I savored the Newmark EJCP because it is the ‘anti-journalism program’ program
Tanmoy Goswami, founding editor, Sanity by Tanmoy
How would I describe my life after the Craig Newmark J-School’s Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program (EJCP)?
As a solo creator with an interminable to-do list, I still start every single day feeling like I’m about to be hit by a speeding train. Except, thanks to the program, I now know that there is nothing stopping me from simply stepping off the tracks and letting the train pass, even whistling at it and wishing it the very best. Good bye, you marauding hunk of metal. I am not interested in taking you on anymore. I am done with this bonkers game that goes by many sexy names in our industry: ‘hustle’, ‘success’, ‘peer approval’.
At his masterclass around the start of the 100-day program, Jeff Jarvis told our cohort: “I’ll celebrate with you if your platform manages to reach two million subscribers. Hallelujah! But do know that you don’t have to scale to that level.”
It has become my personal anthem.
To be sure, the EJCP covers all the brass tacks you need to become a media entrepreneur in 2021: product thinking, business planning, firming up revenue streams, building teams, and risk management. There is also the company of extraordinary colleagues from around the world building extraordinary things. But what made the experience truly special for me was the collective wisdom of instructors who nudged us to fearlessly question our industry’s lust for ‘growth’ at all costs.
In a sense, the Newmark EJCP is the ‘anti-journalism program’ program. And that’s why I savored every moment of it.
How I got here
I had never been to J-school before. In fact my entire career in journalism has been shaped by a series of professional and personal accidents. I am an English literature postgrad who ended up in banking and equity research because it paid well and my family needed the money. But I hated being an Excel gnome. So in 2008, at the peak of the recession, as the juicy bonuses dried up, I quit my job and moved cities to work as a film critic. The company that hired me went bust before I could even start. As luck would have it, I landed a gig as a business and financial journalist.
At 28, I became the managing editor of a magazine co-founded by the then dean of Harvard Business School. Soon, I was appointed the founding editor of India’s first innovation magazine. From there, I went on to work at Fortune magazine’s Indian edition as the head of the desk, and as associate editor of ET Prime, a reader-funded platform by India’s largest pink paper, The Economic Times. By my mid-30s, I was reasonably well-placed to scale the Mount Everest of journalism: becoming the editor of some big-name publication.
But as my career bloomed, I was shrivelling up inside. I have lived with depression, anxiety and self-harm my entire adult life. Things first came to a head five years ago, when I went through a particularly vicious spell of illness, had to quit full-time work and return the advance for a book I was writing, and withdraw into a dark room for nearly a year. A couple of LinkedIn posts I wrote about living with depression went viral, sparking in me the first flicker of interest in mental health advocacy.
Over the next few years, speaking up publicly about my tryst with a debilitating illness became both profoundly therapeutic and professionally stimulating — it helped me imagine possibilities outside of business journalism, where I was again beginning to feel wary of turning into an Excel gnome. I started maintaining a daily diary of my experiences on Twitter. I spoke at podcasts and webinars, delivered talks at educational institutions and corporations, and campaigned for better media reporting on mental health and suicide.
I developed a particularly strong interest in that last project. Historically, the media has had a disastrous reputation for stigmatising and harmful coverage of mental health issues. The mental health conversation, which was already picking up momentum before the pandemic and has now become a bona fide gold rush, is dominated by western voices and interests. I wished somebody would do something to change all this.
Then, in 2018, our son was born. As I stared at him in his crib in the hospital, I was overwhelmed by terror that I might have passed on my illness to him. Looking back, it was at that moment that I realized I could no longer dabble in mental health part-time. It had become part of my life’s mission. I also realized I couldn’t wait for somebody else to create better journalism around mental health. If I really cared about it, I had to do it myself.
In 2019, I took a moonshot and applied to The Correspondent, an exciting member-funded media startup headquartered in Amsterdam. My pitch impressed the editors and I joined as the world’s first Sanity correspondent. For the next 18 months, I wrote on the politics, economics, and culture of mental health, focusing on underrepresented voices. It was beautiful. Until the pandemic put paid to The Correspondent’s business model, and the company suddenly shut down in December 2020.
In a haze of panic and adrenaline, I launched Sanity by Tanmoy, a Substack newsletter, days after losing my job. No planning, no strategy. #JustDidIt. So I was a bit gobsmacked when within 100 days of launch, Sanity broke into the top 6 of Substack’s paid health-themed newsletters, the only non-western name on the list. It grew to a community of over 1,700 subscribers from around the world, about 13% of them paying supporters.
If all this was exhilarating, it was also extremely scary. I mean I was just a journalist. What did I know about building a business?!
The day I got the acceptance mail from Newmark, I thought I was finally going to learn how to marry these two disparate personas. I had the journalism part covered. I wanted to know how to crack the entrepreneurship part.
Did the program help me do that? Yes. But not in the way I had expected.
What I needed, not just what I wanted
I could write a whole different article featuring the most powerful business insights from our instructors over these 100 days. Sample a couple:
“The creator economy runs on collaboration. It is a potluck of skills.” — Jeremy Caplan.
“Don’t worry about ‘building a community’. Your community already exists. Find it. Serve it.” — My mentor Christian Fahrenbach.
But the messages that I didn’t know I needed to hear were not just about building a great business. They were about building a good life.
Jarrett Carter Sr., who runs a great newsletter on historically Black colleges, told us:
“I want you to be happy and I want you to be healthy, because I don’t want you to quit.”
Then there was satirist par excellence Paul Szoldra, who said:
“My wife often reminds me that nobody’s waiting for my email.” Ouch. But also, yay.
Timi Siytangco, one of my favorite creators, told us how she had decided to step back and pause her popular newsletter as she reconfigured her priorities.
And Anita Zielina, an amazingly inspiring teacher, reminded us that we need to master the art of relentlessly saying no to everything that’s not aligned with our values.
As a mental health journalist, I can untiringly speak about how our productivity obsession is at the root of our collective distress. At the same time, it is ridiculously easy for me to be trapped by the voice in my head that says I have to be the savior that journalism has been waiting for, even if that means running on fumes. I can’t tell you how gratifying it was to have some of the most respected names in the business tell us that we have earned the license to do things our way and not get caught up in breathless, performative competition. That we were going to be okay. By choosing to be independent creators, we had already removed ourselves from the race to build gigantic media empires. Why continue to play by the same old rules?
I am doing a huge disservice by not naming every single instructor in this essay, because without exception, all of them helped us believe that the old adage — you need to destroy in order to create — was grossly overrated. Sometimes, you create by preserving — yourself, to begin with.
Right now I am transitioning from Substack to my own website. For updates, connect with me on Twitter here and here. See this for a collection of my lessons from the program.
