It’s been over a month since my last letter. I wanted to send one last week, but just couldn’t find the energy for it. I was packing for a trip to New York, and wrapping up a bunch of things, and more or less crashed.
I started writing this letter in NYC (though I’ll be back in Bucharest by the time you get it), in the lobby of a CitizenM hotel (a brand I wrote about last May). I love their open spaces; it’s one of the main reasons I returned here. I’m in New York for my second of three residences in my CUNY Exec News Innovation and Leadership program – we usually have class on Zoom on Wednesdays, but we also get to have these intense few weeks of in-person learning (which is why I didn’t get to do much else while in town).
My head is crammed with questions and ideas, mostly related to strategy and innovation, and how you could run a news organization that both delivers on its mission and promises (while also being sustainable), but also explores and makes time to try new things. For small indie publishers, especially in my part of the world, this is even more difficult.
Arguably, for 13 years I ran a newsroom that never really escaped its exploration phase – we had to innovate and change lanes constantly just to survive. We more or less innovated into exhaustion.
But that’s also because we couldn’t make the main product – longform, in-depth storytelling – successful enough for an organization of our size to be stable. We came close, we achieved some stability, we had years when we brought in solid revenue, we had periods of more calm, but we were always close to the edge. So we innovated. (We did also win a European Press Prize for innovation in 2020).
It’s why we lasted for 13 years when many couldn’t. But it’s also part of what led to our shutting down; constant reinvention is not a strategy. But neither is being oblivious or burying your head in the sand.
Not dying is not a strategy.
Making money is not a strategy.
Just doing journalism is not a strategy.
Yes, these pretty much cover the existing Romanian market.
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So this is part of what’s been on my mind, and, honestly, it’s because I feel a decision moment approaching. What do I do next? I made a long list more than six months ago, but currently it seems to have narrowed down to newsroom work. Or at least to deciding whether I want to join an existing newsroom or start a new one.
The downside of starting one is obvious: exploring and innovating and fundraising yourself into burnout.
The downside of joining one is being in a place that is dysfunctional to the point of being not just chaotic, but painful. (We had long chats in our CUNY program about this).
So it’s a question of the kind of energy I want to spend going forward (or that I can spend): the energy of building and fundraising and cheerleading, or the energy of managing organizational debt, internal politics and persuading.
This is the other reason I haven’t sent another letter over the past month.
I used up almost all the energy I had in the beginning of this year for the stories I did alongside Carla Lunguți about sexual harassment in universities, mainly in the journalism school I graduated from, and that I occasionally teach in.
The lessons of our first piece on Horea-Mihai Bădău, and his inappropriate behavior was the subject of my January letter. Now that piece has been translated into English – you can read it here. (Thank you, Alina Cristea!) A reminder of what we found out from the dozens of women we interviewed (14 of which were featured in that first piece):
From the students’ stories, a pattern of behavior emerged: over the years Bădău picked students whom he contacted privately, and if they responded to his messages, he took the conversation in a direction where he repeatedly suggested they needed a man like him in their lives. Because most were afraid to tell him to stop, he went further: he called them at night, asked them out, invited them to his home or to the beach in Vama Veche.
He hired them, coordinated their internships, sent them poems, told them what he considered “feminine”, showed up with flowers outside their dorms, told them he loved them, and ultimately came onto them. He turned into a bully when he became romantically involved with some of them, emotionally and psychologically abusing them, as several experts have confirmed.
Here's what has happened since: the professor’s case is now analyzed by the Ethics Commission of the University of Bucharest (because multiple complaints were filled after we published). And, in France, he was temporarily suspended last week by the university he teaches at because, the president said in a letter, the students started worrying after reading the stories from Romania.
We also published a second story just last week – taking the number of public testimonies from victims to more than 25. And we have talked to many more who have stories to share but are not ready (or are not willing) to go public with them.
