My 100-day Crash Course Takeaways
What I learnt at CUNY’s Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program
“How do you envision your product-market fit?” I want to be honest with you: This question would have terrified me 100 days ago. Like many journalists-turned-entrepreneurs, it wasn’t exactly for my business skills that I had become a co-founder at Hostwriter (I’m a journalist at heart with a background in Cultural Studies). Operating since 2014, the Berlin-based nonprofit helps journalists to easily collaborate across borders, we connect 5,5K local journalists based in 150+ countries for collaboration and exchange. And we just decided to transform the network into a remote newsroom!
So here’s me, in the middle of a conversation with a potential investor, delivering our pitch: “International journalism has been dominated by white, male, Western voices, which makes it challenging to capture the authenticity of experiences, aspirations and concerns of a diverse audience. Building on Hostwriter’s existing network and our successful pilot project ‘Unbias the News: Why diversity matters for journalism,’ we aim to rectify empathy and trust through grounded, multi-perspective, nuanced reporting by local journalists (rather than foreign correspondents). Explore journalism by diverse creators collaborating to ‘unbias the news’”!
“Ok, understood. But how do you envision your product-market fit?” I took a deep breath, smiled into the video conference screen, shook off the linguistic intimidation and provided an answer to the best of my knowledge. It was at this moment perhaps that I realized the essence of what I had learnt as a participant of the first cohort at CUNY’s Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program.
Take Away #1: No Fear of Business Talk
Be it “value proposition”, “audience funnel” or “product-market fit,” I no longer feel frightened by business terminology. As I see it, nobody has figured out a masterplan for making journalism sustainable yet, and neither have I. But business concepts can be learnt, it’s not rocket science and a lot of these concepts are actually useful — why not give them a try?
So back to the product-market fit, which means that your “product” (your newsletter, podcast, or whatever journalism service you have in mind) has evolved to a degree that the “market” (your audience) finds it attractive enough to invest in (e.g., by paying a fee), allowing you to scale. It’s part of a business approach that starts with identifying the needs and pains of your potential costumer first, and then creating a viable solution around it. (As opposed to launching your travel blog because that’s what you’ve always wanted to do, regardless of whether anyone wants to read it.)
In class however, I soon figured out that this approach was more challenging than I had anticipated. You can wake me up in the middle of the night and hear me recite Hostwriter’s organizational mission statement. But what are the specific needs and pains of our potential “customers”? Who are our “customers” (our future paying audience members) anyway?
Take away #2: No need to guess, just ask your community
In the case of Hostwriter, a community survey followed by stakeholder interviews helped me to gain more clarity. As I shared in a previous post, the direct feedback by our community was eye-opening! It’s not the first time that we sent out a survey, but maybe the first that asked specific questions with the intention of testing assumptions and guiding our actual product development, leading to a set of around 200 responses to work with.
In an open text field, we asked which blind spots or stereotypes in journalism had bothered our community the most, if any, and the terms most widely used or referred to were: exoticism, colonial mindset, Western bias, simplification. When we asked what underrepresented perspectives our community was interested in the most, most answered: female reporters, journalists from ethnic minorities and journalists based in the so-called Global South. Bingo! This felt like a good starting point to define a niche for our reporting.
Committed to cross-border collaboration as a default, the next brainstorming session to draft our “value proposition” and “ideal customer profile” took place remotely with Hostwriter’s editorial team — Ankita Anand, Mercy Abang, Purple Romero, Tina Lee and Zahra Salah Uddin — with time zones ranging from Hong Kong to the U.S.
Take Away #3: Don’t hide behind your organization
I couldn’t be more proud of the Hostwriter team and the geographically diverse editors who collaborate on this project! However, my last lesson learned was that I shouldn’t shy away from speaking up as CEO and represent the venture with authenticity and pride. In short, I should know my “story behind the story”: What makes me think I’m the right person to “unbias the news” und diversify journalism? What’s my personal motivation behind this?
Putting all imposter-syndrome-inspired fears of hogging the limelight aside, I started some serious soul-searching. And as a matter of fact: I’ve found it much easier to communicate the organizational mission once I had more clarity around my motivation to start this in the first place. So here it comes, my story behind the story. Ten years ago, I was a newbie who had just started her journalism career at the German National Radio, when the exposure of the neo-Nazi terrorist network “National Socialist Underground” (NSU) shook my country. Nine people with immigrant roots and a policewoman had been killed by the group.
Guess what: Not a single German newsroom had the actual story. German journalists had collectively overlooked that the murders were motivated by racism. Instead, the series was widely dubbed “the Döner killer series” and peppered with speculations around organized crime committed by migrants, portraying actual victims as potential perpetrators. In 2014, a study by the German Otto Sprenger Foundation concluded that “structural deficits in journalism,” including “insufficient representation of migrant perspectives in reporting,” had contributed to this massive media failure.
The NSU murder series made it clear that newsrooms can get the news wrong if they aren’t as diverse as the society they serve.
However, little has changed since then — and a systemic lack of diversity in newsrooms isn’t a German phenomenon alone: Ten years after the NSU media failure, the largest migrant communities in Germany still have no representation among editors-in-chief at leading news outlets, newsrooms in the United States remain more white and male than other work places, and Indian media is an upper-caste fortress.
It’s time to change this! Diversity is not a moral question, it’s a question of quality. That’s why we’re launching a remote, cross-border newsroom. Fingers crossed for our journey towards product-market fit ;)
