Draft Four: Can Quitting Be Winning?

The power of letting go – why it’s hard, and when it’s necessary.

Over the past year, I did some informal coaching with two brilliant young journalists working on noua grijă, a climate and environment newsletter. It’s what’s left of an ambitious initiative that faded, but Marian and Patricia wanted to keep the spirit alive.

Both have school, jobs, and live in different countries. Yet they’re committed to deep and humane environmental stories, and they are packaged grit. They stuck it out through 2024 with symbolic grants. I nudged them to get under a larger umbrella, so they pitched themselves to Scena9. The arrangement allows them to publish the newsletter, which they can’t live off yet, and which isn’t growing fast enough. (Help by following on Insta).

This week they told me their new plan: do a call for volunteers, and go big. They have seen other Gen Z initiatives take this route, they believe in the noua and the bet is: more of us, more stories, more attention on socials, more chances to make it.

They’re not start-up founders chasing venture investments. Just knowledgeable enthusiasts who believe in a cause, don’t have the time and resources to fully commit, so they are betting on outsourcing some of this enthusiasm and some of the work.

The optimistic scenario is a spark will light up, and noua might become more than a passion project. The pessimistic scenario? That noua stays small and fragile? Or that if this effort fails they stop altogether?

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I’ve thought a lot about quitting. Not noua quitting, or me quitting this newsletter (although quitting Substack is something I should get to). But knowing when to pull the plug on an idea, a dream, even an identity. A few nights ago I started reading Quit, by decision-making expert and poker player Annie Duke.

Duke reminds us that we live in societies that don’t reward quitting – on the contrary, quitting is giving up, and we only praise those that stay the course. But some of those who stay the course – people or initiatives – die. We stay in terrible jobs, and toxic relationships. We persist with an endeavor when we shouldn’t, our biases holding us hostage.

We should quit more. And we should quit sooner.

This was on my mind when two bits of news shook the Romanian media world.

G4Media, a newsroom that recently got on a (really) high horse chastising competitors for lacking morals and ethics, sold to a tabloid mogul with a questionable background – a man who admitted to anti-corruption prosecutors that he was an intermediary for high level bribe.

G4 was operating a for-profit company, whose ad model was clicks, which explained the click-bait subpar journalism dominating an otherwise well-connected and well-sourced politics and investigations-focused outlet. It was also operating an NGO through which it accessed grants and took in reader revenue.

The amount for which the G4 co-founders sold all their stock is unknown, but the speculation puts it at 4-5 million euros. Much of the journalism bubble was either disappointed or LOLed. A generous interpretation is that the co-founders are quitting. Not their roles as journalists, but a decade of being media owners, roles they didn’t want, and could now be happy to get out of (with good money on hand). They can now focus on the journalism; fingers crossed the new ownership won’t screw them over.

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I’m projecting, but if they quit building the business to focus on the journalism, I understand the temptation. Independent media in Romania over the past 10-15 years was built by reporters and editors wanting to have their own shop, without the interference of media moguls. Some made it, some didn’t, but all went through the painful realization that making it meant they wouldn’t be the ones doing the journalism.

It’s almost impossible to be both creator and publisher. Eventually, you have to quit one.

DoR in its infancy was a lot like noua – volunteer-based, often latching onto every new plan that promised salvation. We didn’t have money, we didn’t make money, and I hoped I could be a reporter-writer, and also whatever that management job was. I was kidding myself, but I was young, and just like Marian and Patricia, I kept hoping. It was only when I quit the idea of being a writer for my own publication that it began growing.

By the time the pandemic rolled around, we were a staff of 25, with many products going at once. We did quit a lot of them in March 2020, and quitting helped us focus. When we decided to quit for good, in 2022, it wasn’t because our bank account was empty. It was also because I couldn’t shake the feeling that we entered a prolonged decline. That we’d just go down a road that eventually ended. Why drive all the way off a cliff when you can stop, say goodbye, and head in another direction?

This is tough to do – for founders, but also in life. Not only do we not quit – we escalate commitment (a common trick of the mind). We stick with it because we’ve stuck with it. We pour more money into it because we’ve already poured money into it – this is the sunk cost fallacy.

In the early years, I poured my savings into DoR (it took me almost 10 years to recoup some of it, at a loss). I stuck with it because I was invested, but also because I felt we still hadn’t tried everything. For a while, I was right.

In 2022, we all knew we were too tired and out of ideas for another reinvention. We looked at some other signs – the pandemic, war, accelerated social polarization, content creation sucking up money and attention. I told everyone that within 5 years the publishing landscape would shift massively, and smallish general publishers would be largely irrelevant.

My prediction holds. The spotlight is now on medium-sized publishers that keep adding staff or verticals: look at Recorder, with 2.3 million Euros in yearly revenue; the HotNews publishing ecosystem that absorbed the bulk of the Libertatea team and launched a sports site; the G4 transaction, plus a few others recently consolidated players.

These former indies on steroids are the new mainstream challenging cable news. Those not part of this, even though they are doing important work, are most likely struggling.

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There was a piece of news that was sadder to me than the G4 sale, and that is ZYX Media, owners of HotNews, shutting down Panorama, one of the only homes for deeply reported explanatory journalism (plus features), not to mention visual storytelling that got them a European Press Prize nomination.

Panorama was far from perfect. Like other small outlets that still publish complex stories, it lacks strategic coherence, which means it doesn’t quite know what not to do. And if inside newsrooms journalists find ways to justify any story choices, for the public this can be confusing. Being an under-resourced generalist in the age of the niche creator is quasi-impossible. It’s certainly not a unique selling proposition.