Doing another 10,000 word story in three weeks was exhausting. We did it because so many other women contacted us with their testimonies after the first investigation that we felt their voices had to be heard, too. Plus, we felt that another story could better explain the pattern of Bădău’s behavior, and also look into the lack of action by the J-School and the University of Bucharest even after so much of this became public knowledge.
What was exhausting was not just the reporting and writing.
Bădău started a Facebook page which he said he would use to tell his side of the story. What he did on it is that he attacked colleagues, victims, and us, the journalists. He threatened to sue for 1 million euros in damages, he published the names of the women he assumed had talked to us, he published screenshots from our social media pages taken out of context, made assertions which he would then edit or delete, get likes from accounts that had no real FB history etc.
Just keeping an eye on that was tough. Carla was also in constant touch with the women that had talked to us, seeing how they felt. What kept us going was the courage of these women, and how they held each other up. That was the idea behind the illustration Simina Popescu did for the second story: in the first one (see above), Bădău plays the women as cards, discardable. In the second (see below), the women take back their voice, their power, and hold each other up.
We don’t know what the university will do.
I have no idea if the journalism school will invite me back to teach next year (I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t). I also don’t know if or how we should continue doing this kind of work, because it’s hard. Plus, going back to where this letter started, there are little resources available for it.
We did the more than half a year’s work for free on the first story and are yet to talk about getting paid for the second. This is structural, and yes, it’s about funding, but it’s also about a lack of strategy and leadership, miscommunication, poor organization, and just the general chaos of Romanian newsrooms.
This goes back to the energy question: spend it in the hopes of supporting existing newsrooms to deliver better experiences? Or spend it to build something new?
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When I got onto the plane last Sunday, I barely had any fuel left in the tank. But I also felt proud of everything we did and felt privileged. Reporting, writing, planning a story brings me tremendous joy, and sometimes a story requires stretching one’s limits. Yes, to your own detriment, and unfortunately sometimes to the detriment of other people in our lives. This is something I always struggled to convey to budding reporters in this line of work: sometimes you will choose the story, and you will leave people, and places, and possibilities behind. Striving for balance should remain the goal, but what do you do when balance gets thrown out the window?
I had this conversation last weekend with a friend about world-class athletes and the obsession they need to achieve sometimes otherworldly goals. It’s not the obsession that is the problem, necessarily. It’s more instructive to look at the motivation. With journalists it’s sometimes hard to tell if what we do is because we want to fix the world or fix ourselves.
Often, if we’re honest, it’s a bit of both.
I’m flying back a little more rested, with new ideas (anyone willing to fund an Eastern European fellowship program?), and with the intention of protecting more free time over the next few weeks. But we’ll also keep following the Bădău story, especially because it’s inspired testimonies from women that graduated from other schools. It’s not a Romanian #metoo, but if it leads to more awareness of behavior that is improper in university settings, that would be incredible.
I’m also going to start thinking more intentionally about what I do next, with whom, where. What I do know is that I can’t be too far away from stories.
SIDE DISHES:
Saving Time, by Jenny Odell, is a beautiful and complex book-length meditation of how we measure our lives, and what we miss when do so. (She also wrote the insightful How to Do Nothing, which is certainly not about that).
Speaking of time – How to Keep Time is an Atlantic podcast series that offers tons of tips and thoughts on how to love your time at work, how to make the best of rest and many more.
A wonderful conversation between Ezra Klein and philosopher Agnes Callard touching on everything from meritocracy (and making excellence palatable to the left of the political spectrum), to polyamory.
Green Day’s latest album, Saviors, is nothing groundbreaking, but it did made me feel young again (so did watching Matrix IV on the place – give that a shot, too.). The bonus is that I now have a song for my year of birth, 1981.
Thanks pentru inspirație, keep going somehow, e ciudat cand nu vine duminica newsletterul de la tine :)
PS: adauga la final un buy me a coffee link, would definitely support your hours in lobbies ;)
de câteva zile a luat foc Facebook în cazul Alexandru Matei. Demersurile sunt bune; consecințele pentru cei vizați însă nu prea par a fi serioase.