DoR after the quarantine: a report
We are publishing this piece June 11, the day we were awarded the European Press Prizes’ Innovation Award for our Transylvanian pop-up newsroom last year. It’s both an honor and an opportunity to celebrate our amazing team, community, and partners; we couldn’t have done this without all of you.
If the EPP news is what brought you here, welcome. We are DoR, a publication out of Bucharest, Romania that tells true stories to empower its community, to help it be more empathic, to point it towards solutions, and to be a guide in how we can live a better life. We have been around for more than 10 years, and have gone from a print quarterly devoted to narrative journalism, to a digital-first publication, events organizer, and innovator. (Yes, we still publish the print edition).
We have been through a lot of shake-ups and changes, some chronicled in our Medium archive. Our latest transformation came courtesy of the COVID-19 pandemic, and this is what this story is about: what has stayed the same, what we lost, and what changed in the past few months.
At the time of writing we didn’t have to cut salaries or staff, but our future, like that of most newsrooms today, is uncertain. (We will probably be losing money by September if we don’t bring in new revenue). But we have an amazing and award-winning team, and a community that believes in our work. These are both gifts at times like these, and they allow us to persevere.
— Cristian Lupșa, editor
What hasn’t changed
The mission, vision and values of the organization
We continue to tell stories that support people and organizations become better versions of themselves. And we are adding a more precise aim to our work over the next 18 months: to guide and support people through crisis and reconstruction that we’ll endure, especially as the pandemic has not ended.
Tip: What helps us stay connected to our mission is discussing it often and making choices asking ourselves whether a certain project, piece of journalism or behaviour fits with the mission and the values we have set.
The stories we told
There’s no Olympics or World Cups for journalism, and sometimes — if you’re lucky to live in a society that doesn’t experience trauma often — you don’t even have friendlies. It’s a job you do every day, and you get better at it. A training routine you don’t really know why you’re going through until something like COVID-19 hits.
That’s what I was training for, you say to yourself.
For some, especially camera crews, photographers and news reporters, it means being on the front lines. For those like us, who offer context, deep dives and intimacy, it simply means sitting down at your desk, with your phone, email and chat apps heating up, and saying “here we go!”.
The pandemic has been a complicated time for many, but for journalists it’s also the time when the profession we chose can be more valuable than ever. We felt this while working on almost 100 stories that we published in the two months Romania was in a state of emergency and in over 70 daily newsletters. And we saw the validation of our work in traffic numbers (sometimes triple of a normal month), in engagement and reader feedback.
Team rituals
A solid team has rituals that bring people together. Even though ours — both formal and informal — were tied to a physical space, we adapted quickly by moving to Zoom.
Now we start the week with a check-in, Mondays at 10:00, where we each say thank you to colleagues whose work we appreciated the previous week, and we each answer a question, usually linked to what we’re going through at the time: how are you getting along with your family, what’s good about spending time at home, etc. Each Friday at 18:00, those who wish gather for a (virtual) glass of wine.
We’ve continued our monthly Story Time sessions, moments when colleagues share a part of their life story. Our birthday celebrations have also moved online — birthday cards turned into Google Docs, which made them more creative. On top of that we have our editorial conferences and other meetings about day-to-day work.
Tip: At the beginning, it’s going to be embarrassing to build new online routines and moderating them might feel artificial, but it’s important to be patient and persevere. The need for connection and sharing exists, and with time, the mechanics of it becomes natural and invisible.
Openness to vulnerability
This closely ties into the rituals an organization has put in place to build trust among team members. But it also ties into the way the organisation sees its role in the staff’s lives: we want to help our colleagues be the best version of themselves. To get to a place where the experiences you have at work also help you in your personal life.
One of our guides over the past three months has been psychotherapist Domnica Petrovai, who helped us put into words what we were each going through in the pandemic, and who showed us tools that can improve our lives and our work. She also supported us in having complicated conversations and in searching for the right balance — a complicated issue especially at a time when, working from home, you don’t know when work ends and life begins, and the other way around. Domnica isn’t our only guide, and we’ll always recommend to other organisations to spend time with an external psychologist, coach or facilitator that can help them become better.
Tip: To know what we’re all going through, we found it helpful to write into a collective journal that eventually reached 200 pages and from which we published excerpts. We wrote about our anxieties caused by isolation, but also about our wishes for when the pandemic is over.
What we lost
Plans and teams
We started the year with new plans and structures which, in this new context, we are rebuilding. The teams and management structures we had did not withstand these past two months, and they swept up by role changes, projects coming to an end, and colleagues leaving DoR.
One of the sources of tension, we realised, was the difference between process management and culture management. At this time our organization has more people inclined towards the latter (and many informal leaders, which is great), but the lack of the first type of management sometimes leads to insufficient attention towards structure and process, which leads to results below our true potential.
