Draft Four: New(s) leaders for wild times

Scroll for a sample motivation letter.

This is another letter about journalism in my part of the world, more specifically about leading it. It does contain a personal motivation letter in the second half; hope you at least find the template useful.

A handful of newsrooms reached out in the past few weeks to ask for recommendations of editors in chief. Not reporters, not editors (although I get asked about those, too), but people who can run the place. (Add to this list a few others that could benefit from a management shake-up.)

That’s not a good sign, that newsrooms have a hard time filling top positions, but it doesn’t surprise me. Because what our newsrooms in Romania (and maybe in the region) need – even if they can’t quite verbalize it yet – is not another decider on what we cover, but a leader with a strategic vision for what our journalism is about, what our mission is, what community needs we’re serving, and how we support each other as a team.

Journalism has been bad at growing leaders because our know-it-all way of being has slowed us down as the world changed. We revered reporters-turned-bosses, macho men (because they are still mostly men) with large egos and loud voices, who didn’t really listen to colleagues or the community, but could push back against evil forces in society. We were always at war with power, so what happened in the trenches didn’t matter. Neither did thinking about whether we really needed to be in a war in the first place, or if it had to be fought this way.

We still need courage in the face of adversity, corruption, and ill intent. But it’s no longer enough to be sustainable: neither as a business in the digital age, nor as a workplace culture.

We need new skills, and we need new leaders, better than the ones we have. And we need the ones we have to take a better look at themselves, then the environment they’re leading in, and accept a change must take place. This is not about finding a clever business mind to squee a newsroom for profit, or even directing advertising revenue our way – those days have passed. This is about finding mission-driven folks, who believe journalists still serve a role, who are generous and humble, who embrace uncertainty, who are concerned with community, collaboration, and equity.

This is about redefining our paradigm of what leading in media could be.

*

Before we get too far, I don’t have a blueprint.

I mostly have my own learnings and repeated failures over the past decade, which have made me believe this is the way to go: we need leaders in journalism, and we need to start looking for them, empower them, and help them grow.

Some might already be in the profession – either on the business or the editorial side. If you’re among them, hello fellow traveler, we need to train, because a good reporter or editor doesn’t necessarily make a good manager. I’ve learned this the hard way, over and over and over.

Some might be outside our newsrooms, and they might not think they belong. Maybe you’re a business analyst looking for a way to bring your systems-mindset to a civic-minded enterprise. Maybe you’re a young lawyer looking to bring your analytical mind to problems of sustainable growth. Maybe you’re a corporate manager who is ready to lead in a community-minded space. Maybe you’re an organizational psychologist who wants to experiment with new forms of collaborative work. Maybe you’re a product owner in tech who always wanted to build civic information infrastructures.

You get the idea.

(If you feel you are part of the list I mentioned above – inside or outside the newsroom –, please reach out. I’m always building potential teams and projects in my head).

Our talent pipeline in the local industry is draining. (That’s my perception, at least). There are a few of us that care about this, but we’re still learning ourselves. I was, and still am, an average leader on my best days, but then I hear stories from the industry – about cultural chaos, about lack of systems, about faulty communication, about burnout, about meager pay, about people who don’t feel they’re supported to do their best work – and hope we had just a tiny bit more average leadership. At least as a starting point.

*

What I wrote above is largely what compelled me to apply for CUNY’s Executive Program in News Innovation and Leadership. I mentioned this before, and I’ll know probably next week if I’ll get in. Whether I do or don’t, the struggle is real, and I’ll keep thinking of ways to address this issue.

I thought I’d be transparent and share my motivation letter – it expands on the ideas above, and also explores my own doubts and imposter syndrome. I hope it at least serves as a template for any of you writing such letters – whether for school or job or fellowship applications.

The past, as is seen on the streets of Chicago.

MOTIVATION LETTER

More than 14 years ago, a group of us – reporters and writers in Bucharest – started DoR, a magazine of intimate narrative journalism, crafted to explain modern day Romania through “news you can feel”.

In a booming financial crisis, our naivete served us well.

Back then, journalists knew even less about building a business, a brand, a strategy, so we learned on the job: from engaging readers, to fundraising, to workflows, to launching spin-offs. By the time COVID hit in 2020, we had become the longest-standing local nonprofit media, with a staff of 25, and a membership-driven model that provided half of our revenue.

We pivoted to digital, were local pioneers in podcasting and newsletters, ran sold out live shows at the National Theater, and prioritized connection to our community: a pop-up newsroom won us the 2020 European Press Prize for innovation.

Then, on December 31, 2022, DoR stopped publishing.

*

The reasons were manyfold: the pandemic and the war at the border were crushing. The financial struggles, endless. Pushing for new ways of doing and financing journalism that were ahead of their time for Romania, exhausting.

