Draft Four: Austerity Blues

Happy 100 letters to us!

Two quick notes before we start. First, this the 100^th letter I am sending – if I counted wrong it might be 101, or 99, or 103, but I am choosing this one as an anniversary edition. Thanks for sticking with me, or joining along the way. Some reflections and news below, including why payments are paused, at least for now.

Second, under the banner of Media DoR, the NGO that used to publish DoR, we’ve started a series of industry events, for journalists and/or folks in connected fields. They are 90-minute get-togethers, followed by a glass of wine, where we hear three short stories of how something was made: a story, a strategy, a fundraising drive. Our second one is Tuesday, July 15, in Bucharest, and we still have a few seats left, so you can sign up here (it’s free). This is the only (sort of) public mention of it, so think of it as one way to thank you for reading.

Last fall we secured a small grant through the US Embassy in Bucharest for The Power of Storytelling. It was 5.000 dollars and, at the time, as we were still piecing together the return of the conference, it was energizing, proof that former partners still believed in the idea.

Then, once the Trump administration settled in and started dismantling the world, we got a notice – in short, we could keep the grant only if we signed a letter promising not to carry out activities with a DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) theme, or “discuss or advocate for gender ideology or gender identity”. Doing so, in the eyes of the new State Department, constituted discrimination.

We chose not to sign, the grant was terminated, and we had to pay back the whole amount.

The total cost of the event, when it was all said and done, was 240.000 Euros, but our revenues fell about 10.000 short of that. The money we gave back could have come in handy, as we had to cover the gap from a separate fundraising effort.

The decision though, felt simple. Our gathering is built on principles of equity, inclusion, hearing all voices, telling untold stories and recognizing the injustice in the world. I wasn’t worried that we would break these new rules if we signed; I was worried we would transgress our own values. And what’s left when you betray your own values?

This sounds principled bordering on cringe, but the truth is we could afford to stand by our values. What if that amount would have been 20.000 dollars? Or 50.000? What if it was half our budget? Would we have made the same call? Would we have been willing to sacrifice what we built for “our values”?

I’d like to think the answer would still have been “yes”, but I don’t know.

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I’m starting with this anecdote because money is on everyone’s mind.

In the US there’s the Big Beautiful Bill that promises to punish lower income folks pretty soon (especially when it comes to medical coverage), and, in Romania, we have the first round of cuts to reduce our EU chart-topping deficit of more than 9% of GDP.

I’d like to say it’s a surprise these measures will hit hardest for people struggling with precarity and in-work poverty – because of an increase in VAT, cuts to social programs (including for students, mothers etc.), all coupled with energy prices roughly doubling starting July 1, right as the country is cooking in another continent-wide heatwave.

But it’s not surprising.

When it comes to professed values and promises, this is the story we’re used to be living through: we talk about being there for the people, then betraying that promise under the threat of “urgency” or “we gotta bite the bullet just this time”. “Just this time” is almost every time.

I won’t go into the socio-economics, or morality of the cuts – spoiler: both appear to have been neglected. But I do want to speak on the public narrative.

I wrote a few weeks ago that our current president is not a good storyteller – and by that I mean a leader that can express a vision, guide us towards it, with a desire for all to become better and live better after the experience – one that is about us, not about him. Once in office, for now, Nicușor Dan more or less disappeared, his public comments on various issues sounding like an unhelpful help line: this is not my prerogative, ask the experts now in place.

Technically, he is right. Romania needs a president that stays within the bounds of his mediator role, but in a broken country, he is the main elected leader mandated to address the rifts. To explain decisions. To offer transparency. To mediate. For now, he isn’t doing any of that.

The new prime minister and some of the newly appointed leaders around him are less arrogant than the previous ones, but it’s still more about them than about us. They say they are sorry people will suffer when cuts hit, but that’s about it. No responsibility for years of irresponsible behavior (but plenty of blaming others), little proof they understand what they’re cutting, no real curiosity about how this is coming across, no time to listen.

They actually said this – there’s no time to talk about what needs to be done. This is urgent.

At the risk of overstating: it’s always been “urgent”.

Romania is where it is – on the verge of economic meltdown, having barely escaped a right-wing authoritarian regime, split across too many fault lines – because we don’t have leaders, elected, or appointed, who listen. I’m not saying the cuts come out of corruption and greed and a dislike for the poor; I’ll be generous and say they come from an inflated sense of self-importance, from thinking they know it all, and they are the victims shouldering the burden of decision making.

All of these are stories: they are the stories we, citizens, tell of our leaders. They are the stories these leaders tell to themselves. And they are the stories they share with us. And there is no harmony in all these narratives – there is only ever-growing tension.

