Making sense of the pandemic together, one newsletter at a time
The first week of March found DoR with a new home: we moved from our previous newsroom to a larger place, where we hoped to host community events. We had already filled the calendar for March and April with a fair number of workshops.
We were also doing the first round of magazine deliveries from our new place, as the move coincided with the spring issue of DoR going to print.
But only a few days later, a different world started appearing around us. The spread of coronavirus around the world was officially declared a pandemic on 11 March — that was our final day at the office. We chose to postpone all the workshops that were due to take place in March, and to work from home. At the end of that day, there were 47 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Romania.
What became clear very quickly was that our editorial plans could not continue as they had been set out until the end of the month. Our minds were somewhere else entirely now, and our readers’ interests had also changed. Everything we knew about our lives would be challenged. Although at that time Romania was not under lockdown (but would be soon enough), we had seen what happened in China and Italy and believed we were likely headed that way. Schools were already closing and events over a certain size were banned. We would all be faced with uncertainty and our lives would be disrupted in ways we couldn’t even imagine. So we decided to shift all our editorial efforts towards making sense of our new reality.
The daily magazine
We’re not a news organisation, so our journalism takes us away from breaking news regarding the latest COVID-19 cases and towards the implications of the pandemic and the state of emergency in our country in our lives: the jobs lost; the changing family dynamics with schools closed and parents working from home; the impact of isolation on our mental health; how aspects of our lives we took for granted are no longer possible, like jogging in the park.
We chose to start a daily newsletter, Jurnal de pandemie (The pandemic journal), where we would curate the latest updates about the spread of coronavirus in Romania as well as the human stories we were actively documenting. It’s a newsletter through which we try to make sense of what’s happening together with our community. It went from idea to design to the first edition in three days, arriving in inboxes for the first time on 14 March and daily ever since.
We have been sending several regular newsletters in the past couple of years, but our most frequent were weekly newsletters, with one exception: a pop-up newsletter in 2019 that went out twice a week. This was new.
Jurnal de pandemie was sketched as a daily magazine: it has predictable elements, an intuitive and repetitive format, it’s built on sections, but there’s also room for serendipity. Each day a reader knows they’ll get the highlights from Romania and from around the world, plus the Good News of the Day, but the rest is supposed to be surprising. There are recurring features: what’s new in schools, in rural Romania, in our readers’ lives, but there are also surprises. These have included: advice for keeping mentally and physically fit, a visual essay of a day in the life of an illustrator, short “pandemic fictions”, where we publish prose or poems by local authors, a recurring “postcard from..” section that has taken us to Italy, China, Spain, and also into the intimate lives of many Romanians.
The tone mixes the informative and serious, with the playful and the hopeful. Our mission is to bring people together, and help them connect, empathise, create a path for action, and see solutions to the problems we’re living through. News-speak is not apt at many of these, and this is why the newsletter is conversational. It should be a friend you can trust in these trying times: both with information, as well as with personal worries, and hopes for the future.
As well as getting used to working from home in the current climate, a big change was figuring out a rhythm for putting out a daily product without burning out. The process was a learning curve, but we’ve now settled into a workflow based on a rotation and nobody is constantly on call without a break.
In addition to the newsletter we also ramped up our reporting efforts, and published around 30 stories in March, a working speed that’s a big change of pace for DoR. We tackled how students and teachers are coping with online lessons; how the homeless population in the country is affected by the pandemic; how church leaders are dealing with the sudden interdiction to welcome worshippers to mass on Sundays; how the isolation affects domestic violence victims; and how our relationships are changing in this time.
A new relationship with our community
But in order to direct efforts towards making sense of our new world, and do so with a focused and rested mind, we had to give up several other projects. By the end of March, our previous newsletters — on rural development, food culture and education — had to be shelved for the time being. The online community space, which had its own editorial flow since its launch in December, was also paused. In order to ensure we are serving our readers and subscribers to the best of our abilities, we had to reinvent how we connect with them. We wrote to them about our plans and the reasons behind them, and we thanked them for their support, which enables us to do the best version of our work in times like these.
We started a team collective journal, where we share how daily life is for us these days and our hopes and fears. We combined it with a form people can use to send us their stories, which we occasionally publish on the website but most often they help us inform our reporting. We started a community on Slack, because we felt it was important to offer a space for people to connect and feel less alone in these times of isolation and uncertainty.
In March we also hosted our first two webinars, which had been planned before the crisis as a way to bring our community from outside Bucharest together, but now offered us an opportunity to test whether online versions of our workshops could be a good solution for the near future. A webinar on creative writing hosted by our colleague Georgiana Ilie brought together around 30 people from all over the world, and became a space for them to share and feel connected, and an opportunity to suspend thoughts about the coronavirus for a while, as many of them emailed afterwards.
And although our membership offering was built on a few benefits we have currently paused, we believe our readers understand the reasons behind the change. They support us because they believe in our mission, not because they receive a particular product. As long as our reporting and actions continue to reflect that, we hope they will continue to be part of our efforts, as much as their own resources permit it at this time.
Future scenarios
We know our lives and our work will not return to normal. They will enter a new normal at best, and we have to be ready for it. As a small media outlet we’ve always had to struggle through uncertainty, but this is maybe the most complex challenge we’ve faced, as it has rapidly disrupted our way of doing journalism, as well as our business model, and our way of connecting and collaborating as a team.
The crisis has found us in a relatively lucky place compared to other small organizations. We know we can pay salaries through the end of May without changing anything. We know we will keep bringing in revenue from projects that were not disrupted, but we don’t know yet what will happen starting in June. DoR is still heavily supported by our events, including The Power of Storytelling conference in October, and should we have to cancel or postpone it, our financial resources will be impacted from the beginning of the summer.
We won’t wait and see, as that would mean decisions would be made for us by external factors — not a position you want to find yourself in as a small organisation. We have a strategy in place that allows us to stay in control, as much as possible at this time. Think of it as a decision tree, with a deadline for each branch. We know by which date we have to choose whether to postpone an event, or go forward with the plans, and the impact each decision will have on our cash flow.
It’s highly likely that we won’t be able to spend as much as we have recently for a while, which highlights this idea of a new normal where maybe we change roles, maybe we scale down a little. But our chances grow the more we keep moving and looking for opportunities to deliver on our mission in the new reality awaiting us.
How is your organization adapting to community needs at this time? How are you planning for the next few months? Leave us your thoughts in the comments or in a tweet at @decatorevista.
Article by Catalina Albeanu, with contributions from Cristian Lupsa and Georgiana Ilie. Newsletter visuals by Alex Munteanu.
