Just the Beginning: Episode 7
The New News
Kickstarter’s Just the Beginning podcast featuring stories about how independent creators bring their ideas to life.
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Meet journalists experimenting with creative new ways to report the news.
Tortoise
Founded by industry veterans who have previously helped run The Wall Street Journal and the BBC, Tortoise aims to create a new kind of newsroom — one that takes a slower, deeper approach to covering stories. With an eye toward staying financially independent, they’ve pursued a participatory, membership-based model. And they invite members to directly contribute to their coverage through in-person events called ThinkIns.
Cabina en Malos Pasos
Alejandra Sánchez Inzunza and José Luis Pardo Veiras have been reporting on corruption and violence throughout Latin America since 2012, working with traditional news outlets like The New York Times and Univision. With Cabina en Malos Pasos, an interactive video booth that features firsthand accounts of survivors, activists, and perpetrators, they aim to inspire empathy and make the often amorphous issue of violence in Latin America feel more personal.
Transcript
Zakiya Gibbons: From Kickstarter this is just the beginning in this episode: The New News
[Music: Balún, “Años Atrás”]
ZG: I’m Zakiya Gibbons
Nick Yulman: I’m Nick Yulman
In this episode, we’ll be looking at creative new approaches to reporting the news.
We’ll hear about one project that’s pushing back against the idea of breaking news by making their coverage more slow and deliberate and another that aims to make the reports we hear about violence across Latin America feel more personal.
And we’re joined by Oriana Leckert, who works with journalism creators here at Kickstarter. She’s going to help us explore these ideas.
Oriana Leckert: Hi guys, thanks for having me on the show.
ZG: It’s so awesome to have you here. Okay. Oriana, first of all, there are probably some people who’d be surprised to learn that Kickstarter even has a journalism category. How does journalism fit in with the other creative projects here at Kickstarter?
OL: I am so glad that you asked me that. It is almost my entire job, to explain that to people. This is a really fascinating moment, to be pursuing alternative funding for the media. In case it isn’t wildly apparent, all of the old ways are broken. So, there’s really just so much exciting experimentation to try to figure out new ways to make the media happen. And I think that community-supported journalism is really having a huge moment right now, because folks are finally starting to get the message that if we want the news to continue to exist, we might have to actually support it.
ZG: When I think of journalism, I think of a field that’s supposed to be objective. Hard facts. And when I think of creativity, I think of something that is subjective and a space where people can express themselves and their experiences. So, are the ideas of journalistic objectivity and individual creativity at odds with each other?
OL: I think they’re definitely not at odds with each other. I think that part of the work of being a successful journalist is employing creativity in a way that’s going to make the facts that you’re presenting compelling.
OL: I think the idea that any of us could be strictly objective is kind of a lie. We are human, we are nothing but our collections of experiences and thoughts and the catastrophes and baggage that we’ve amassed over the course of our lives.
Of course, most journalists would say that they are attempting to approach objectivity. But factual accuracy is only one part of how you tell a story. We just saw the first image ever captured of a black hole. So if you wanted to report that story, you could report, “Scientists captured the first image of a black hole.” And that’ll be factually accurate.
You could also say, “In the grand tradition of unknown women driving STEM disciplines forward, A 29-year-old woman named Katie Bowman led a team that captured the first-ever image of a black hole.”
All of these things are factually accurate. But the creativity behind them allows you to tell totally different elements of the story that are going to appeal to different audiences and readers.
NY: What are some of your favorite journalistic experiments that have come through Kickstarter?
OL: There are so many different ways to experiment. One that I really love is there’s a 90-second podcast, The World According to Sound.
It has one sound, and then one minute of conversation about that sound: how it started and where it came from.
[Clips from The World According to Sound]
“This is blood surging through a person’s brain.”“This is the Great Stalacpipe Organ, It’s the world’s largest instrument.”
“These are ants. Hundreds and hundreds of small black ants.”
OL: In like, a completely opposite direction, there’s a nonprofit newsroom that launched in Chicago called City Bureau. What they focus on is a lot of almost citizen journalism, and really hyperlocal reporting. They’ll pay average citizens to go and sit in on community board meetings or traffic incident hearings.
