Draft Four: Doing it at human scale
Crafting experiences for connection and belonging. Plus: a sneak peak into my research project.
This end of the year is tough.
I didn’t have a plan for where I’d be as 2023 wrapped up, but I probably would have bet against being this tired and spread thin. Too many projects, too much (self-inflicted) pressure to deliver at a personal standard of excellence, too many stakeholders, partners, and allies. I especially don’t like who I sometimes become in such moments – I have a shorter fuse, become less empathic, project my worries. All I want is to hide under a blanket.
It takes something special to break such loops of doom, and outside of having people around that can help you shut off the world (I also recommend books), there aren’t many public or community-driven opportunities to do so.
This show I also mentioned last week, Oamenii Dreptății (OD), did that. I want to unpack what it did, why that matters, and how it can inform complimentary ways of engaging with the world at a human-scale: as journalists, but also as artists, civic activists, and so on.
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OD is a project of Leaders for Justice, a leadership program that trains young judges, prosecutors, attorneys, police officers, and so on, to be more than just their job description. To become both better professionals, but also better citizens, who are more connected with society and ideals of fellowship, and fairness. Initially, OD was a way to showcase the program’s alumni to the wider world. (I’ve known them for a while, and every spring I lead storytelling training sessions with their new cohort.)
Last year, DoR and Leaders for Justice teamed up for an upgraded edition of OD that combined our formula of live journalism with their community. We created a show that was both a farewell tour for DoR, but also a showcase of stories about justice.
The way we did was by taking experiences they had on the job, and shaping them into stories for the stage: one judge spoke about learning to make decisions by recounting the harrowing case of a girl assaulted by her own father; another judge talked about risking being fined for not closing enough cases because he was adamant about making sure regular people got a chance to be heard in his courtroom; a lawyer recounted her experience in elderly care homes that were in the direst of conditions and trying to protect people society decided were unfit to fend for themselves.
In between these we sprinkled moments of poetry, dance, live music, comedy, and other stories, told by our DoR crew, or guests – Paul, a journalist who is blind, came on stage with his guide dog, Phantom, and talked about navigating an unjust city landscape.
Because last winter we packed halls in Iași, Timișoara and Bucharest, Doru Toma, the mind and heart behind Leaders for Justice, wanted to recreate the experience. So OD was back again this year in Bucharest, in front of almost 500 people, with a similar mix of storytellers: lawyers, judges, police, but also musicians, a teen theater group, a director, an anthropologist, a poet and so on.
Once the show got going, all my stress and worries went out the window. For the next two and a half hours, the quick pace of stories broke my loop, made me feel safe, connected, and part of something. For that one evening, I belonged.
This was the feeling we always aimed for when we did live shows with DoR, and it was beautiful that last week I got to feel it as member of the audience. Last week’s OD both proved that our model worked, but it also underscored something else: it worked because the motivation of Doru and his crew this year was not a financial one, or one of awareness, or a marketing ploy to please advertisers by setting up an Instagram corner for influencers to perform in.
The aim of OD and the spirit of it was connection.
When Bianca told a story on stage about being bullied by a teacher in school, she wanted to reach those of us who went through that, too. When Doru Trăscău of indie rock band The Mono Jacks talked about writing songs out of his bouts of anxiety and heartbreak, he brought us closer to his work, and to the reality that we don’t have to hide our tougher moments. And when Lori talked about switching many careers over the last decade to eventually return home to Suceava and build something for her community that connected with all of us who want to make a difference.
“We all have our Suceava’s”, Lori said, and, at that moment, we all thought about it. Maybe it’s our literal hometown, maybe it’s your adoptive town, maybe it’s just a street in your neighborhood. But for a few minutes, we all belonged to a community that shared something special and connected over it. Some even cried – good storytelling can have that side-effect.
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Over the past year many people asked me whether we’ll bring back The Power of Storytelling (PoS), a storytelling conference at which the audience also cried (plus learned, felt connection, and belonging). Whenever someone starts a conversation about the poor quality of many events in Romania, someone will say: “PoS was different, and I miss it”. It’s gratifying to hear.
What made it different was our intent: we always wanted to put on an event that made the world go away. For a day, sometimes two, we wanted you to feel immersed in a different time, where although you were connected to a few hundred strangers, you still felt you belonged.
We intentionally worked to create that. Most conferences and events don’t. They optimize for information delivery, or entertainment, or simply profit. Nothing wrong with any of those, but very few own this choice, and even fewer think of the experience of the audience – from the day you register, to the day you get a feedback form. Even if your goal is to just make money, you should still consider me, the person giving you the money.
