Draft Four: Collaboration and camaraderie
Scroll for news of a fundraiser.
Before we begin: This letter sends Sunday, 8am, as Romanians vote in the first round of the Presidential elections. I don’t remember ever seeing as many internet takes on the candidates – both from content creators and influencers –, coupled with a general disappointment regarding our choices. (There’s no progressive candidate on the ballot, for example). The upside is I’ve also seen more utility-oriented journalism than ever: breaking down candidates’ positions on everything from the economy, to abortion rights, to their stance on Ukraine or Gaza.
I don’t have a hot take on where we’re at, or one that adds to the discourse. But it is interesting reading about these elections in English – the narrative seems so neat when it’s anything but, and it doesn’t match the noise and the clashing stories. The noise will continue, as we have two more election Sundays – the Parliamentary vote and the Presidential run-off, and I’ll return to the topic of our clashing stories before it’s all said and done.
But today, it’s other ideas about the future – and a story about a fundraiser your company could get behind.
*
Many of you told me that last week’s letter resonated. What I was discussing was finding other options on the continuum that has solopreneurship (or freelancing) at one end, and a traditional organization at the other. To put it in journalism terms: what structures exist outside “I’m a person with a newsletter” and “I’m employed by a newsroom”?
The question interests me because many people find the structures of newsrooms constricting and not modern enough, and many solopreneurs and freelancers find their work too lonely.
I was chatting about this a couple of nights ago with Natalia Antelava, co-founder of Coda Story, and a journalist-entrepreneur I deeply admire. Natalia started Coda after years in international media (she was a BBC foreign correspondent) and launched it from her home country of Georgia. In less than a decade, Coda outgrew the country and is now, arguably, a global voice. Natalia is also doing ZEG, a tremendous storytelling festival in Tbilisi.
In the past couple of years, she has also been thinking about the constraints/freedom dynamic in newsrooms, and alternative models not just of selecting and telling stories, or fundraising, but of working together. In a blog post she published in June, at the end of her Stanford JSK fellowship, she wrote about three principles she’s determined to follow in the future with ZEG and Coda: radical collaboration, rethinking distribution, re-imagine growth to scale for impact, not traffic. (These are all version of similar ideas I came to while doing my community-driven media research all year).
I love how Natalia frames this. Here she is on collaboration:
My instinct is that the only way for non-mainstream newsrooms to survive is by building vast, yet agile and cross-disciplinary networks for sharing audiences, content, revenue and expertise.
For Coda, this translates into a two-circle approach to radical collaborations. In our inner circle are other journalists, organizations and individuals, with whom we are going to build closely knit (in some cases merger-like) partnerships that will enable us to share insights, audiences, capacity and revenue.
In the outer circle are much more broad, agile and most importantly cross-disciplinary partnerships that bring different industries into the conversation to feed our journalistic output.
And on rethinking distribution:
It is time to change the power dynamic and stop relying on the middleman. From now on, for us at Coda social media is just a marketing tool, the rest of our distribution will focus on a mix of channels that allow us to build new feedback loops and genuine relationships with our audiences from in person events to creative online storytelling.
What we were talking about is that these ideas need both the right teams, and, of course, funding, but also a completely new way of working, and coming together in different teams, on different projects, at different times – especially if teams are in different places, even on different continents.
*
I also got some great insight from Vladimir Mitev, a Bulgarian journalist who also speaks Romania and who covers the country for Bulgarian public media. He actually is living a form of collective-network reality with one of the projects he’s involved with, Crossborder Talks.
This is what Vladimir said:
Cross-border Talks is an attempt at such a combination of freedom and camaraderie. It is a Poland-based media, published by foundation Naprzod, which is a Polish progressive foundation. But the foundation is not interfering at all in our activity and in fact we asked it to be our legal publisher, namely because there is a relationship of trust between us.
Cross-border Talks has in its core a Polish, a Czech and a Bulgarian-Romanian journalist (me). It also has a WhatsApp group of about 45 members, which is very appreciated by its members for the diversity and competence of people who communicate there. They are from various EU countries.
