The burned-man, the false sparring, and popcorn
Developing my own thing for ex-pats
Creating is something that we as a journalists are not used to doing. Actually, we only have a vague idea of what creation and innovation are. Thinking outside the box is a scary trip; with no editors setting the relevant angles for a story, the sources we must contact, and of course how readers or users must consume the stories we publish.
Most greatest ventures emerged from an idea and started from scratch. Creating is in fact a hard, long, and sometimes frustrating process, but it’s full of learning, personal growth and fun.
Many of the skills a solopreneur develops are far away from the skills journalists have and learn before they are able to create a thing that can serve an audience through not just quality journalism but journalism that is centered on listening, diversity and equity.
Ideation is not enough. Before I was selected as part of the first cohort for the Journalism Creators Program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, Bajío Informant, the newsletter I created during the program, was nothing more than an idea that emerged back in 2018.
In a nutshell, Bajío Informant (you can sign up for here) is a weekly newsletter designed for ex-pats communities living in the three largest cities in the center of Mexico; our goal is to provide relevant content, news, and lifestyle with a unique contextualization angle, oh! and a written in a mix of English and Spanish.
Bajío Informant has its heart in the basics of journalism: observing and listening. Back in 2018 on a covering trip to San Luis Potosi, the access door to the Mexican north and one of the largest cities in the Bajio, I found growing ex-pat communities that were attracted to the region by the rapidly developing regional industry focused on tech and automotive global corporations.
Of course, there are many commonalities in the personal lives of these ex-pats: they seem happy, but feel lonely. I spent two months reading all the local newspapers published by local media outlets, searching for editorial products like podcasts or websites, even looking at social media. I found nothing but a desert. No single editorial product specifically designed for these foreign communities.
At that moment, I didn’t realize that what I had been doing was ideating a product for an underserved niche audience. Without knowing it, the process of creating Bajío Informant newsletter had begun.
By the beginning of 2021, the idea started to look more like a product rather than just another idea for a media outlet. This is the result of a design process with product leverages that could scale in the future, launched with a strategy based on social media and conceived as an option to fill in the information gaps that legacy local media can’t serve for a specific niche audience with diverse backgrounds.
Getting here after discovering what the mission of my newsletter would be and the goals to achieve has not been a smooth journey, instead it has been more like a ‘Hero’s Journey’ in which I have fought against all the things that I had believed of myself as a journalist and against of my overthinking mentality.
My personal process of growth and my venture development required hard work in ideation, design, development, testing and one final effort to launch. Before the JCP program, doing this would have been the same as throwing a bottle into the sea hoping that someone would bet on my idea.
Fighting against Manny Pacquiao
We spend our lives thinking that what we do in our daily jobs as journalists is important to everyone, and beyond that, we believe that the stories we sign must be relevant to the people.
The reality is that people care about their own lives, they don’t care about the politicians, but the fact is politicians are 24/7 just inside our journalistic minds. People care about the reason why their bank accounts are being drained by a virus and the bills that have to be paid, they care about their loved ones dying, they care about their families and the struggles the pandemic brought into their lives.
For several years I was part of a “journo-wave” that believed that with our stories we were building people’s life vision and giving shape to public opinion through the reports and long investigation stories we made. Nothing is farther away from reality.
My mentor wasn’t exactly a Zen guru from the mountains, rather than that, he was what I decided to call a “false sparring.” The Nieman fellow, Kabir Chibber, loves boxing, he founded a great newsletter called 13th Round. Boxing with me was exactly what he did. He put me in the ring with him acting as sparring partner, though he fights like Manny Pacquiao.
During my menteeship with Kabir, he never gave me an easy answer. He always tried to challenge me, to put me through my fears and doubts, and forced me to think about how would I address those issues, find a solution, act and evolve.
His wise final words were: “Focus on the important things, identify the people who love what you do, and ask them why, and keep building your email list, are the important things to do,” he said.
Looking for a sustainable future
One of the motivations that drove me through the entrepreneurship journey was the lack of financial security working in a large legacy media outlet, at least in Mexico. The advertising business was great for the publishers, but it has never been secure for the journalists.
I’m still working on defining a business model for Bajío Informant. But thinking about how your product could be profitable and how you could have diverse revenue streams from your venture is one path to sustainability as a journalist.
Right now, I am in the stage of iterating my newsletter as a product, designing the value that I will deliver to the audience and on the path of market fitting of my product to be able to grow in the coming months. It’s great to find my own pace and here I want to recall for the Dan Oshinsky words: “You are not behind, direction is more important than speed”.
It’s the first time I am thinking centered on business to make money. If it’s your first time too, I can advise you to think about your incomes like a cinema business model.
The movies don’t transfer value to the cinema theaters in themselves, the business core revenue streams are the ticket sales and the food, I mean, the popcorn you bought before entering the hall. Tickets with a specific location and the food you eat give you something valuable that you don’t have in your apartment.
To define the business model for your venture, think as the cinema did, find what is the kind of ‘popcorn’ your audience needs, how they prefer to consume it, which channels are suitable to deliver the product, who could be your strategic partners and, of course, what success looks like for you.
For me, success looks like 600 subscribers in the next 6 months, a consistent workflow for creating content and being in the departure hall for the flight to reach my first paying subscribers.
2021 won’t be better or easier than 2020, maybe it could be even worse. But, as Jeremy Caplan wrote last October 2020; the seeds are now planted, and we hope for a new era of entrepreneurial journalism.
PS. Thanks to each of my fellow creators in the cohort, you taught me so much in this amazing journey.