Why am I talking about all of this?
Because, in my mind, it ties into tons of questions I have written about in these letters before: what could I do in the world that orbits around the ideas of generosity and care, that is built for connection and belonging, and is shaped as an experience? Something that doesn’t make us even angrier and more polarized, something that can enhance people’s pro-social behaviors, something that appeals to the better angels of our nature.
And is that something a form of journalism, or do I need to move away from the word?
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Journalism in Romania is in terrible shape.
I gloomily predicted last year that 2023 will be the toughest in a long time – I think I even said I was worried that closing DoR is just the first mainstream sign of trouble. Well, 2023 closes with Ringier firing Cătălin Tolontan from Libertatea (and other senior leaders quitting or being fired as well), with investigative journalist Emilia Șercan protesting outside the General Attorney’s offices, with the largest party in the country pumping millions of euros of propaganda money in outlets large and small, with lack of funding for independent media, and stress and burnout everywhere.
A big part of the problem is the same in other countries, too: journalists, activists, academics, people involved in social change, are all pains in the ass for leaders in power. And Romania is undergoing a period of dramatic political consolidation, the consequence of which is pressure on critical voices. It’s not Orban’s Hungary, but that model is attractive for many modern versions of one-party states in this region. (Because, as Ivan Krastev has argued, liberal democracy is “a light that failed” in our neck of the woods).
But another part of the problem – which is something people in power exploit – is that civic infrastructure is broken. It’s broken party by tech companies and their social media candy machines. But it’s also broken because in all our fighting for survival many of us lost touch with the on the ground reality or with people’s needs.
When it comes to journalism, most of it is done from Bucharest (even here, locally, there are barely any slivers of coverage that create community). Most of it still hasn’t adjusted the ideas of scale, growth, traffic to the reality that mass-media is dead – both as a business model, but also as a measure of impact (are your pageviews really a metric of anything else but what you can charge for ads?). And most journalists I know aren’t interested in connection and belonging as user needs to be served; they just don’t regard them as part of what journalism is for.
This applies to other industries / endeavors: do you want to open a coffee shop to be able to open six more later on, or to create a community space that delivers for a certain number of people, in a limited area? Do you want to sell local products to create sustainable local networks and infrastructures, or is that your pilot project for an investor-ready-AI-integrated future tech unicorn?
I’m definitely not saying that keeping something small to a niche community is easy – I just donated to ArtHub so they can keep the lights on (you should, too) –, but I am saying we are spending way too much time talking about growing, scaling, expanding, and replicating, about likes, shares, followers, and virality, about surviving, grant writing, and crowd funding, and not enough about meaning, mission, values, intent, and user needs.
That’s where I’m coming from. The importance of deciding what you’re about and why, delivering that at high quality, and then working to figure out the rest.
In my industry, we certainly need big independent players with large reach (which is why what’s happening to Libertatea is tragic). We also need niche players who punch hard, often above their weight (Recorder being the prime example). But we also need human-scale storytelling, something that might not even involve the act of publishing, but which can create some of that magical belonging I described above. (I also deeply believe such endeavors can aid our quests for dignity, agency, and hope).
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All these disparate thoughts have blended recently into what I proposed as a capstone project for my CUNY leadership and media innovation fellowship. The idea and questions are framed around journalism, but you’ll find them relatable to other types of endeavors that create or sustain civic life and infrastructure. I’m sharing my research proposal below, and I welcome any thoughts and feedback you might have.
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Headline: What is journalism at a human scale? Can it still be called that? Could it survive outside developed democracies?
Description: Journalism has traditionally been optimized for scale, efficiency, and speed. The public was the mass. The models are evolving, new roles are popping up, but as we stray from business as usual, I wonder: when you optimize for community, trust or care, is it still journalism? And can it be sustainable?
Problem: As our business model crumbled (and keeps crumbling), journalists largely refused to change, and hung on to both the practice, and the myths. That we are here to gatekeep the truth in an age where everyone is a creator. That democracy needs us to survive. That people have to consume our work, no matter how we deliver it. That we don’t need to adjust our relationship to our communities.
This stubbornness has hurt change efforts in newsrooms everywhere, but resistance to journalism done differently is arguably stronger in places such as Central and Eastern Europe. Even the small players here fetishize scoops and investigations as the path to change society and consider innovation in relationships and mission foolish.
