Draft Four: Said no to things recently?

On strategy and the death of mass-media.

I just wrapped up a marvelous week in New York to kick-off a nine month executive education program in media leadership and innovation – some of you are reading this as I’m flying back to Bucharest, actually.

It was a week packed with learning and thinking about the state and future of journalism, plus drinks and Korean BBQ (which you can never have enough of). As our group of 20+ journalists (from big players like the Associated Press or Reuters, to innovative upstarts like the Prison Journalism Project) was sharing its first takeaways – gratitude, new friends, reduced imposter syndrome for being here – we also realized we’re slightly less morose about our industry.

It didn’t suddenly improve as we were debating it, but when you share the pains of the day to day next to personal hopes, your mission, and your ideas for change, things get less bleak. They are hopeful in that special sense of hope as action in the face of the reality you have, not the reality you wish you had.

One thing that emerged as many colleagues were speaking about their challenges at work – especially with top management – was that it’s one thing to be frustrated that they aren’t taking the right steps (to reach more young people, to start or stop projects, to tinker with the business model), and it’s another to make sure they know your vision for what might be different.

They might say “yes!”, and you might be on to a new role and a great adventure, or they might say “no, you’re wrong”, “no, we’re not doing this”, “no, you’re not ready”, and you have different choices to make, but you’ll have an answer.

Asking questions and getting answers leads to action, even if sometimes it’s not necessarily the action you hoped for.

It’s refreshing to see that media leaders with decades of experience still have fears and worries, including many about their own capabilities.

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I also thought a lot about strategy these days. Mainly about how we don’t really do any in journalism, nonprofits, or cultural institutions in my part of the world. (This might be the reality of other institutions, too, but the former are the places I know best.) If we use classical models of strategy, we’re simply talking about the way we execute on the mission, vision and values of our endeavor. After we sketched out why we exist, what change we want to see in the world, and our guiding principles, it’s simply time to list activities, and how they’ll keep us sustainable (or growing, if that’s your wish).

So strategy encompasses the activities we do, which ideally should be:

• different from the activities others do.

• or how we do them differently (think low cost vs. regular airlines, or indie theater spaces vs. a National Theater).

The activities need people and processes that ideally should fit together, so it all runs well. Once you have all of this mapped out, you should be able to say “no” to a lot of things that want to push you off your path. (Here are two media strategic plans that I find inspirational: Chalkbeat and Texas Tribune).

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I knew all this. I had read the classics. You’re probably thinking: “duuh!”

But the question is: do you have all these pieces in place? Do you know what you’re doing now (and doing next)? Have you said “no” enough times recently?

In journalism – especially in any kind of niche or entrepreneurial or independent journalism – we struggle. Most outlets are birthed by journalists; they just want to do the work, not talk about abstract-sounding bullshit like mission, vision, strategy. The problem is that without those, as enthusiasm wanes, as you struggle with money, as you try to bring new people on board, you'll be stuck.

So, eventually, reluctantly, after a few years, you’ll start to do those. It’s what happened to us with DoR after the first 2-3 years, it’s what I’ve seen in many other places. (Some outlets actually closed when they reached this point).

But then we start running into problems. One is that journalists are educated to want to serve everyone with everything. Here’s news, here’s commentary, here’s some longform, here’s us on this platform, and that platform, and now here as well! Many social workers or NGO folks are the same way: the idea of saying “no” to a new set of people they could support is terrifying – it makes you bad person, right?

The second problem is money. Especially in corners of the world like Eastern Europe, there’s not enough of it in these spaces. Our wonderful friends work in the private sector, especially in large multinational companies, make decent money (two-three-four times as much), and build more secure lives. The rest of us justify struggling by emphasizing we are “mission driven”, which is another way to say we are often poor as organizations, live from one project grant to the next, can't afford to take risks, and certainly can’t say “no”.

