Navigating entrepreneurial journalism with Newmark J-School
Globalization, polarized communities and unaccountable power. How does journalism respond to this ever-changing landscape? In Europe, a small group of journalists set out to try and answer this question.
It began with a conviction that if power doesn’t stop at borders, neither should journalism. To uncover and explain the power structures underpinning Europe (corporate interests, financial systems, political power plays), collaborative and cross-border reporting is a must. This is how Investigate Europe, a journalism non-profit and cooperative which now spans 14 European countries and 10 languages, came into being.
Although it’s transnational, this doesn’t mean there’s a one-size-fits-all approach or an absence of local nuance. Quite the opposite. Continuous exchange between reporters keeps national biases in check. While working across newsrooms, yet rooted in local realities, IE can produce investigations that dissect Europe’s systemic problems but still make them relevant to readers at home.
Work in progress
To achieve this, IE adopts a two-pronged strategy. On the one hand, it relies on a vast network of country-specific media partners for distribution; selling articles and reaching audiences in their native languages. On the other, it publishes exclusive material via its own channels with the aim of growing a unique, multinational, pan-European readership. It could be a perfect balance, for now it’s more of a work in progress. But we’re getting there.
When I started the Entrepreneurial Journalism Program at the City University of New York, my priority was the latter part of the equation — own outputs, brand identity, and community channels. As the team member responsible for outreach and community coordination, I hoped to learn more about building a niche journalistic project in its own right, beyond external media partnerships. What would it take to grow big and be sustainable? How do we reach our intended public (“European readers”) that escape definitions? How could I discover how the latest innovations in journalistic entrepreneurship could help unlock IE ’s full potential?
These were the questions I asked myself in the beginning. But during the journey I realized that before getting any answers, I had to start asking them differently. Here are my biggest takeaways from the course on how to do it.
Landscape analysis for self-discovery
Whatever questions I had prepared, my first big take was to be less abstract or generic, and more grounded in the reality around me. In a way, that happens naturally when immersed in a group of 30+ students and 30+ different, brilliant ideas for a journalistic venture. Align this to the media expertise of our lecturers and the expert speakers, and the result was a stimulating and also incredibly grounding experience.
By zooming out from my own, IE-focused issues I started to see a whole landscape of possibilities and better understand the space one occupies within that spectrum. In one of the first lectures, Jeff Jarvis told us that 63% of news subscriptions (in the US) go to three major brands: Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and New York Times. There’s not a big pool of potential readers left, and certainly not all of them will or should be the aspirational targets for niche projects like ours.
For me, as I navigated through notions like market analysis and benefited from the knowledge shared within the program, I realized I needed to rethink my questions and/or remove my own earlier assumptions. It was time to shift away from big quantifiers (“European reader”) to terms I could define, and forgo binary choices — own channels versus media partnerships — in favor of a more holistic approach where the two can complement each other.
Circling back to community
If not a mass scale, New York Times type of distribution, then community-centered approach would be more reasonable. Figuring out how to serve one’s community and meet its needs is the one recommendation that would reoccur in nearly every lecture or conversation we had. For readers to return, open one email over 10 others in their inboxes, engage and be willing to support smaller journalistic outlets, the offering needs to be unique for them and stand out from the crowd. Sometimes this offer must be better defined, sometimes it just needs to be better spelled out.
So, if there was ever an answer to my opening question on what are the latest journalistic concepts and ideas that niche projects should adapt to succeed, it would be: There’s a whole other set of queries to ask oneself first. Among them: What’s our value proposition to readers and how to capture it best? What information gaps do we fill for our community? How is it reflected by our content? And among the most challenging of them all for a pan-European outlet: Is there really only one community for us to think about, or rather, are there as many as the languages we report in?
Service is key
Trying to meet the readers where they are and understand them not through the lens of a demographic indicator, but their own understanding of themselves, can help inform many of the editorial and organizational choices. Knowing more about readers’ habits and expectations means decisions over medium, format and story selection can become less arbitrary and more attuned to their needs.
“Story is not a sacred unit of journalism,” Jeff told us. A unit of journalism, as I came to understand from him, can also be a space for a community; a channel for readers to debate the latest articles, a question asked in a newsletter, a guide on where and how to vote, a message with information that is otherwise difficult to find, and so much more.
Throughout the course, we began to understand the countless different forms journalism can take, yet the biggest takeaway for me was to reverse the question of how to make your product viral (grow big) or how to make asking for money more appealing (grow sustainable) into: How can you make sure readers find your product useful or nourishing? If answered successfully, reader, subscription, and door numbers are bound to follow.
Navigating forward
With all these new questions, and some old ones I managed to rephrase, the journey towards building a sustainable and widely read publication becomes much easier to navigate. In that sense this program has been like a control tower to me, helping me to figure out a way through the traffic. The thing is, there’s not one universal way to reach your target, and the destination itself often shifts or becomes impossible to fully define. But do not despair. Fellow travelers are always around and here to lend a hand, a community that stays on no matter the question.
- If you’re interested in the work we do at Investigate Europe, please visit our website, give us a follow on Twitter and subscribe to our newsletter.
