The Geneva Observer Experience. The Magic of a Newsroom. (2/3)
Previously on Medium: in the first of our three instalments written by our founder, Philippe Mottaz, we broadly outlined the journalistic contours of The Geneva Observer. In this second part, we want to talk about something we are calling “The Geneva Observer Experience”, and we’re happy to say that this post is as much about you as it is about us.
We hope that, very soon, you will be reading us and, if all goes well, you will also be listening to our interviews, to our podcasts, and you will be watching our videos. But we want The Geneva Observer to be much more than that. We want it to be a different kind of media platform.
When we got together two years ago, it was in the absolute conviction that ensuring the future of quality, innovative journalism required a fundamental change in the traditional relationship between a media venture and its public.
For us, this change has to involve a commitment to truly and meaningfully engage with our public, and this is why we always conceived of The Geneva Observer as a “co-creation” with the community it aims to serve. Not only do we believe that in the era of “post-truth” and “fake news”, this engagement is central to restoring trust between the press and the public; but we also think it makes sense, both for you and for us.
Geneva is a highly sophisticated environment and a very demanding market. Only by engaging with you, will we be able to produce the kind of quality, ambitious journalism we aim to publish, and you want to read. If “all politics” is local, so is all good journalism. Expertise doesn’t lie with us, but within the community; that is to say, with you. Moreover, covering a community means understanding the forces, circumstances, and deep currents at play. By tapping into it, the quality of our output will incrementally improve and we will be able to produce the kind of content that not only we want to publish, but that our international partners can republish or, better still, commission from us.
Expertise doesn’t lie with us, but within the community; that is to say, with you.
An engaged community of members
Furthermore, only continuous engagement will allow us to grow the three essential elements of what constitutes quality journalism: trust, credibility, and reliability; three key factors upon which we want to build a solid membership base, and meet our goal of being reader-funded. For a not-for-profit new media platform like The Geneva Observer, which prides itself on being part of the reinvention of journalism, this kind of membership strategy is pregnant with opportunities, editorial, and economical. Driven as much by journalistic passion as by entrepreneurial spirit, we are convinced that niche, thematic journalism is shifting from a supply to an on-demand model.
We thus view membership as a virtuous journalism circle between a media platform and its public. Emily Goligoski and Elizabeth Hansen gave membership its most articulate definition:
«A membership model invites audiences to give their time, money, connections, professional expertise, distribution to their networks, and/or ideas to support a cause they believe in. Membership in its “thick” version represents a two-way knowledge exchange between journalists and members».
We believe passionately in this “two-way knowledge” exchange. Focus groups helped us to be where we are. We’ll keep having them. We’ll take you along on field trips. We’ll ask you what deserves our attention. In our journalistic work, we will strive to go to diverse and multiple sources when reporting on an issue. We will be transparent about the way we have produced our stories, including their costs. We will adhere to strict ethical standards, from protecting our sources when necessary, to fully sourcing and giving credit when we have been inspired by others. We will incorporate our audiences feedback and insights all along the story generation process, publication cycle, and beyond.
So when we say: “a commitment to truly and meaningfully engage with our public is the cornerstone of The Geneva Observer”, we mean it.
A newsroom open to the public. Stop by.
We want The Geneva Observer to operate as an «open newsroom». Our makeshift one for the duration of our trial run is at Rue de Varembé 3, at the offices of our friends at The New Humanitarian. Do drop by if you want to have a chat. Hop off at Sismondi on tram 15. Coffee and tea will be on us.
Newsrooms are amazing places. Within them, fluxes of information of different values continuously converge. An unending stream of pictures and sounds, of data and chatter, provide a live, raw, unedited, unscripted view of the world. Not unlike the LHC at CERN, newsrooms are colliders as well, of ideas and thoughts. They should be a gathering place for the community.
Somehow, together, in the heart of the knowledge cluster called Geneva, we will try to make sense of it all, to discover new topics, to look at familiar ones from a different perspective, or to reflect on this hyperconnected, hyper-fast society we have built for ourselves.
We will also set up our tent in other areas throughout Geneva. Organized in pop-up spaces or in established venues, our events will assume different shapes and forms. They may be put together on the fly or require prior booking. But their goal will remain the same: hit the pause button, disconnect from your screens and your phones and get together to share expertise and experiences freely. Mix perspectives, think across disciplines, what better place than Geneva to do that? Our members will have free access to most of these events, or discounted prices to a few of them. Non-members will pay an entrance fee.
Once operational, we want to bring together people that don’t necessarily meet. The chief sustainability officer of a multinational corporation headquartered here might sit between a GAVI field employee passing through town, a human rights defender, and a couple of students. We want to lower the barriers of entry to knowledge and expertise. A membership card will be all that is required; no special credentials needed. And no particular dress code or yawn-inducing speech formalities.
We want to lower the barriers of entry to knowledge and expertise.
In a few days, we will start publishing content on our website. It will be a trial run that we hope will show what kind of journalism we mean to practise and the spectrum of our coverage. We’ll start with a long piece on a former Geneva resident, Mr António Manuel de Oliveira Guterres. We thought it was time to have an assessment of his tenure at the helm of the U.N., an organization that faces growing challenges. Also, can design help raise money online? We will look at how one NGO successfully used user experience to do just that. Following a recent lecture at the Graduate Institute, we’ll also talk about the state of the “fake news” debate.
PRACTISING TRANSPARENCY: HELP
Let’s be honest. We will need all the help and the support we can get to ensure that our soft launch extends past the end of November. We are still short of the members we need to have by the end of this month. So if you like what you read, if your values align with ours, if you feel there is a need for independent quality coverage of International Geneva, then please join our growing community of members. It’s a small fee, but it means the world to us. Share this post around, encourage your friends and colleagues to do the same. Ask them to register for our newsletter.
We think it’s a pretty exciting adventure. Between this post and our previous instalment, we hope you got a pretty good sense of what The Geneva Observer platform might become. In our next and final post, we’ll share some of our experiences since deciding to have this crazy idea of launching a new media in Geneva in 2019. Thank you, and stay tuned.
