Thinking as an entrepreneurial journalist
When I came to the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism I didn’t have a clear idea about the Entrepreneurial Journalism project that I was going to work on. I shared two ideas with Jeremy Caplan, Director of Education at the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism. One of them was about Arab immigrants in the United States; when he asked about the project’s unique value, I didn’t know what to answer.
Later when I tried to fill the lean canvas model things became complicated. I confess that I failed to answer these questions: what is the problem that I am going to solve? and If I could define it, what is the solution I have? and of course, why people will pay attention for it.
I was thinking as a journalist who had worked for more than 10 years in the traditional media. I wanted to write stories, profile people, their successes and their failures, how they live between two cultures, how it affected their identity, and integration stories and challenges. I believed that the writing style that I adopt when creating content in Arabic would be enough to grab people’s attention to my project and make it successful. Plus there is a huge desire among readers from the Arab region to hear stories about immigrants, especially those who became successful in their lives abroad. Jeremy wasn’t convinced of the idea, and I wasn’t very convinced that it would work either.
In the first weeks of the entrepreneurial journalism program a scavenger hunt was organized. One of the clues required interviewing a (wo)man on the street about what frustrates them about the news. When I saw a man smoking in front of the New York Times building, I rushed to ask him. “A lot of news is fake. It’s just misinformation and people think that it’s the truth,” he answered.
Many of my colleagues have received similar answers. One of the respondents’ answers stuck in my mind. “I’m sick of it. I just want facts to make decisions.” My project is actually inspired in a way by these answers. Two weeks after those person-on-the-street interviews, I asked myself what if I took this same question to the region that I came from, the Arab Gulf Region, a conservative area where the media does not have freedom of expression. What would people think about the same issues?
So I started creating an online survey using a Google form. I made sure that the questions were few (3 questions) and easy so people wouldn’t feel discouraged about completing the survey. The three questions were:
- How do you get your news?
- What frustrates you about the news?
- What can make your experience with social media news better?
After gathering 67 responses, I found that the majority of the answers that I received were similar to the answers that my colleague and I got from Times Square streets.
The most repeated answers included the following, “News is based on lies and far from reality; news is always biased towards one group; exaggeration and conflicted data.”
What was surprising for me is that almost 47% of respondents depend on social media and WhatsApp to read the news, even when they complain that it’s fake and not credible. While I started one-on-one interviews with people from different backgrounds via Skype and Viber, the problem became more apparent. There is a real need for credible, fact-checked news in the Arab Gulf States region, not only in America.
At the same time, I started to follow the debate that is taking place here in US about the fake news problem, especially during and after the presidential election, and the attempts of traditional and social media companies to develop their own verifying tools to deal with this issue. So I got the idea to build a fact checking service for news that are shared among social media in the Arab Gulf States.
Things are becoming more clear to me now. At least I can see a real problem. I can define it and touch it. And I can think of a solution. I started following sites that specialized in fact checking like Snopes, PolitiFact and FactCheck and read about its recent growth in Europe.
The good news is that after scanning the landscape, I noticed that there are almost no fact checking websites covering my targeted region. However, the bad news is the amount of news shared in social media is huge and require a lot of human resources. To deal with this challenge I’m planning to cover few countries in the beginning then gradually with more time and resources work on covering the whole region.
The question now is: how can I generate revenue to make it sustainable? That’s another story that I want to learn more about during my journey in CUNY.
