Niche is The Next Big Thing
By Pauline Tillmann, Constance (Germany)
Applying for the CUNY Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program, first of all, I wanted to improve my digital magazine Deine Korrespondentin (Your Female Correspondent) which I founded in May 2015.
Our mission is to make inspiring women worldwide visible through our network of 10 freelance female correspondents.
The reason is simple: In Germany we cover men four times more often than women and we think that this is something that has to be changed as women make up half of the population. The rising interest in our magazine shows that gender equality is an issue more and more people are aware of and care about.
Our initial funding in the beginning of 2015 we got via crowdfunding on Startnext. Afterwards I had to learn everything about building up a media startup and leading a virtual team from scratch. Our three main revenue streams are: collaboration with newspapers, our membership campaign on Steady and private donations. Since autumn 2020 one of the most difficult issues for us was how we can get more paying members on membership platform Steady.
As legacy media outlets in Germany are in a real crisis because of decreasing advertising revenues, there was a significant gap in funding that we can only fill with the help of more supporters. So we made our financial situation crystal clear and improved our website https://www.deine-korrespondentin.de thanks to mentor Valerio Bassan, who is based in Italy and took part in the CUNY program in New York City a couple of years ago.
Along with that we started in December 2020 an ambassador campaign and printed more than 1.200 postcards with motifs of inspiring women we portrayed in the past 5 years (see below). So people could buy a set of 10 postcards as a Christmas gift.
During the CUNY program I learned more about product market fit, how important the value proposition is and how we can improve our existing membership program. I learned that we have to listen even more to our audience and that quality content is not enough for making our supporter base happy on the long run. That’s the reason why we started to organize events with our female correspondents (e.g. live talks on Instagram and WhatsApp chats) and will continue doing so in 2021.
I recognized that we need as soon as possible a community manager who is taking care of all our upcoming events and keeps in touch with our members, readers and fans. At the moment we are working on an e-magazine, a printed book and even an exhibition based on our long-form articles.
Golden recipe for success: partnerships
2021 is for me personally my year of collaboration. I think we can so much more together than we can alone That’s the reason why we started a six-event talk series with remarkable feminists from Germany and will invite not only our so-called Gold members on Steady but also members of 2 other larger organizations (Journalistinnenbund and RiffReporter).
In Germany meanwhile there is a huge variety of media startups from one-women-shows like Deine Korrespondentin up to larger newsrooms like Krautreporter and Perspective Daily. There are even content startups with more than a million annual budget like CORRECTIV or Media Pioneer.
The 100-days journey of the Creators Program showed me also that there is a huge need for consultancy of upcoming niche projects in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
There are some incubators and accelerators for content startups like MediaLab Bayern, Medieninnovationszentrum Babelsberg or Journalismuslab NRW. The problem is that these fellowships are 3 to 6 months full- or part-time programs with a large commitment in terms of time and effort.
Consultancy for media entrepreneurs
But if you are a journalist — staff or freelancer — and just think about a side project like a niche newsletter or a new podcast and have no clue how to start such an enterprise, you need first of all consultancy or coaching. That’s why I will be starting a first test balloon in March 2021 offering professional consultancy for 8 journalists who want to become media entrepreneurs or just want to discover if their idea might be transformed into a larger project or even an own startup.
It might be considered as a pre-seed stage where journalists will benefit of my gained business skills founding Deine Korrespondentin but also participating in the CUNY program. The test balloon will be supported by the German Schoepflin Foundation, which wants to help the media ecosystem in a sustainable way considering quality journalism as crucial for a pluralistic, vivid and resistant democracy.
I am super excited how many people will apply for this new form of consultancy, at the same time I am confident that a need for starting an own business and networking is bigger than ever.
If you want to get more information, here you can watch my final presentation I hold in the end of January 2021 among my peers: https://youtu.be/6-WH9wV9XMY
More about the author:
Pauline Tillmann is founder and editor-in-chief of the digital magazine Deine Korrespondentin (Your Correspondent) with 10 female correspondents covering stories about interesting women worldwide. She holds a master’s degree in Political Science, Sociology and Psychology and completed a journalism traineeship at the Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation (Bayerischer Rundfunk) in Munich. Between 2011 and 2015 she worked as a freelance foreign correspondent in St. Petersburg, Russia, mainly for German Public Radio and TV (ARD). 2018–20020 she was project manager for media viability at DW Akademie. Currently she works as a trainer, keynote speaker, moderator and consultant specializing in media startups.
If you want to get in touch, please feel free to write me personally: pauline@deine-korrespondentin.de
