The beauty of what we are doing
My view and what I learned during the EJCP program.
Journalists rarely stop to reflect on what we do: The speed of the news, the urgency to publish or the insistence to seek the truth mark an exhausting routine that leaves little room for reflection. But the profession changes, or rather, the media ecosystem does not stop changing at a speed that perhaps we do not always calibrate properly.
Without having yet fully processed the dynamics of algorithms in social networks, we are now entering the Era of Artificial Intelligence, to cite just one example of the vertigo in which we live and which surrounds our work. The model that for decades was a certainty by which the media simply sold advertising to its readers without distinction is a thing of the past, of another era that is becoming less and less similar to the one we are living in now.
“The beauty of what you are doing is you can move past this era of mass media”, Jeff Jarvis told us in late October, when we were just starting the 100-day Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program (EJCP) at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. I found his quote both inspiring and challenging at the same time.
It is true. We deal with the usual dilemmas, threats and challenges, but we are pressed by new questions in a context in which many more people prefer to stay away from the news, or in which propaganda and disinformation are also disseminated with enormous ease. We tend to take for granted that what we do is important, and of course it is! But we cannot be satisfied with that if we want to prevail.
If I had to summarize this 100-day Enterpreneurial Journalism Creators Program (EJCP), I would say that it has been like a journey to the origin, to the heart of my work as a journalist. There wasn’t a session in which I didn’t immediately ask myself how these ideas could fit in with my project. Several times, I even went through the exercise of rethinking what things I would change from decisions made in the past.
That exercise of imagining the future of what I do as a journalist and the future of my project has been something very productive. In 2018 I had to leave Venezuela because of my work as an investigative journalist at Armando.Info, an independent Venezuelan media outlet dedicated exclusively to investigative journalism. Since then, I have lived through a whirlwind of events, I continued forward the investigation that cost me the exile, I became a partner of the project, but surely I had not stopped to think slowly about the future of the project.
Armando.Info was born in 2014 as an urgency to fill a void through investigative journalism in one of the countries where the press freedom situation was increasingly deteriorating and one of the most corrupt places in the world. I think we have accomplished that mission well enough, but we want to prevail, endure and adapt to new demands.
Building community and sustainability
Near the end of the first session of the program, Jeremy Caplan outlined what was to come: “Over the course of 100 days, you’ll clarify what you are building, plan for smart growth, and sharpen your model business. You’ll dive into building, with the help of colleagues, coaches and a mentor.”
Definitely, this has been the case. The ideas and experiences we studied now allow me to have another look at the future of Armando.Info. After almost nine years since it was founded, it is not bad to rethink something essential that we repeat throughout the program and that in the midst of the routine we sometimes lose sight of: who we serve and how we serve that audience.
“Who are you writing for, and what will motivate them to take time out of their busy lives to read your journalism and potentially provide financial support for it,” Ariel Zirulnick commented to me after one of our exercises on the “Value Proposition” concept.
On the way to find that answer, I understood the importance of another concept: “building community.” Since the origin of Armando.Info, we have had the idea of building a community around the concepts of “transparency” and “accountability.” But it is clear to me that the possibilities of expanding that community are even wider, if we take into account that we have a very loyal audience base, but also the fact that 30% of our readers are Venezuelans in countries such as the United States, Spain and Colombia.
I have always believed that one of the “original sins” of us journalists when we become founders/directors of our own project is that we only think of journalism as a mission, as a duty, but not in the need to have and develop a business model that makes us sustainable over time. We even come to view these ideas with a certain disdain.
If EJCP does something, it is to make us think about these possibilities and show us different paths. At Armando.Info, we have also tried some models in different stages (crowdfunding, paywall, membership) to achieve the greatest possible financial independence. We have not always achieved the results we were looking for.
It is clear that there are no magic solutions, but now I imagine several alternatives to make Armando.Info a project sustained by the community it serves, as well as how to convert part of our audience into potential donors.
Some voices are not optimistic about the future of journalism. After this 100-day journey with colleagues from all over the world, I rather believe that it is a time of incredible transformation that we are being part of with each of our projects.