Take the example of AFCN – much of Romania’s cultural output is subsidized by these state grants. We got money from them to print magazines, too. But that also means we’ll sometimes come up with stuff just to get funding to keep going when we should have said “no”. We do a project that barely anyone sees – a play that is performed twice (if we’re lucky), an exhibit that runs for four days –, and then we rush to write the next grant proposal.

Our strategies fail (or don't get made at all) because our context works against the idea of strategic planning. Why plan when we’ll change the plan in a couple of weeks because we can’t say no to serving a new community or trying a new toy? Why plan when we’re not in a position to say “no” to money that can keep us afloat, even though it has little to do with why we exist? (Sometimes the source of money – gambling, tobacco, pharma etc. – directly conflicts with our stated values).

That’s exactly why I increasingly believe we should plan. When you draw boundaries, it gets scary. But also it frees up creativity to think inside of this box.

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Quick example of how we at DoR strayed from a plan. We often executed well on strategies (unfortunately most were short term), but we also strayed many times.

When the pandemic hit, we did many things right: immediately said “no” and stopped projects that we believed we couldn't execute (even if some, like large events, had been planned for months later). Discarding options frees your mind.

Then we asked ourselves whether daily media – digital players, newspapers, TV stations etc. – would offer any kind of product that was about belonging and hope and agency in the face of an unknown threat. The answer was “no”, unfortunately. (They still don't).

So we started a daily newsletter on March 14, 2020, called Jurnal de pandemie (The pandemic journal), that many still remember as their companion through the worst of it, especially the lockdowns.

As a newsroom focused mostly on longform narratives we had to change everything about how we worked to deliver a daily newsletter (and daily stories on the website). People needed it, the feedback was tremendous, our traffic as high as ever.

When a few months later the newsletter rebranded into Concentrat and expanded its scope, we thought it was a natural next step: it definitively served our mission of helping people transform themselves and their communities. Over the next couple of years we had some of our most brilliant and creative people on it, and they built a great brand.

Strategy wise, this made us straddle two worlds: our DNA of longform narrative storytelling, and a daily rhythm. We made some good choices: a dedicated team, a different brand, but we still shared many resources and ran the same kind of quality control on a daily newsletter as we did on a printed magazine. (I still believe you should ensure quality, but there are certainly costs to doing it all at once). We straddled and struggled not just because of an insane pace and what it took for the team to do it: the format was also different, the technology was different (formatting a newsletter is hell), the model of acquiring readers was different.

The journalism is the fun part; the strategy around it is what gives you headaches.

It's impossible to say if we should have said “no” to doing it, because we built something that's become essential to our history. (Concentrat is a brand I’d actually love to see come back to life.) It's also hard to say whether we should have dropped other things (like the printed magazine) and completely re-focus our rhythm and products.

It's not like we didn't ask these questions. We did. For months. In many meetings. Definitely more than I see others do. But we asked them in motion, while tired and stressed, convinced we didn’t have the luxury of stopping to take stock and asses. When you’re small and you stop – especially if you’re an NGO, a cultural project etc. –, you risk losing everything.

So even stopping to strategize seems potentially deadly, even though it might be deadly if you don’t.

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There are no right or wrong answers. It’s about trade-offs. Many of the newsrooms I’ve conversed with in the past few months are constantly negotiating trade-offs, always hustling, always scrambling.

We don’t stop and we don’t say “no” because we’re scared of losing what we have.

But what would we do if we just embraced that fear? What if we said: fuck it, let’s stop and get our shit together – mission, vision, values, strategy –, look for the right people, and then execute, even at the risk of taking a loss?

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What follows ties into strategy. Or it does for me, as I’d love to see us strategize newsrooms with missions other than just delivering information. Because, as Jeff Jarvis, a well-known media critic and innovator, shared with us – information is everywhere, and we don’t have a monopoly on it anymore. It’s just a commodity that many do little but repackage.