Oriana Leckert: As newsrooms are shrinking, we don’t have the bandwidth to be sending journalists to every single hyperlocal thing like this. But you can send regular citizens there, give them some money, really bring them into the process of the nitty-gritty of how journalism happens.
N: And there have also bee projects from names people might recognize, right?
Oriana Leckert: There’s a lot of experiments with new outlets. But even somewhat older kinds of media outlets like Gothamist, which is one of my favorite places for local media in New York City. After they got shut down, they had a somewhat complicated path toward relaunch. And they used Kickstarter actually to buy back own their archives, which had been kept from them.
That inspired several other of the -ist sounds brands including LAist and DCist to run their own campaigns, so that they could also relaunch. And that has been really crucial for local media at a moment when there are fewer and fewer smaller journalistic outlets in cities across the country and across the world.
[Music]
Tortoise
ZG: So, trying to stay on top of the news in an era of constantly updating feeds and smartphone alerts can feel daunting, if not impossible. And the truth is we know this pace isn’t good for us — just think of the language we use to talk about being a “news junkie” or a “twitter addict.” Or needing to go on an internet “cleanse.”
OL: Yeah, you’re not wrong. A lot of people really feel that way. So, one of the projects that we’re going to take a deeper look at is a group of journalists who were very aware of that frenetic culture that we’re all struggling under. And they wanted to change it. They wanted a completely new way of doing journalism. A slow way. They’re called Tortoise.
and set out to change it… with a very different type of news organization … a slow news organization. They’re called Tortoise.
[Music: Jake Armerding, “Musicland (reprise)”]
Katie Vanneck Smith: The BBC creates four seconds of news for every second in the day. It’s just a cacophony of almost white noise. So the motto of Tortoise is slow down, wise up.
OL: That’s Katie Vanneck Smith. She used to be president of the Wall Street Journal — but today she’s the publisher and co-founder of Tortoise — along with James Harding who was formerly editor of the London-based newspaper the Times and head of news at the BBC.
KVS: James tells a story of being at the BBC back in 2016 when there was a major terrorist atrocity in Nice where a lorry driver just drove down the promenade killing lots of people.
And in his role of head of news then they were looking into the backstory of the individual who was the lorry driver. And then by the time it got to the news bulletin that evening that story had been dropped from the lead story because events had happened in Turkey that had taken the top spot on the news.
And he had this moment the next day where he was like, “What was the backstory of the person driving the truck down that street?” And he realized that going deeper into the story, was not something that was afforded in the 24/7 breaking news cycle. So, James had an aha moment in the height of the news and how the news was breaking and that’s sort of the genesis of the idea. Then when he pitched it to me I was like, “I get it. I want in because I want it for me.” [LAUGHS]
OL: It isn’t just that the endless flow of news can make us feel ill as individuals. Katie and James believe the breakneck pace is bad for society, too. As leaders of some of the largest news organizations in the Western world, they recognized that in the rush to be the first to report what happened… news outlets were sacrificing the ability to explain WHY these things happened… and provide any sense of perspective. What we needed, they thought, was slow news.
KVS: For us, slow journalism is about providing a context of understanding why. We choose fewer things on purpose so that we can stay with them. So actually not news when it happens but news when it’s ready.
Katie thinks Tortoise will be able to cover stories in a broader more nuanced way — and that they’ll be able to add new angles to topics that are already in the news on a regular basis:
You know right now, the Me Too movement and gender is very front and foremost but it comes in and out of the news cycle driven by revelations of an individual. But actually, for us, that conversation is an ongoing conversation. We won’t be publishing when there’s a women’s march or when another story breaks around individuals who have behaved like the Harvey Weinsteins of this world.
So we have a series of conversations around this that isn’t driven by the news cycle. That’s driven by the fact that we believe that having a conversation around gender and understanding how we use this moment as it was to come up with solutions for society really matters.
[Music: Jeremy Arndt, “Mt Helix”]
There are some other notable distinctions between the way Tortoise does things and how they’re done at traditional news outlets. For one, Tortoise wants to remain truly independent and so they’re operating on a membership model. They don’t take advertising money and they’re not directed by a majority shareholder.
KVS: We think it really matters because the only people then you’re accountable to are your members. Because ultimately, what we do is a public service.
