrainian refugees. All those pieces try to do what I describe above: point at how we could have better, and safer, and more equitable futures, together. (You can vote for one our stories to receive an Audience Award).

3. Every year I leave Perugia with a list of ideas. This is a quick first draft sketched from the panels I attended. You’ll find more in the Reuters Institute wrap-up.

• Prioritize user needs: what is your journalism optimized for? Are you explaining, are you inspiring, are you connecting, are you just updating? You can’t do all, and you can’t do all well. Put mission first, strategy second, define user needs, and then start applying the framework to story selection and formats.

• Media capture is real. Autocrats and oligarchs love to own media as “atomic suitcases” to deploy when needed for their own good. One way of keeping bad faith actors away is being financially sustainable: a poor press will often have a hard time staying a free press.

• The media is how we learn about the world. If you only hear about problems, you’ll end up believing that’s all that exists. Journalists must accept they shape realities with their coverage, and remember, as Amanda Ripley says: “The more hopeless news you consume, the harder it is to see hope in the wild”.

• Pick your priority; the smaller you are, the more targeted you focus should be. It’s tempting to do more, and try to be more, but better focus can better align a business model with an editorial model.

• There is potential for generative AI to be a game-changer in this industry. But we should be mindful of how we deploy it, since in many cases this is another technology largely owned and developed by platforms we don’t control.

• Changing what we see as news and who we see as journalists, matters.

• The journalism playing field in a country or region is not a zero-sum game. We can have different missions, different outlooks on how we serve the public, different formats or shapes or sizes. Thinking of colleagues as potential threats or “people who will steal my idea” is antiquated. If we cooperate and collaborate, we’ll all win.