“I couldn’t have done it without you” might be a cliché, but it’s true
In retrospect, it would be easy to tell a clean, inspiring story about how the idea for my first solo journalistic project came to be. It could go a little like this:
Ever since I was a geeky kid living in the middle of nowhere in the Italian countryside in the early 2000s, I have thought of the web as if it were a metropolis, with squares and libraries, playgrounds, and unique communities. Spending a good part of my time there, I met friends and foes, I sharpened my political beliefs, I was at times extremely entertained or very disturbed — and I watched my horizons move further and further as I explored it. There were the extremely niche forums where I would talk for hours hiding behind the name of my favourite book’s heroine and the social networks where I first experimented with presenting my teenage identity to the world; the blogs where I would fangirl obsessively over British TV shows and — of course — the endless feeds of whatever hellsite I was obsessed with at a given time. The Internet has always felt like an incredibly physical, tangible place to me, and I couldn’t imagine who I would be without it. This is why I get very mad when people dismiss any criticism of the (objectively toxic) way most of these spaces are currently run with useless advice like “Just delete your Facebook profile” or, better yet, “Get off social media entirely, it’s poisoning your brain anyway”. Guessing that I mustn’t be the only person who feels stuck between not wanting to go offline, and looking for a more meaningful way to live our online lives, I got obsessed with the work that Eli Pariser and the New_Public community do, at the intersection of design, urbanism and the Internet. Inspired to bring the concepts they have been exploring to an Italian audience, I started working on my newsletter — and the rest is history. Subscribe here.
To be completely fair, most of this story is actually true. I was a geeky kid that spent most of her time online, and I grew up into a geeky woman who spent most of her time online even before something forced everybody to spend much much more of their time online. I do get very pissed at people who can’t seem to have the imagination that’s required to think of better digital spaces. And I have started to work on a newsletter — although it’s currently at a beta-testing phase, and it won’t see the light of day before the fall.
Everything else is much messier. For starters, when I started thinking about writing a newsletter about the Internet for an Italian audience, the concept of digital spaces was buried in a chaotic tangle of intertwined topics I had been looking into for a while. These topics were so vast and vague that I referred to them for months as, simply, “online stuff”. You can actually see that in the first pitch I sent in for the Journalism Creators program:
Having grown increasingly obsessed with the way online phenomena intersect with politics and human rights offline in the past four years, (Viola) will be focusing on setting up and scaling a newsletter focused on the past, present and future of the Internet for an Italian audience.
(Way to go, past Viola! That does not sound extremely generic at all, good job.)
Unraveling the tangle and understanding what unique angle my newsletter should aim for was something I would probably have never managed to do without the support of the JCP. Knowing myself a little, I would have kept toying with the idea of setting this up for a few months and then I would eventually have given up, only to regret not having pursued my idea for the years to come. (Cemetery visits for all the ideas that have never made it past the imagination stage start at 10AM, Monday to Friday).
Instead, I was given the opportunity to work side by side with nineteen brilliant journalists who were facing the same challenges and doubts I was looking at, as well as of a stellar array of different experts who had a whole lot of technical and, most importantly, human advice to give to someone in my exact position. Which I guess was the whole point of such an experimental program — but I’m still surprised by how well it worked. Saying “I couldn’t have done it without you” might be a cliché, but it’s true.
Be it perfectionism or imposter syndrome, procrastination, or not being able to say no to people, realizing that we were all facing the same fears proved invaluable on its own. And that’s before you factor in all of the actual course material covering entrepreneurship, revenue models, and everything you need to know to make it as a journalist going solo.
From a practical point of view, then, the program was vital in turning a vague and wide-ranging idea that lacked a clear angle and tone into a project that I have true hope in. It forced me to think strategically about the kind of community I want to serve, what the minimum viable product will have to be for me to be able to look at myself in the mirror, and what the monetization strategies I could pursue are. Plus, I made a list of topics that have me covered for the first ten episodes, because lists are cool.
So here’s what my pitch would look like today…
As Eli Pariser writes in a favorite essay of mine, “Much of our communal life now unfolds in digital spaces that feel public but are not. Technologists refer to platforms like Facebook and Twitter as “walled gardens” — environments where the corporate owner has total control. And while Facebook and Twitter may be open to all, as in those gardens, their owners determine the rules”. Stemming from this interpretation, I’m launching a solutions-oriented newsletter that looks at digital spaces from an urbanistic perspective to provide inspiration to live more fulfilling online lives!
As more and more people spend a large part of their existences online, my newsletter speaks — without jargon or the need for an extensive tech background — to (Italian) people who aren’t exclusively nerds, but who care about the present and future of the digital spaces they inhabit. It takes a look at the big problems that social media platforms have accelerated — polarisation, lack of common ground between people, hate speech, and discrimination — to find a better answer than “just delete your Facebook account”.
Discussion around how to improve online communities by applying the concepts behind urban design to digital spaces flourish on the other side of the Atlantic, but they’re only accessible in English and to people who have a strong academic background. I thought it would be vital for non-English speakers to begin imagining what this future might look like, too. Orticelli wants to bridge this gap and give readers the tools they need to think (and act) critically towards current platforms, asking them to do better or make way for platforms that will. Ideally, it would feel like being walked through a chapter you haven’t studied yet by a peer who’s a little ahead of you on the exam material, with lots of room to ask each other questions and share our takes and doubts in a healthy learning environment.
Well, all that’s left to do now is write it, I guess. Thankfully, I know I’ve got a whole cohort of brilliant people to cheer me on as I do — and a whole lot of course material to read and watch through again and again whenever I’m in need of some entrepreneurial inspiration. Who needs to go out and touch some grass now?