So open journalism for us starts with simple things like for every subject that we talk about or publish our point of view on, we create and share with our members all of the data, all of the analysis, all of the information we have used. We call them Tortoise notes — so that’s the first thing.
The second thing is that the conversation that you traditionally have as a newsroom to get to a point of view is in something called editorial conference or leader conference. Our version of that, which we call a ThinkIn will be open to our members and our partners to come in and join.
The sort of difference of the Tortoise newsroom is that we believe the more voices that you hear and listen to in advance of coming up with the points of view, the more informed that point of view will be.
[Music]
Most of these sort of journalistic events that you see live they feel more like a panel discussion, don’t they? Here are the experts on stage. We’re telling you our point of view. You can ask us a question and we’ll respond to you. That’s not what we’re doing. The world doesn’t need another panel discussion. There are quite enough of them. Our only rule in a think-in is no questions. What we want to be able to do is genuinely offer people a seat at the table. We want to hear your firsthand experiences. We want to hear your point of view.
So we don’t publish a point of view until we have created this organized system of listening. And the reason we think that matters is because if you think about some of the big stories of the last 10 years, be it the economic crisis of 2008 or the rise of populism and extremist political perspectives and also this sense that the media and many others in power have failed to see some of the human and societal impacts of Big Technology — we’re living through some of those now — those are stories that if you had been listening and if you had been listening in different rooms, if you had been in Des Moines rather than DC you may have heard a very different perspective from the voices in those rooms and that would have informed your journalism.
OL: Since they started publishing in January 2019, Tortoise has been hosting ThinkIns at their newsroom in London as well as on the road. I caught up with Katie at a ThinkIn they held in New York City just last month.
KVS: So, we were in Louisville, Kentucky; we’re in DC next month; and in fact next week James is in Greece in a refugee camp in Lesbos understanding firsthand the stories of those people who are refugees; I’m in Amsterdam in SoHo house talking about the future of belonging. So, um, he’s probably got the most interesting story, I’ve probably got the nicer bed.
[Music]
After a ThinkIn, Tortoise editors create a sort of digest of what was discussed which gets distributed to members — and these digests often include actual audio recordings of the conversations. We’re going to hear some recent examples, like this discussion about Michael Jackson and the longstanding allegations of child abuse against him.
[Audio from ThinkIn]
Speaker 1: Like many people, I have some childhood associations with Michael Jackson. My cousin dressing up like Michael Jackson with the glove and everything, and the white socks and the loafers and doing the dance from ‘Bad’ and singing along, but he didn’t know the words. So he just made the same noises. And I wonder, oddly, with Michael Jackson, if we weren’t necessarily paying attention to the words. Michael Jackson is the amazing outfits, right, and the sound and the dances. Actually, I looked at the lyrics of ‘Smooth Criminal’ this afternoon and it’s really hard to look at and think about even for a second, the lyrics to ‘Smooth Criminal’, which are clearly about some kind of sexual attack.
Speaker 2: Everyone on social media believes that the world revolves around social media. You become part of a poll, or someone [inaudible 00:00:38] up a tweet, and this can be retweeted many times and people believe that’s a consensus of British society and that’s not the case. Most of my friends that I’ve spoken to, both male and female, they don’t believe that Michael Jackson was guilty. They would ask everyone online and decide, yes, he’s guilty.
OL: Another ThinkIn dealt with the rise of the far right and how it relates to the election of Donald Trump in the US and the Brexit vote in the UK.
[Audio from ThinkIn]
Speaker 4: Anti-immigration, anti-multiculturalism; these are the ideas which have traditionally drove the far right. The reason why they had no political success is because they were seen as fringe and racist and eccentric, but you now have mainstream politicians who agree with them.
Speaker 5: People go around saying these matches openly beforehand and soon as Brexit happened, unleashed quite a lot of racist jargon and [crosstalk 00:01:27]-
Speaker 6: One thing is that they think it’s okay to say that now in a way they didn’t two years ago.
Speaker 5: Because they think the tendency is to believe those who voted Leave were of the more racist and xenophobic opinion, and so because Britain put ourselves in the position where we have voted Leave overall, it makes people think that that xenophobic opinion is a more widely acceptable one.