The best example I saw recently about what stories politicians today want us to see came from a series of videos the mayor of Sector 1 is posting on Instagram. It’s him on the street, overseeing his domain, pointing at the things that need to be changed, that he will change. He is stylish, hair combed, and he acts tough: shit is about to get real.

When he runs into a homeless person on the sidewalk, he tells him to go work, asks him why he is in Bucharest if he’s not from here, then tells him to pack up and go to a shelter, because he has provided for shelters. This is not helping through curiosity and listening. This is helping through punishment. He then runs into a woman who is cleaning the streets. And he tells her she missed some cigarette butts a few steps away. She says she will get them. And then he tells her she probably would have seen them if she didn’t keep the broom on top of the garbage bin.

To him, both are lazy – even the one doing the work to keep the mayor’s streets clean. This is the story he tells: there are lazy people, citizens that misbehave, and others that disturb the kingdom – change shall be delivered through punishment and fear.

I’m sorry to say, but the mayor is not original. Almost all of our leaders, almost all of our institutions have acted the same way for decades – whether or not they are run by someone who means well, or by someone who means to extract personal gains from the system.

The Mayor, the Prime Minister, the President, they don’t want us as partners, because partnership means listening. And they are too busy to listen when the great act of leadership – especially for men – means making bold choices. (Bold choices that, for some reason, don’t include cutting propaganda money for media, which over the past 5 years, journalist Cristian Andrei has revealed, has meant hundreds of millions of euros for docile coverage and lies.)

This story is only going to get worse if none of them tries to write a more empathic script. Or if we don’t create more empathetic politicians And we know how it ends a few years from now: with the resounding victory of the far-right party AUR, or of a mystical empty vessel like Georgescu that people will empower just because he seems to care for them. We are so unloved and so unseen that we are inches away from picking an abusive savior who lies that he loves us over the current emotionally unavailable rulers.

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What’s this got to do with journalism?

In a way, everything. Good journalism stands somewhere at the intersection of needs, values and resources. In an ideal world, it should provide a service people need, according to a set of transparently communicated values, while being able to spend the necessary resources to do it well.

But it’s not an ideal world.

The reason I paused the payments on this newsletter is mainly because I’d be breaking the law starting July 1 if I don’t invoice every single one of you individually for any new payments (either the recurring monthly sub, or the yearly one). That’s because a new provision is coming into effect that the Romanian state needs to see invoices for every customer (living in Romania). Any proof that Stripe or Substack provides of your payment (including an invoice!), my accountant said, is no longer sufficient.

What bothers me is here is the extra bureaucratic hoop I have to jump through without any help or guidance from a state that under-collects everything, from VAT to taxes. Of course a solution exists, but it’s up to me to find it. Currently, I don’t have the bandwidth to get this one more thing done, but I also don’t like doing things illegally. So, for now, payments are paused.

This gets us into some lessons at the 100^th mark.

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Over the past few months I ran a program to empower newsletter creators, mostly my old colleagues from DoR, to grow theirs with the help of an outside consultant. We all had modest success – grew the readership, grew the number of paying members, make lists of necessary improvements. But we all hit a wall we should have anticipated: if you don’t treat your newsletter as a business, with a strategy, a marketing plan etc., there is a limit to how much you can grow, and for some, it might not surpass the level of a side hussle.

This is harder if you also draw a line when it comes to values. Let’s say you write about sports, like Andreea does, and say “no” to the betting industry that is singlehandedly propping up most sports-related content (and sports itself). That puts the onus on you to find other revenue sources. Fundraising is difficult, and it takes time. Increasing readership, the same. Which means there is less time for doing the actual work. Plus, sometimes, none of the other jobs fit you. And there are still bills to be paid, which means other gigs, which means a scarcity of time. And so on.

Now, market logic is cruel: it would say that you are either lazy to do the work (hey, mayor!), that you don’t want it enough, or that your product sucks if not enough people line up to pay for it without you asking. But not all of us can be both good journalists and good salespeople – successful and worthwhile solopreneurship is the exception, not the rule. I wish we could Labubu this, but we can’t.

This doesn’t mean we deserve money for simply existing. I don’t believe any of my words are good enough for me to be paid for through public subsidies or what have you – I am not owed a career in this field by anyone. And no, I don’t think journalism should be supported just because it pretends to have a noble mission. (Which it often fails to delivered on in practice).

Yet the willingness to discuss creating something at the ideal intersection of needs, values, and money is fading.

I have been part of some frankly demoralizing conversations that emphasized unilaterally one of the above (thus killing great ideas, even promising products), or slightly better convos that tried to at least merge two of the conditions – at best, we create ambitious work that not enough people find relevant enough to be sustainable.

But the prospect of getting all three seems daunting to impossible right now.

