Chinarrative: What Should Come First?
In recent weeks, I find myself thinking a lot about poultry battles — chickens pitched against eggs — as I plot next steps for my storytelling venture Chinarrative.
Chinarrative has a media component that showcases the best of current storytelling on China in English, which I first wrote about here.
There’s also the educational element, which I’m tentatively calling the Chinarrative Academy. That’s designed to nurture future generations of Chinese storytellers who wish to bring their perspectives to the world by writing in English.
Though both form equally important parts of the Chinarrative storytelling ecosystem, they are quite different in nature and from the perspective setting up a business.
Which aspect of a new media venture to tackle first?
Conventional wisdom suggests first pursuing that which is easiest or comes more “naturally.” In my case, that means sharing great Chinese stories in English through a newsletter and website.
I’ve already started doing that with the launch of my newsletter (the sign-up form is here). I’m also making good progress toward launching Chinarrative.com, a platform for showcasing reportage, investigative reporting, personal memoir and other in-depth or personal stories from China.
Yet from a revenue perspective, launching the Chinarrative Academy early makes more sense. Quickly establishing a robust revenue stream could help bolster the development of the content component, giving a considerable boost to the sustainability of the platform in its totality.
Finding the right partner with whom to build the Chinarrative Academy is probably going to be a time-consuming task that will no doubt come with its own set of challenges.
Fortunately in recent weeks I’ve had ample feedback from experts, entrepreneurs, friends and family from which to learn and contemplate. Overwhelmingly, their reactions have been positive. There were also a few stiff shots of reality thrown in for good measure.
On May 7, I pitched to a panel of media entrepreneurs and experts that included Jigar Mehta, a digital entrepreneur, documentary filmmaker and founding team member of media startup accelerator Matter Ventures. He wanted to know more detail about Chinarrative’s revenue model.
Ranjan Roy, founder and CEO of content strategy firm The Edge, felt that my presentation could have done a better job at addressing the education side of the business.
While Jan Schaffer, ombudsman at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and who has extensive experience of running incubators focused on news innovation, wanted more specific examples of stories on China that were inaccurately framed in foreign media so she could get a deeper understanding of how Chinarrative might work to balance that.
Jeff Jarvis, the director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at CUNY, wanted to know whether my business was, at its essence, providing new perspectives on China to the rest of the world or was it serving the Chinese market — educating people in that country to better communicate in English?
“I know how these [strands] could become interdependent, but you still need to find the one best starting point that can become self-sustaining before you build anything else,” Jarvis wrote in a follow-up feedback email.
The following day, I got to present Chinarrative to the public, where the questions were more focused on the underlying philosophy and challenges facing Chinarrative than on business metrics. One audience member wanted to know how Chinarrative would be different from Chinese-owned publications that, in her view, existed merely to cast a positive gloss on China and its government.
Spin, along with the issue of censorship, regularly come up in conversations, and understandably so. It’s a valid concern when it comes to China coverage. It’s something I think about all the time, and there’s no easy answer. For now, I believe the best approach is to be mindful of the issue and acknowledge it as a possible threat. But it would be wrong — and potentially paralyzing — to overthink it at this stage.
My main goal is to share and amplify some of the incredibly amazing stories that are being told in Chinese, translate them into English and share with the world thereby offering another slice of life in China.
Chinarrative doesn’t pretend to be the definitive source on all things China.
It would be impossible to deliver on such a promise. Instead, it wants to be a source of compelling stories on China that delight and offer insight. It can supplement other coverage on the country. There’s plenty of stories to tell and lots of scope to develop a more rounded, deeper understanding of this emerging superpower.
The launch of my newsletter on May 8 was also a milestone and another chance to get feedback. In the first issue, I talked about the types of stories Chinarrative plans to showcase, providing one specific example to illuminate our thinking.
The featured story was about a young man who had wanted to be a policeman but failed the height requirement to enter the police academy. That twist in his fate set him on a path to crime and he ended up as one of China’s most notorious crystal meth producing drug lords.
A former academic advisor at Columbia University wondered if the choice of story for the first issue of the Chinarrrative newsletter was “too dark,” and whether it would upset the Chinese authorities by presenting what he, an American, considered a less-than-favorable view of China.
I smiled as I recalled the woman in the audience who a few days previously had cautioned me about presenting overly rosy portraits of contemporary China.
Follow me on Twitter: @Colum_M