Speaker 7: My son was told to go home when he came from the day after the referendum, because he’s got brown skin. And that had never happened to him in his life. It was an empowerment of permission.
OL: Beyond ThinkIns Tortoise also provides members with a daily update of no more than five short stories on a range of topics. And they aim to publish a quarterly book of long reads — thoughtfully reported pieces that investigate a single topic in more depth.
And while most news organizations treat objectivity as a kind of baseline for the work they do, Tortoise embraces having an opinion — one based on hearing from a lot of different voices. For them it’s about not only reporting on a problem, but also thinking about a possible solution.
KVS: Objectivity in news is about the facts and the information. We are not another news outlet. We are much more focused on participatory and proactive solutions-driving journalism. A take really matters. We are focused on investigations, analysis, and opinion.
Those are the things that we think add to the conversation and take us to a positive place so that we can drive for action and solutions. So we will have an opinion.
[Music: ensemble, et al., “A Beautiful Walk Through an Industrial Wasteland”]
OL: Tortoise has laid out a really ambitious new model for reporting the news. They have a kind of thesis about what a better approach would look like. And of course, they’re really early in this journey. They’re still experimenting and figuring out what works. And that’s where a lot of journalists find themselves right now — asking fundamental questions about how they do their work.
[Music]
Cabina en Malos Pasos
ZG: So Tortoise is all about slowing down and embracing a deeper look at the news. And Nick, you’re going to tell us about a project from some other journalists who have come up with a different way to go deeper into the stories they cover.
NY: That’s right, and for them it’s all about emotional depth to reporting the news.
Alejandra Sánchez Inzunza and José Luis Pardo Veiras are the cofounders of Dromómanos, a journalistic production company that has covered inequality, corruption, and violence throughout Latin America for years.
Much of their work takes the form of traditional reporting and they’ve worked with The New York Times, Vice News, Univisión, and other established media outlets. But they’ve also developed a really different way to tell the stories of people affected by violence throughout the region. And it’s not just about reporting facts or representing the scale of these problems. It’s about inspiring empathy.
They’re based in Mexico City and I talked with them over a video call.
Alejandra Sánchez Inzunza: We’ve been covering violence and drug trafficking and drug policy since 2012
José Luis Pardo Veiras: And our current project En Malos Pasos is an investigation in the seven most violent countries in Latin America: Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico.
ASI: Because this is a region without an official war, except for Colombia that had a civil conflict before, it is really hard for people that don’t live in violent context to understand what is happening. They know there’s a problem, but they think it’s really far away from their homes and they are like really tired of news or the TV or reading about violence. They are like, “Okay, tell me another story.”
JLPV: Besides doing traditional reporting and writing, publishing longform stories we decided to look for new ways to connect with readers.
ASI: So we wanted to explore empathy because we think that journalism is a good tool for creating empathy. That’s why we decided to have this interactive phone booth to reduce this disconnection between readers and the people affected by violence.
NY: So this booth Alejandra mentioned, It’s a phone booth that they take to different cities around Latin America and position in public places like parks or plazas outside subway stations. And when you step up to the booth and pick up the phone, a person appears on a video screen in front of you.
ASI: In the booth there is a person which explain their life experience. Maybe his son was killed or maybe they committed a murder or they are an activist that fight against violence in any of these countries. So they tell their story and then they ask a question to the public or to the user that is listening to the story. They ask like, “What would you do if you were in my shoes?”
NY: And once the storyteller in the video asks that question, a camera turns on and you have a chance to record a response, imagining what they would do if they were facing the same situation. It’s way to make this issue, which can feel amorphous and hard to understand, more personal. Like having a conversation with a single person rather than grappling with confusing statistics.
One example of these stories is from a woman named Betty Loaiza Samorillo from San Carlos, Colombia.
JLPV: So Betty is a survivor of the war between guerillas and paramilitaries in Colombia. And she lives in San Carlos which is a small town. In the worst years, about 70% of the population in San Carlos left because of the violence. And she decided to stay.
Betty Loaiza Samorillo (translated voiceover): My name is Doria Betty Loaiza Samorillo, a resident of San Carlos. I was born in San Carlos and remained there during the war. I didn’t leave, because I could never abandon my family.