All of us have an interest in international relations and social issues. At the same time, all of us have one or two basic jobs and Cross-border Talks is more like a hobby. Including, most of the funding for it – for platforms and online services, is covered by us – its core team. We used to receive grants indirectly from the European Parliament for a few years, which were covering part of the expenditures, but this will stop starting from the next year. And we believe we will be able to cover our own expenditures.
*
There are other models, and I’ll continue to look at them. In the meantime, as I think better while taking action, I’ve started to ponder how we could solve – at least experiment with solving – for two problems simultaneously. Find ways to do radical collaboration/cross-pollination/build an ecosystem of journalism creators that support one another AND solve for some of the lack of funding Vladimir was talking about.
In independent media. the lack of funding often less to do with the value and worth of the project, and way more to do with scale and how the market (and I’m including both for profit and nonprofit actors here) still go for eyeballs and reach over impact, especially over impact at a human scale, the kind you see with your own eyes when you do a live show.
Having started media before, I remember how big of a burden not having resources was. It’s actually something I’ve advised young wanna-be journo entrepreneurs to be cautios about: try to not jump into the unknown without securing a big of cushion.
Alas, there are tons of ideas about what our journalism needs and wants. I’ve scribbled pages of notes during dinners we hosted in our office over the past couple of years. Many of these are worth trying out to see if there’s something there – they are worth the try, worthy of a pilot.
So, together with my former colleague from DoR, Carla Lunguți, we asked ourselves: What if we raised €100,000 for this very purpose – to do experiments, be a catalyst, boost the network effect.
Our idea is to create a small, pooled fund, with a dual mission: to train and develop the next generation of journalists (something we’ve started doing with workshops), and to bankroll some projects as experiments. This fund itself would be an experiment – a decentralized structure prioritizing collaboration and co-creation.
What we landed on for an easier-to-run effort was this: there are so many companies supporting journalism in various ways. Some do it through donations or sponsorships, others through advertising or know-how. At DoR, we collaborated with many of them. What if we built this fund with their help? If 100 hundred companies in Romania contribute €1,000 each, we’d have enough to get started.
This fall we began reaching out to companies, sharing some of the ideas we’d like to test – which are themselves in draft mode. Here are a few examples:
Public events around the idea of How We Did This to bring newsrooms closer to their audiences: journalists from different outlets talk about the work behind a story;
Mini-editorial experiments in towns across the country. For instance, a visit to a county capital where, over two days, we organize several events: a dinner with local civic actors to discuss their key issues, a public event about local journalism, and a one-day workshop with students;
Editorial experiments on underfunded topics: series or even verticals on migration, poverty, or – why not? – sewer bugs, that could be done in partnership with existing media;
Upskilling reporters, editors, and managers;
Fellowships for “editors for hire” to support newsrooms that can’t afford them;
Consulting and solutions for independent business models: such as creating a network of newsletters and helping them build a strategy and develop a stronger reader-revenue component;
Hiring experts to support a collective of solopreneurs with contracts, taxes, and more.
*
Will this work?
It looks like it might – we’re closing in on commitments of 70.000 euros, so if anyone out there wants to join the list of companies and individuals that have chipped in, just reply to this or email Carla at carla@dor.ro.
Our aim is to reach the 100.000 euros target by December 31, and then, starting in January, beginning work on the ways the money could be spent.
Ideally what we would support are experiments that build on the ideas mentioned above – new ways of coming together to do things that we couldn’t have done by ourselves, or that existing organizations are too stiff and bureaucratic to pull off fast enough.
This newsletter will be part of this ecosystem, of course, and I’ll report from the frontlines. Apart from finding projects and running experiments, such work also requires system-thinkers who can design operational rhythms oriented towards co-creation, and community managers who can act as connectors between nodes. Not to mention good project managers.
Journalism doesn’t have many of the people above – so we’d need to find and train some of these, too. But the prospect, I will admit, is exciting. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with the questions I dropped here last time, too – please keep replying, it helps.
If you’re solo, what’s working and not working for you?
What models have you seen that combine freedom with camaraderie?
What new forms of collectives, umbrellas, networks have you seen, and what do you think are their secret ingredients to making it work?
How would you build an ecosystem out of a group of independent creators without creating an organization or a new brand to swallow them up?
How do we teach collaboration and teamwork?