I reached my personal leadership capabilities. While I had found ways for us to exit crises before, this time I was tired, stuck, and alone. As the pandemic progressed, my feeling of inadequacy grew. Our revenues plummeted because we lost live events. Some senior people left – not for other newsrooms but left the uncertainty of the profession altogether. Our management team disbanded as my partners returned to reporting; leading others through chaos wasn’t bringing them joy.

They were former reporters and editors; that was part of our troubles. It was certainly part of mine. I learned to strategize, fundraise, and lead all while editing (and occasionally writing). I didn’t scale myself, didn’t grow new leaders, and this became obvious when the ones we did have decided they didn’t want the job. It certainly didn’t help that Romania isn’t a hotbed for media management talent.

Last summer, after many conversations within the team, we announced we were closing. We didn’t want our products to drop in quality because we were too tired to make them. We considered it a better strategic decision to go out with a bang than fade into irrelevance. In those last few months of public grieving and celebrating, hundreds of messages reminded us that DoR shaped a generation of Romanians, who now better understood poverty, discrimination, domestic violence, mental health, and others as complex stories we all wrestle it – personally, or collectively.

It has been bittersweet since. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that in my darker moments, I look at our story and also see failure. I know, rationally, that DoR was not just any media project – it was the spark for modern independent media in Romania, and an inspiration for small newsrooms abroad. But I also wonder if a version of me – with more skills, more strategic frameworks, and stronger leadership experience – could have handled this differently.

I want to put future me in a position to do so. This is why I need the CUNY program.

*

Everything I’ve done for 15 years I did out of a combination of instinct, reading, and conversing. I became a newsroom leader the way a reporter would: doing the research, looking at what others are trying, talking to them to discover pain points.

The Executive Program would allow me to put a systems framework around this disparate knowledge. It would allow me to understand finances better (far from a burning spreadsheet), analyze tools of innovation and leadership together with peers, and help me evaluate culturally relevant obstacles and opportunities to building resilient media.

I am no longer employed or directly responsible for a newsroom, but I still believe good stories are not enough to create change. They should also be told by resilient and adaptive institutions, be they one-person newsletters, 10-person investigative outlets or challengers to mainstream media.

We need to attract diverse talent, create roles that complement traditional ones, learn to use data, champion collaboration, and build cultures comfortable with uncertainty. Knowing is not enough. In Atomic Habits there is a line I tacked above my desk: “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems”.

My systems need an upgrade. A year with the CUNY cohort will profoundly help with this, as well as contribute to shaping what comes next.

*

There are two things I have been obsessing over in the past few months and both align with CUNY’s program. One is about creating more space for a “journalism of hope” – optimizing our work to help people lead better lives. It’s about connecting differently, challenging the idea of “publishing” as the differentiator of the profession. (What if facilitation and mediation are also journalism?) It’s about being constructive when we spotlight the wrongs, so that we can make change together.

These ideas are not new in Western media. But they are still insufficiently tested in my part of the world. I don’t know if my next project is here, but we could find out together.

The second thing is more targeted and has to do with me fortifying my knowledge so I can help colleagues in Romania, Moldova, and in the region at large, build more stable newsrooms that can weather what is poised to be a difficult decade, politically and socially. Talking to many I heard they all lack what CUNY’s program is predicated on: product thinking, business skills, and leadership. The bigger problem is most independent newsrooms don’t believe they need this. But they do; if DoR survived and thrived for more than a decade it was because we did a version of all of this. Together we can uncover what bringing this kind of thinking and change management to my part of the world could look like.

---

SIDE DISHES

Three recommendations for today, all building on the ideas above. Hope they come in handy for anyone interested in changing paradigms of how we lead in media, but also in the non-profit and cultural sectors (the parallels here are many).

1. Grants based on trust. This is the story of a grant that over a decade flourished into an ecosystem of local news initiatives in the US. Why? Because it bet on vision, not project deliverables. What if more grants-makers put “faith in the dreams, visions, and expertise” of the organizations they plan to serve?

2. Journalism reborn. If we accept that journalism as we know it is dead, what could we build that “still equips people with the civic information they need to make to make their places better”? How about betting on AE (actual experience) rather than AI (artificial intelligence)? How about hiring relationship builders, community conversation facilitators? How about optimizing for care, compassion, and co-creation?

3. New skills. Laura Krantz of the Chronicle of Higher Education interviewed more than a dozen people to drill down on five leadership skills needed for modern digital media: product thinking, strategy that puts mission and goals into action, entrepreneurial excitement about building new things, mission evangelism, and stewardship, the capacity and desire to help other succeed.

4. Better leaders. Anita Zielina is an experienced news executive who has though a lot about the new skills our industry needs. She recently started a consulting company and has also launched a podcast featuring conversations with a new crop of news leaders from around the world.