Making a Media Outlet from Scratch: an Experiment and an Experience

How to make your own media without money and marketing (spoiler alert: you can’t)

A year ago we decided to launch a media outlet called lawless.tech. Six months ago we had to abandon it for other commitments. This is the story of what happened in between.

We wrote about regulations imposed on up-and-coming technologies varying from space exploration to blockchain startups. Thanks to that, we got acquainted with lots of very interesting people involved in that area. Our articles were viewed more than 200 thousand times, which was pretty decent for an experimental low-profile project. We received some inspiring comments like:

“I never thought I’d ever see real journalism again.”

In many respects, it was a very rewarding experience.

But that being said, there’s one thing we learned pretty soon.

Running an independent media outlet is very much like trying to stop a tsunami with a chopstick while juggling six burning chainsaws that a pack of furious raccoons are trying to snatch from you using phasers from Star Trek.

There were only five people on the editorial board, and even though we agreed we’d post something just three times a week after trying to do it on a daily basis, it proved to be a real handful. Maybe that’s because we still had to do our main job at the same time. Maybe that’s because five people isn’t even remotely enough to have a media outlet up and running, provided they care about quality even one bit.

After a while, we found ourselves in a chaotic turmoil of tasks. Our main job required as much continuous effort as our experiment that had proved not to be as little as we imagined it in the first place. We never had the chance to do at least one half of what we intended to do with lawless.tech. When it started taking a toll on our primary commitments we had no other choice but to put the project on an indefinite hiatus. But we all knew that ‘hiatus’ was just sugarcoating it poorly.

Why You Need to Experiment with Complex Projects

Lawless.tech wasn’t just a case study to try our hand at customary media products we were going to offer our customers. It was an experiment that sought to find answers to very concrete questions. As we were going to upscale our own services and offer a whole new range of media products to our customers, we needed a case study to determine whether it’s even possible for us.

In particular, our experiment had the following goals:

• Check whether our team in its current state is capable of running a complex project while doing other chores.
• Find out whether our research and fact-checking skills are good enough.
• Check whether we are capable of producing content of decent quality under stressful circumstances.
• Test whether a niche media product can find its audience with minimum promotional efforts that could be handled single-handedly.
• Determine whether we lack much in terms of human resources and professional skills to improve on that later.

The results of the test were mixed. On the one hand, we definitely were capable of running a complex project, do rigorous fact-checking and research, ensuring decent quality of our articles, and garnering certain interest from our intended audiences.

On the other hand, it was painfully clear that we needed more people, more promotion, and more managerial skills to attempt something similar in the future. All in all, we found out that we can do it provided we learn much more than we already know. Even though making a media outlet from the scratch is a very powerful learning experience in itself.

However, no matter how interesting an experiment has been, the most important thing is what you do with the results. You have to be honest with yourself and face the conclusions with honor, no matter how badly they resemble a firing squad.

In our case, the conclusions were as follows:

• We need to upgrade our media management skills because what we had had before wasn’t even remotely enough for a complex long-term project. To that end, all of us took several vocational courses.
• We need to boost up our planning skills.
• We need to separate management from production. So far we’ve already done it, and the team beams with joy.
• We definitely need a separate team for writing. That’s actually the hardest part because headhunting qualified writers is an enormous pain in the neck.

So, the valuable lesson here is that practice is the criterion of the truth. Unless you test things, as Galileo taught us, you have no way to know them for sure. If you know big projects are a little ways down the road make sure to test your capability to deal with them in advance and then start treating the weak spots that you detect.

And you definitely will.

How to make a media

That being said, there are certain pieces of advice we’d like to share with anyone who thinks about launching any media outlet, be it a news website, an instagram project, or a channel on social media.

There are certain rules that we had to learn by painful trial and error. Better not try doing it our way. Burning chainsaws, tsunami, and raccoons from Star Trek, remember? So, if you’re serious about making a media outlet, a news website, a social project on Instagram or anything that involves real work with content, please mind the following:

1. Set your goals as precisely as humanly possible. You have to know the exact starting conditions and the desired effect. Then plan on how to get from here to there. Nobody would call you boring. Meticulousness is one of the keys to success.
2. While coming up with the plan, spare no detail. You have to get a very accurate game plan. Every person involved in your project shall know what to do and when to do it.
3. Identify as many existing and future problems as possible in advance. Of course you won’t be able to foresee everything but if you know at least one half of your possible troubles you’ll spend half as much time trying to tackle them.
4. Take a look at other projects that may be somewhat similar to yours. Learn from them. Mediocre artists copy, great artists steal. Yeah, I personally came up with that phrase.
5. Understand your intended audience: what they are interested in, what they want to know, and how you can help them. In the end, they are the people you do it all for, so their best interests are your best interests.
6. You will need money to start a media outlet. And you will need even more to promote it. Unless you have money, no effort or great quality will help your media reach a greater audience. No pride or idealistic worldview have anything to do with that. Nothing in the known universe is free. Just get down on your knees and start paying.

So, if I were to put it in the form of a single golden rule, it would go like this:

Entropy can only increase in an isolated system. Unless you bring as much order as possible to your project, it will crash down into the primordial chaos.

And it works way beyond making your own media outlet.

That’s all for today. Stay tuned.