We also decided that, in the medium-term, we cannot sustain an in-house communications department. To amplify the impact of our work we will continue outreach efforts in the editorial team, and we’ll start working with agencies and other partners, but inside the newsroom it’s more important for us to focus on doing journalism
Tip: Mihai Zânt, a trainer, coach, and a friend of DoR, told me to “never waste a good crisis”. What I took from that was that it’s important not to freeze in the face of a crisis. Whenever we felt that a decision we made before the pandemic was weighing us down, we discussed it, and we either transformed it, or overturned it. Yes, change and loss can be painful, but they can also be liberating.
Colleagues
We have also lost team members — three during this pandemic. All departures have been cordial. Two initiated by colleagues who needed a new environment or chose to focus on family, respectively. We parted ways with the third colleague because, even though we had a good rapport, we wanted different things.
I was very nervous at the beginning of this crisis that we would lose colleagues simply because we would run out of money to pay salaries. For me that was the main meaning of the word “care” in our values: care that the team doesn’t suffer even more in their personal lives than they would anyway because of the coronavirus.
We quickly ran the numbers and decided that, regardless of what happens, we’ll be able to pay all salaries until the end of May. Now, nervousness for what happens after June is still there for me, but the path forward is not so unknown anymore. We reduced costs, reallocated budgets, were lucky to receive support from our community and we applied for a series of local and international grants. (We didn’t get an EJC grant we were hoping for, but all is not lost).
The New School
One of the most difficult decisions we took was to no longer edit the New School project (Scoala9), which is a digital publication focused on education. This was an idea we were already discussing before the pandemic, but the news became official in mid-April.
The time that we were involved in the New School project was also a time to experiment running different products inside the same ecosystem. As we kept building the team we realised that it’s important for Media DoR to communicate with a united voice, which was not entirely possible through separate brands and platforms.
The end of our collaboration with BRD, a bank and the financial backer of the New School project, came partly from our colleagues wishes to work more together, as well as from our wishes to concentrate more of our resources and energy into products that belong to us 100%. It was a difficult one because the financial resources covered the entire salaries for a team of five, a team that, with one exception, is still a part of DoR.
Events and, well, money
Aside from canceling the newsroom workshops we also decided to cancel larger events that became essential to the DoR ecosystem in the past years: DoR Live and The Power of Storytelling.
DoR Live is a special form of showcasing our journalism, with a visceral and immediate impact. From a financial perspective it had always been more of a marketing instrument, because it did not directly generate new revenue.
We decided it would have been a huge cost of energy to move it online, as we would not be returning too soon to theatre halls with 500 seats. And because we are not an events company, it wouldn’t make sense for us to convert it to an online event. We will get back to the concept when we can put it together offline, on stage, in front of an audience.
For The Power of Storytelling, it was clear to us from the beginning that it would not translate well online, because it is built around the energy we can bring in the room. The time we now have to put it together (we will organize it in 2021) will give us the chance to better evaluate the potential of the brand after its 10th edition. But giving up The Power of Storytelling in 2020 also meant giving up the around 20–30.000 euros, which we would usually invest back into our journalism.
Tip: We wondered whether we should wait longer to make a decision and see how the pandemic evolves this summer, but we decided that a “not in 2020” answer is more freeing than a “maybe”, especially as we can continue fulfilling our mission in other ways.
The print subscription
An unexpected benefit of the lockdown and of working from home was the acceleration of our digital transformation. DoR started in 2009 as a print magazine and since 2018 our website is no longer just an online warehouse for our print work. However, we’re still battling with the quarterly print production paradigm.
But with almost 100 stories published online these past few months, we barely thought about print. Or we rather thought about it as that bonus that can repackage some of the journalism that we primarily publish online.
The entire team now understands how vulnerable we would be if we didn’t step away from the process imposed by the print quarterly: the couriers have been overbooked, and the bookshops and press distributors have been closed up until recently. Many copies of our spring issues were returned because its launch and delivery to our subscribers coincided with the beginning of the state of emergency in Romania.
In 2019 we printed 5,500 copies of each issue, and only about 300–400 would go unsold. For this spring’s issue, because of the situation outlined above, we expect about 2.000 copies to make their way back, another reason why for our summer issue, which we will publish in July (not June as usual), we will print just 3.500 copies.
Understanding these realities has helped us sort our priorities and make an important decision: we are no longer offering readers the option of a print subscription. We will continue to print the magazine, you will be able to purchase it in our online shop, and we will honour our existing print subscriptions. But the subscription that can support us at this moment is the digital one, and it will be the only one available starting June.
What we gained and how we are transforming
A new direction and new forms of organizing
It was quickly apparent to us that this crisis is also an opportunity. The reality that follows the pandemic will be complicated. A series of lives will need to be rebuilt, many people will be unemployed (more than 500.000 have lost their jobs during this time in Romania), the medical system will be exhausted, the education system will be confused, the rural economy will hurt and people will be scared of each other and will question the line between the need for closeness and personal safety.