What Panorama had and the rest don’t is the backing of a larger company, with many brands in the portfolio. But it didn’t help them get clarity or find a suitable business model (outside of the ad model the company already knew). So they killed a product that delivered better journalism, but at a loss.

Much of the discourse about the pain of independent Romanian media is about money. It’s become a recurrent theme of these letters that lack of money is not just a cause, but also a symptom. A symptom of a lack of leadership and management skills in a country where the business models are archaic (mostly shameful clickbait), product thinking is a rare bird, strategy is misunderstood, innovation is an afterthought, and people management suffers.

Maybe Panorama was doomed to fail. Maybe the company should have killed it earlier. The answer also depends on what you’re measuring in expected value: is it money? It is attention and reach? Is it delivering a service, even if to a small public?

I don’t think Panorama and the company talked enough about this – about what they measured aside from not losing money. And even when it comes to the money, I’ll go out on a limb and say the company didn’t try enough things before pulling the plug.

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It’s easy to talk from the sidelines. But it’s hard to know when to quit, especially in a profession defined by identity. If you quit an endeavor, are you quitting being a journalist in the service of a public? Isn’t an entrepreneurial failure with a media company, a newsletter, a YouTube channel a source of shame?

Annie Duke has simple ways of encouraging quitting: “Success does not lie in sticking to things. It lies in picking the right thing to stick to and quitting the rest.”

Or: “Anytime you stay mired in a losing endeavor, that is when you are slowing your progress. Contrary to popular belief, quitting will get you to where you want to go faster.”

But how do you know if and when to do it? Like any decision, you shouldn’t make it with all the information – you’ll be dead before you have it. Here are few ideas:

1. Consider expected value. If you switched to something else, would that have a higher expected value than what you are currently doing? Think of a job you’ve had for a while, which is making you unhappy – will it be the same in six months? Would a new job/role be as bad as this one? Of course you won’t know with 100% accuracy, but statistically it probably won’t be. If the expected value of quitting is higher, you have a starting point.

2. Have kill criteria. These, Duke says, generally include both states and dates: “If I am (or am not) in a particular state at a particular date or at a particular time, then I have to quit.” So my friends at noua could say: If by December 31^st there aren’t four of us equally invested in making this newsletter work, and if the subscriber and follower counts don’t reach (enter a number here), maybe it’s time.

3. Tackle the hard thing first. Says Duke: “When faced with a complex, ambitious goal, (a) identify the hard thing first; (b) try to solve for that as quickly as possible; and (c) beware of false progress.” Let me put it in editing terms: when faced with a story, the tendency is to start making small changes to the wording, cleaning up the grammar. But if the structure is shaky, or the pace lags, copy editing is false progress. Tackle the hard part first because that’s what it all depends on.

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In a way, these letters are my accountability journal, and I’m a prime example of ignoring my own advice. I’ve been wanting to move for a year, and still haven’t, even though the expected value question is a no-brainer: I’m deeply unhappy with my living situation, yet I’m stuck.

I’ll risk it, and add two other situations to this, both relevant to the topic.

The first is the podcast about living with less that I mentioned recently. It’ll be a six-part series about cost of living in modern Romania. Through our NGO we poured the last of our cash into producing it – close to 30.000 euros. We need 15.000 euros (at a minimum) to cover all costs to the end of production, plus do the outreach and marketing it needs to actually be heard.

No, we don’t have it. And no sponsors said yes thus far. (We didn’t approach banks or credit lenders for this one – for obvious reasons). There might be a reader revenue model to it, but is that something we should run for a limited series, or only if we consider doing it for the long run? (Which we are).

We broke with the advice above because sometimes you believe a story needs to be out in the world. So we did the story – because we know how and had the money to experiment – , but the hard thing remains: how can we pay for all of it, and how can we pay to keep it going?

The second is The Power of Storytelling, coming back March 2026. Because of all the austerity talk, we only have promises from sponsors, no cash. Which means we are inviting speakers (and we have nine amazing ones confirmed already), but we have no official team (no cash to pay them), so for now this is three people doing volunteer work out of love, while juggling freelancing. Just recently we did some strategic planning that revealed we should hire an experienced communications pro who can grow the brand and who has managed a comms team. Finding them won’t be easy, but paying them will be even harder.

In short, we should probably add some kill criteria to our planning – when should we stop waiting on a particular sponsor before reaching out to others? When should we cut down on ambitions for what kind of speaker list, or team, or show we can put together? Etc.

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I’m saying this to remind you (and myself) that none of us are safe from the complicated questions of quitting. The older we are, the more personal and professional endeavors we are part of, the harder the questions will seem. Which is why I’ll leave you with this mantra from Annie Duke, because it makes it sound elegant and doable:

Be picky about what you stick to.

Persevere in the things that matter, that bring you happiness, and that move you toward your goals.

Quit everything else, to free up those resources so you can pursue your goals and stop sticking to things that slow you down.

SIDE DISHES:

1. This conversation on the genocide in Gaza. When you look at what Israel has been doing in Gaza, especially over the past 16 months, it’s escalation of commitment in its most gruesome form. Philippe Sands, a scholar of genocide, talks with Ezra Klein about the power of the word, and why sometimes – including now – it’s less relevant from the point of view of international law if we use this word or substitute it with war crimes or crimes against humanity.

2. Ultra Marin, by Dragoș Costache, is a sci-fi dystopia about a man from Southern Romania that ends up working on an AI-powered vessel in the South Pacific, sometime in the not-so-distant future. Don’t laugh at the premise – if we don’t renegotiate our relationship with AI, it’s more than likely we’ll end up here.

3. This interview with the fabulous Lulu Miller of Radiolab and Terrestrials. Lulu is the kind of creative genius that often explores quitting and pivoting, and the difference between resilience and hubris. This is one for the soul.