My brother disappeared. He was on a mountain for ten years, but we eventually managed to find him. His remains can now be found here in San Carlos, in the temple.
During that time of violence, I was targeted to be killed, but God gave me the strength to keep going.
Today, I can say that I performed my duty with love, that it’s worth fighting for a town and the people you love.
Fear forces us into making decisions that are not ours.
If you were put on a list to be killed, would you stay?
[Music: ensemble, et al., “The Guernsey Goodbye”]
And people answer these questions in very different ways. Here are couple of the responses to Betty’s story that they collected when they brought the booth to a different part of Colombia. One person expresses admiration for her choice to stay:
[Response]
Response 1 (voiceover): I think it’s a very difficult decision, but we must look towards times of peace and be brave so that violent groups do not displace us anymore. Your story is very beautiful. You are a hero to our country.
And another person shares a different perspective:
Response 2 (voiceover): I believe that I can serve my country, my people, if I leave. Because if I’m dead, if I die, I can’t do anything, but if I leave, if I go somewhere else where I can fight more, it’s better than being dead. So I think that I would want to leave to be able to fight more, from a stronger place.
ASI: The dialog is really different. It’s like if you just read the story or watch on TV, you say, “Okay, this is terrible. It’s like people are being killed in favelas in Brazil, that’s terrible.” Or, “Okay, drug trafficking is affecting Mexico.” Okay. But they don’t have any emotion about that. So-
JLPV: Because they live in the same country but are different worlds. You can live in Mexico but you can live in a neighborhood like Roma, which is famous now because of the movie. And violence, it never happens here.
NY: Alejandra and José generally meet the people they feature in this booth while doing more traditional reporting. They’re often sources for the stories they write, providing facts about the unofficial conflicts they cover. But sometimes, the way a person tells a story — the human emotion they express — is as important as the content. That’s what they look for in selecting people to feature in the booth for these virtual face-to-face conversations.
ASI: For example, one of the stories that is in the booth is Edna Carla Souza is a mother in Fortaleza. Fortaleza is one of the cities with the highest murder rate for children and teenagers.
Edna Carla Sousa Cavalcante (voiceover): My name is Edna Carla Sousa Cavalcante. I am the mother of Alef Sousa Cavalcante. I live here in Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil. In 2015, my son, at age 17, was murdered by the Military Police — he and other young people. There were 11 victims of this slaughter. None of them had a criminal record, none of them were in trouble with the law, but the Police killed them all the same. And this is very cruel, when you see that your son is not in trouble with the law, is not involved in crime, and ends up being killed by the Police themselves, an institution that was created to promote peace, to protect, to keep people safe. And they came and killed my son.
So I turned my grief into action. I’m fighting for justice so that the real culprits are relieved of their positions, removed from the Police force, and condemned for the criminals they are. Because I can’t finance the bullet that killed my son, I can’t pay the salary of a police officer who killed my son. It isn’t fair for this to happen. That’s it. I know it’s not all police officers. But here in Brazil, here in Ceará], this happens. Police officers see poor, black youth in the slums, living on the outskirts of town, sitting on the sidewalk, and decide they deserve to die. This is cruel.
Now I ask you, parents, what would you do if the Police killed your child? What would you do?
ASI: With this particular case with Edna, most of their answers are like, “Wow, you are a hero. I would do the same” And some people say like, “I wouldn’t know what to do. I would be completely crazy” The responses are really different. But what definitely is in that experience is empathy and a connection between them.
JLPV: Edna is a mother and everybody has a family. This is the key. And the context is violence. But the key is like a mother opens her heart to you and you open your heart to her.
NY: The name of the project, En Malos Pasos, means “on the wrong path.” And Alejandra and José explain that this is a typical response when people hear about a killing — that anyone involved must have in the wrong place, involved with the wrong people.
By sharing these stories, they hope to provide a fuller picture. And this means that they don’t just share the stories of victims and activists. They also ask people who have been perpetrators of violence in the past.
ASI: To understand murder as a phenomenon, you have to understand the people that is murdering. We think that that’s a mistake in journalism that sometimes, because there’s an ethical barrier to like, “Okay, I’m not going to interview a criminal, and we respect that.
