How I got going, and how I plan to get good

“Get going, then get good.”

As I was catching up on the Journalism Creator Summit, I came across this phrase.

I diligently noted it in my notebook, diligently forgot about it for a while, and then it surfaced when I was furiously scrambling for some ideas for this blog post.

The second time I read it, it clicked: Wait, this is the story of my EJCP journey.

To be honest, I would even go so far as to say that, without even realizing it, I have lived by this principle for quite some time.

A few years ago, I got started in journalism with no formal journalistic background and learned everything I know along the way.

Later, I launched an editorial project with a couple of friends, which got us some favorable comments in newspapers and invites to events.

In the past, I thought of myself mainly as a theoretical person, but since I began experimenting with it, I discovered a new side of myself — an entrepreneurial side — that I really enjoyed.

Unfortunately, the project didn’t last long, but I wasn’t ready to throw away everything I had learned from it about myself.

So I got going again, hoping to get good. I applied to the Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program and wrote the most candid application. Here is an excerpt from it:

EJCP: What makes you a good candidate for the program, and what would you add to the cohort?

I think that I would fill every member of the cohort with the enthusiasm that I feel for new opportunities and the perseverance it takes to continue working on it if you enjoy doing it (which is why I still roller skate even if I suck at it).

Luckily, the EJCP team has a great sense of humor, so I got in.

As well as giving me some lovely quotes to live by, this program helped me develop a long-term strategy for my new project.

The project I’m talking about is Ibérica, the weekly newsletter that helps Italians who fell in love with the Iberian Peninsula stay on top of Spanish and Portuguese current affairs by delivering an insider perspective of the region’s politics, society, and culture — no plane ticket needed.

Besides coming up with this catchy value proposition, in the last 100 days I have:

• Refined my audience. At first, I made the rookie mistake of thinking my newsletter’s audience would simply be made up of “people like me.” I was going to be my user persona.

Well, as you might imagine, it turns out that “people like me” isn’t a big audience, and it barely works for journalism.

So I came up with actual user personas and an audience survey that could help me understand them. Even before we had a class on audience engagement, I met a mentor (Valerio Bassan) who lived by the same quote and encouraged me to survey my audience.

Now I know my audience research could have been better in a million ways, but nonetheless, it gave me what I needed: a reasonable starting point, and the tools to get better at the next audience survey.

• Changed the frequency. Another initial assumption that I had was that I could just send my newsletter twice a month, and just roller skate the rest of my free time. Again, my mentor pointed me in another direction. He made me realize that readers need to form a habit of reading a newsletter, even if it’s only for the first few years or months. So goodbye roller skating, I’m now planning to send Ibérica every week.
• Explored different formats. By changing the frequency, I realized I could play with different formats every week. I plan to alternate between two formats: a long-form article on politics, society, or culture and a profile feature of a person that nobody’s ever heard of in Italy, but that is rather popular in Spain or Portugal.

And that’s how I got going: at my own pace, changing my mind a million times, learning as I went.

Now it’s time to get going again, launch Ibérica, and get good at growing a community around it.

Thanks to this program and all the people I met in the last 100 days, Ibérica will launch in March. You can subscribe here.