Jarvis most surprised me with his take on today’s internet – it’s bad, yes, but it’s better like this than it was without it. More people are talking, more people are in the conversation than ever before, and if it’s messy or even ugly right now (hello Facebook feed), it’s still more open. It’s up to us to frame the conversation, to create better spaces than the first generations of platforms did, and find that complicated middle ground where deliberation takes place, but where belonging isn’t threatened.

His argument in The Gutenberg Parenthesis is that the years since Gutenberg’s 1450 invention we’ve entered the era of the dominance of print. For all its liberating and disseminating power, print has a form of permanence that lent it authority (especially to those who already had resources and privilege), and it ultimately led to a mass consumption of ideas that made deliberation and debate unnecessary in the messy ways it existed before.

The internet is closing that parenthesis; print no longer has a monopoly on the culture. Publishing is not the powerful act it was. Voices are heard in numerous ways, sometimes articulating truths we have never heard before, other times just piping in more noise. But more people are speaking, the mass isn't holding anymore.

“But mass is myth”, Jarvis writes, and it’s the thought I’m most thankful for. “After two centuries, the internet finally punctures the delusion that people can or should be lumped together by volume, as it finally lets those people be heard on their own. The net is killing the mass media business model, with it mass media, and with it media’s presumption, the mass. (…) Media are one way, messaging to the public as a whole, while the net enables a revival – a Renaissance, perhaps – of individualism. Rather than being labeled by others according to borders or demographics, the net permits people to label themselves and gather in communities of like mind, circumstance, interest, need, and affinity. The net helps these communities act together to build movements around issues that media, industry, and government too long ignored.”

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What Jarvis is saying is not easy to accept when I open my Facebook feed, but I’m with him. Yes, social media makes for a crappy public sphere, but more voices are present. Yes, some of those voices spread lies, and hate, and disinformation, but we should strive to protect freedom of speech. At least we should try to make it better before we start to censor. Because, Jarvis says, “the internet thus far has been built to speak, but not yet to listen.”

We have work to do – a lot of it. But it’s not just Facebook and TikTok that need to fix themselves. We have to build mission and vision for projects that stop chasing the myth of mass and scale – especially if our aim is to improve the lives of people through stories. We have to build projects that improve conversation, not simply deliver content. And we then need to draw up some damn strategy to make sure they work, pay people, create good working conditions, deliver value and achieve impact. Easy, right?

Writes Jarvis:

“I can begin to envision a post mass-media net built to accommodate many communities, many changing publics that can gather, converse, and act among themselves and in concert with others. This vision supports individual identity and the power to define oneself by one’s connections with others, in communities, in publics.

(…)

I wish that media organizations would create similar covenants with the communities they serve: How will journalism serve our communities? How will it offer reparations for the damage it has done to those communities? What can we expect of each other? How will we be held accountable?

We need space where individuals may safely declare their own identities so they may find others who share their sense of self, their circumstances, their goals and desires. Informed by Arendt’s diagnosis of the ills of atomized mass society and Kornhauser’s prescription for a pluralistic society, I wish for the means for people to find that they are not alone, that they belong, that they have connections with communities and their support. I wish for a place where people may tell their own stories and share their needs with whom they like in an environment that is maintained so that they need not fear harassment. I would like to connect not only with people like me but also with people not like me, so I may, with their permission, learn more about their lives and perspectives. I want a place where people can ask for help and others may offer it. I want a place where standards and norms of behavior are negotiated and maintained by communities with the support of the platforms that play host to them, where trolling, harassment, and manipulation through disinformation are not tolerated. I want a place where many communities can flourish and discuss and debate, where they can have fun and solve problems, where they can collaborate to common ends, where they can be constructive. I want a place where people are not dismissed as a mass or a minority but are heard with dignity and valued for themselves. And I want the people there to act as if they deserve respect.”

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PS: This was a long one, so I’ll skip the side dishes. With one exception. My CUNY cohort wrote about what keeps us up at night when we think about the state of journalism. Here it is.