Solution: As the tumbling of trust became apparent, the journalism ecosystem elsewhere was flooded with small newsrooms and outlets that spoke differently about the work and started doing it differently. They emphasized mission, community, care (for the work, the staff, the people it features in the coverage), co-creation, and other tools that are not in the traditional journalist’s toolbox. They expanded the existing traditional roles with some that seemed closer in scope to community workers, activists, or psychologists: conveners, mediators, facilitators, and so on. Their aim was to make journalism relevant to their chosen communities, build from their needs, and take it down to human scale.
I believe making room for more human scale journalism that centers community and relevance can also diversify existing journalism in Eastern Europe, even if maybe it’ll have to contend with not being seen as part of the profession.
Path: I’d like to identify and interview newsroom leaders who built such new systems to ask a series of questions around these ideas:
How are existing initiatives around the world wrestling with the tension around their work being journalism or not?
Does this matter (or doesn’t it)?
What you gain and what you lose by abandoning scale, and operating at a human level?
Do we need different kinds of talent pipelines for this work?
How is this work sustainable; is there a business model around it?
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A confession: I have no clue where these ideas and interviews will lead. I also don’t know if this a passion project, something I’d love for others to do and for me to be involved in occasionally, or if it might become a future job, a future organization, a network.
What I know is that we’ve played with versions of these ideas at DoR: we went as a team of journalists into a community and told the stories the community wanted to untangle (not the ones we envisioned from the outside), we acted as a connector that brought stakeholders around a table to discuss issues such as domestic violence (we once had everyone from survivors, to counselors, to law enforcement in the same room), and we did various types of events, from classes, to conversations, to large scale shows.
They always felt like incredible exchanges. People gave us trust and paid money to attend, we provided stories and a space for reflection and belonging. Our aim was to leave something behind, and the way we measured impact was less the numbers of butts in the seats, and more the numbers of personal messages. Even after a full year without DoR, we still get them – just this week someone emailed one of my former colleagues to tell her that our podcast, Obiceiul pământului, encouraged him to declare his Roma identity in the national census.
That’s impact at a human scale. And yes, you can get there by telling great stories to many thousands of people you’ve never met. But this mass model will only be available to a few (institutions or influencers). The rest of us – like or not – will embrace niches. So if community-level and human-scale work is what’s needed to bring us closer together, maybe it’s not that bad of an idea to start experimenting with.
OD came about from an intersection of journalism and the law. But what other communities of place or practice need their stories told – doctors, educators, civic activists? What groups should come together, but what they’re missing is a someone to bridge that gap and create that connection? What small communities are underserved and could never be served if the expectation remains growth and scale? Who needs to belong and be seen?
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Being seen is what I wrote about last week, and you responded in kind. I have nothing but gratitude, and I wish you all peaceful holidays, and the chance to have whatever you need in your life: if it’s the hustle and bustle and occasional chaos of family, so be it. If it’s a chance to reconnect with friends and loves ones, go for it. If you just want prop up on the couch with books and wine, I salute you, fellow traveler.
I will send two more letters this year – one a list of side dishes on Christmas eve, and the other most likely a list of conclusions from this adventure of writing and reading. Like I told you, I had no strategy for Draft Four. But I did have a hope – that each letter speaks powerfully and loudly to at least one person. I was reminded of that hearing Taffy Brodesser-Akner, a great writer of profiles, speaking on The Daily about the importance of Taylor Swift. (Which I didn’t need to be convinced of, but it still moved me). “All great art is the art that sees you”, Taffy said about why Taylor’s music resonated with millions. “If you show somebody that they are real, you have them for life.”
Side dishes:
There is interesting research into the power of live journalism – it allows people to focus on stories, discover topics they would otherwise avoid, and journalists are considered both more authentic and more trustworthy from the stage. It’s also been posited that it’s a vehicle for “Self-transcendent eudaimonic experiences”, meaning it can be a highly emotional and transformative experience as it makes one reflect on their own life and its meaning.
For those interested in the inequities of journalism funding (read: few donors fund project that target communities that can’t eventually pay), this is a sobering story about sustainability.
Why we need to write so we can think better.
Elif Shafak’s newsletter is a beauty. Her most recent piece is on Jane Austen, and, of course, Taylor Swift.
Beirut is a band I was deeply in love with in the 00s. The new album is a perfect winter soundtrack.
Beautiful:) Thank you for giving me a ray of light at the beginning of a busy, tough day. I loved also reading about El Timpano. I think that in-depth, varied, high-level fundraising should be taught in Journalism Schools more than ever, if journalism is to survive.
Looking forward to the two final letters and to the future project you will be a part of!