But there will also be solutions.
There will also be new initiatives. There will be voices that will offer hope. There will be ideas about the future: about the importance of the environment, now that we know what an exponentially growing tragedy looks like; about the importance of quality and equity in education; about the need to be there for vulnerable people; about how we can train to better handle future crises, as individuals and groups. That’s what we want to document: how do we recover and rebuild a more resilient Romania. To do this to the best of our abilities, these days we are reorganising the newsroom and the roles of our reporters and editors — we will be more focused on a few subjects to become experts over the next 18 months.
Tip: We wanted this transformation to be participative, so we all split into four teams of 5–6 people to come up with a new model for DoR: new products, new stories, new business and new structures. The brief was simple: imagine an organization you would start from scratch at this time and will need to operate for a while in this reality.
The team got together (online) and strategized, and for an entire day in April we shared presentations and suggestions: to give up print, collaborate with Netflix, sell consultancy — every possibility under the sun. Starting from these presentations we formed a crisis team (we nicknamed it the crisis cell) which, in May, transformed these ideas into decision: how do we split into beats? What projects are we shelving? What should we invest in?
The Pandemic Journal
On 14 March, after two days of brainstorming and design, we launched a daily newsletter that two months later reaches nearly 5000 subscribers. The journal was our daily connection with our readers, where we send them news, stories, tools, advice and recommendations. About half of them open the newsletter each day, a constant open rate that’s above the industry average.
When we asked them for feedback, we received 700 replies in just a few days that helped us validate this product and choose to continue it.
We decided a daily (Monday-Friday) newsletter would become our business card. Our objective is to reach 8000 subscribers before the end of the year.
Community
Our DoR supporters are essential to our work and, although we had to pause our weekly community newsletter (which will be back in June!), we didn’t want to lose touch.
So we created a space for direct communication, on Slack, a tool which we have been using internally at DoR since 2015. We chose Slack because we wanted a safe space to talk about what’s on our minds at this time, to see how we could better support each other, how we are handling working from home or simply how we manage to take our minds off things. We also hosted several Zoom meetups, including two storytelling webinars and meetings where we talked about how we’re handling things at DoR these days. (If you’d like to support DoR, you can subscribe here.)
Tip: We have a monthly team ritual called “State of DoR”, where we keep each other up to date with organizational updates. We started hosting occasional open “State of DoR” meetings last year, as a live activity report for our community. The most recent was on 11 April, on Zoom, on the day we celebrated 11 years since the idea of DoR.
Flexibility
After 11 years we have some experience with crises and we often talk about the importance of flexibility and the impossibility of avoiding uncertainties, especially in an industry that doesn’t have a clear business model.
The pandemic has shown us that going through the previous crises was a good exercise for handling this one: we quickly adapted to working from home and to another publishing rhythm; we quickly adapted to the reality that we’ll have to stop several projects and plans. I like to say that DoR is a well-organized lack of certainty. Over the past few months, we’ve fully lived this.
Goals
To round off, it’s important to mention our qualitative and quantitative objectives for this year, which we chose in January and minimally amended after the start of the pandemic. They are our benchmarks for measuring our evolution at this time:
Quantitative objectives:
- 3.500 paying subscribers at the end of the year;
- 500.000 RON in reader revenue (subscriptions and product sales);
- a monthly average of 150.000 unique readers of dor.ro;
- 8.000 newsletter subscribers;
- a minimum of five journalistic material of impact built collaboratively. We’ll learn how to measure impact together, but it could be about reach, or about galvanising change in a community.
Qualitative objectives:
- to communicate who we are: We want DoR readers to understand our mission and values better than they do now;
- to be together and feel safe: We have a system for regular team meetings, where we talk about how we’re feeling;
- to have initiative: We are building our skills of asking difficult questions, of initiating and challenging ideas (from small changes in the newsroom to moments of collaboration or mutual help);
- to have impact;
- to innovate: We often think about different methods of thinking, writing or packaging a product;
- to work with the community: To find ideas and document stories through community engagement.
So here we are, after two months of intense lessons and transformation. When I look at the news of thousands of journalists who have lost their jobs, I feel like we are among the lucky ones.
Personally, there are few days when I don’t feel both joy and panic. In this new world of accelerated uncertainty, it’s difficult to know whether you’ve made the right choices.
So I sometimes come back to the words of Simon Sinek in The Infinite Game: “Leaders are not responsible for results, leaders are responsible for the people that are responsible for results.” And this means building an environment in which people feel safe. This is more in our power than we believe, no matter how many quarantines we go through.
Illustrations by Paula Rusu. This story was originally published in Romanian and you can read it here. Translated to English by Cătălina Albeanu.