Take Romanian newsrooms – the larger ones, that dominate the news ecosystem are about traffic and compromising on revenue streams. They are also led by men that act more or less like the mayor of Sector 1: if curiosity was ever part of their toolkit, it’s now been replaced by aggressive certainty. The smaller ones either can’t deliver on the needs, or don’t have the bandwidth or imagination to fix some of the money equation.

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As I write this 100^th letter, this is on my mind: how can we make more things that are useful to people, that are built with care and intention, that last, in ways in which we don’t cut corners (on quality, on legal requirements etc.), and that also bring in enough resources to cover costs and pay people decent wages?

For those reading in other parts of the world, this might sound laughable for how obvious it is.

But here?

There is a local event series that promotes vulnerability (and tries to sell investors on scaling it), where one of the speakers talked about essentially scheming your way through building a business. He didn’t fail at trying to do it the right way. He never even tried. And we’re celebrating that.

Some of most relevant and large name digital media players still use fake bylines for news stories written by the editors on call. There are plenty of explanations – most, like their clickbait headlines, have to do with a business model that is not oriented around needs or values, but traffic (money).

I also could have kept taking your money and just ignored the taxman and their burdensome invoicing rules. Some people I know do that.

And here’s the thing. I don’t blame any of the ones above, and I don’t think punishment is the answer. When you feel you’re left to your own devices, your survival – as a person, as a business, as a brand – seems more important than whatever fanciful values we’re all pretending to uphold. Values are a privilege if you’re hungry, or feel you are unfairly punished.

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So can we pursue excellence in a time of austerity? Can we demand more – of ourselves, of the those around us, of our leaders –, when everything seems less? Can we listen to what others lack when we feel consumed by lack ourselves?

The only way I have to answer questions like this one is by telling stories.

Together with my former colleague Andreea Vîlcu we brought together a team of people to produce a pilot season of a podcast about scarcity. (Inspired by an essay she wrote in 2022). It’s going to be called Prea Sărac (Too Poor), and it’ll tackle a few themes: the income disparities in Romania and their effect on how people live and make decisions, the cycle of debts many of live through, the fear that we’re all one family tragedy away from personal ruin, the shame of not having enough, that others will say we’re poor, that we will never fulfill not even the technically modest Romanian dream of owning your own place.

We also have a survey (in Romanian) you can fill out and share with your friends.

Of course our dream is to make something as close to this Venn diagram of needs, values and resources possible. We are using people’s answers to guide our reporting, we are trying to have the best possible production quality, and we’ve committed the last 30.000 euros we had available in Media DoR for test projects to it. (It covers some of the human resources costs, and some of the technology).

To circle back to the start: of course this will cost more – more like 50.000 Euros if we do it like we dreamed it. We’ll go fundraise soon, and we know we don’t want banks or financial education projects funding it, which restricts our options. We might even come directly to you, the public, for those extra 20.000 Euros.

I guess what I’m saying is that we’re not ready to compromise on an ideal version before we give it a solid try. This seems too often the story around these parts – in politics, in sports, in business, in journalism, in families – there is an excuse for it not working out or being good, before much has been tried. We justify misguided decisions, unfair punishment, and rushed pronouncements by telling ourselves that it could not have been any other way.

Yes, it could have been. There are so many paths to take. Don’t discount them without trying.

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Thank you for having me in your inboxes. You remind me every time that I chose to write this letter, that I am lucky to be read, that I am fortunate to have 4.165 subscribers out of which 51 have decided to pay at one point, and that longform writing (although often less polished than I would like) is still needed. This is a gift you are giving, and you are seen and appreciated for it.

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SIDE DISHES:

1. How can listening become a generator of attention? Just take a look at Zoran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign in New York — a great breakdown by Ezra Klein and Chris Hayes.

2. Leo Vardiashvili, Hard by a Great Forest. If you wanted a summer adventure read, pick this one about a young Georgian returning to his native Tbilisi to find his father and brother, and the country he once called home. (Also available in Romanian).

3. Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection. I can’t do justice to this book of loosely linked tales. It’s filthy, it’s funny, it’s like the inside of a brain soaked in the most obscure and dark puddles of the internet, coming to terms with the more complicated nuances of human relationships.

4. Should you drink airline coffee? The answer is less important than the search and the way curiosity is deployed in this Search Engine episode.

5. I’ve read a couple of Lea Ypi essays recently – this one on hope being a privilege is short and punchy –, and I recalled how her book Free transfixed me. It’s about Albania in and after communism through the eyes of a child, and about how complicated freedom is.

6. Also read Irina Dumitrescu’s essay on Ypi’s book. Actually, read Irina’s newsletter – she is a brilliant mind and it’s always a pleasure to walk beside her thoughts.

7. I finally saw Bright Eyes live. They are one of my favorite bands of all time, and this playlist is largely the tour’s setlist. If you want to start somewhere that captures Conor’s songwriting, try Persona Non Grata.