But we also are thinking sociologists, you know? If we want to understand why Latin America is the most violent region in the world, we have to talk with the violent people It’s like we have for example, a young drug trafficker that started in crime at 12 years and that’s what he learned because his family was in crime and then it’s like he didn’t know there was any other option.
That doesn’t erase the fact that he’s a murderer. And We don’t justify that. We just want to understand that.
NY: Here’s the storyteller Alejandra is talking about, a former drug trafficker from Brazil who they just identify as Galo:
Galo (voiceover): When you’re a thug in a drug gang, you have to be ready to take the boss’s orders. Like, if the boss says “go get those guys” You have to kill them.
This happened to me several times. Me hanging out in the community. The mother of the boy they’ve just killed shows up — and I know she’s the mother of the boy. And she comes up to me and she says, “Hey. Have you seen my son?” And I say: “Gee, lady. I haven’t seen him.” I knew — I knew she would never see him again. But what am I gonna say? “For sure, we just killed your son over there.” Not gonna do that. Jeez. I’m not as bad as that. I’m bad. Just not that bad.
I’d always known the drug gang. When the police would come to the favelas, the guys would hide at my place. My mother would hide their guns for them… So, ever since I was a little guy I’ve been around those things. I would smell the weed; I would watch the older guys smoke. That was my experience.
After I got completely involved, I never left the favela. Do you know what it’s like to stay in the favela for five years and never leave, you never leave to go anywhere? It’s like, you stay here inside, like a baby, without leaving?
It’s like being incarcerated.
That’s how my life was there. I was stuck inside that community. I could never leave it. My life was staying stuck inside.
I have no direction, dude. I don’t even have any place to go. I’ve done so many foolish things, there’s nowhere I can go right now.
I’m here because of drugs. But not just because of drugs. Also because I have no place to go, get it?
[Music]
ASI: We want people to not think of Edna just as a victim, she’s also an activist. And Galo is not just a killer, he’s also a victim and he’s now a fighter because he wants to help other kids in the situation to get out of crime. It’s like, like people are so many things that you can define them in just one aspect.
JLPV: The booth is like a tool against categories. That is very important. We try to understand them. The police or the judges judge them, but we are journalists.
[Music]
Alejandra Sánchez Inzunza and José Luis Pardo Veiras are the cofounders of Dromómanos.
We heard recordings from their interactive storytelling project Cabina en Malos Pasos. Translations were read by Gina Rovirosa from Kickstarter’ International team.
OL: Listening to that makes me think about our earlier conversation about the intersection of creativity and journalism. To me, this is a great example of how creativity and journalism can be intertwined. This is not a normal way to read a story about drug trafficking in a favela, but a way to really get inside of someone else’s experience, which I think is one of the goals of many kinds of journalism. I think this does that in a really harrowing and beautiful way.
The Next Page Conference
ZG: Thank you so much for joining us, Oriana. It was so cool to hear about all of the new and exciting journalistic experiments happening on Kickstarter.
OL: Yeah, it was a real pleasure to do. And this is something that I’m thinking about and talking about all the time. In fact, my boss, Margot Atwell, our director of publishing, she conceived Kickstarter’s first ever digital publishing conference, which is going to be happening next month on May 11th. It’s an entire day dedicated to figuring out the future of publishing in the media.
We’re going to have four panels on radical inclusivity, and building community, and figuring out fundraising, all sorts of ways into this massive and crucial question of, how do we create the future of publishing that we want to see?
The conference is free and it’s streamed online. Anybody can join. If you go to, kickstarter.com/conferences, you’ll see it. It’s called, The Next Page Conference, and we would love input from anybody anywhere around the world.
Credits
[Music: Balún, “Años Atrás”]
ZG: Thanks for joining us for this episode of Just the Beginning. The show is produced by Zakiya Gibbons, Michael Garofalo and me, Nick Yulman. Elyse Mallouk is Kickstarter’s Editorial Director.
Our theme music is by Balún.
NY: We heard additional music from Jake Armerding, Jeremy Arndt, and ensemble, et al.
Special thanks to Rebecca Hiscott and Célia Vermicelli.
ZG: Until next time, I’m Zakiya Gibbons
NY: I’m Nick Yulman. And this is just the beginning.
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