PNI Month Notes — October 2021 — Shirish
I just feel really tired. We ALL feel really tired.
There’s so much work to do, so much to create, and there’s never enough time. I care so deeply about the work that we’re doing and feel such a huge responsibility to get it right. At every point, I’m thinking of the people I know we can serve and all the community power we can build with The People’s Newsroom. I know how lucky I am to have a job that feels like a vocation rather than work, but it’s a double-edged sword. I wake up in the middle of the night, worrying about the things I don’t know, the articles I haven’t read, and how I’m getting everything wrong.
I freelance alongside my part-time job on The People’s Newsroom, largely on projects in a similar space, which I care about deeply. As a result, I often end up working seven days a week to make sure that I can never blame laziness for doing things badly, and then get so tired that I make mistakes — perhaps not thinking clearly about what key priorities should be, or not having the headspace to contribute coherent thoughts to shared documents.
I didn’t want to sit down to write this, but now I’ve started I see this is part of the work. We know how difficult it is to set up a new journalism project, and the mental health difficulties many founders face. The themes are common — financial pressures, knowledge or skills gaps and feelings of isolation. “Going it alone” often feels like exactly that. And that’s not always an easy place to be, particularly when you’re also feeling that imperative to use journalism to make the world a better place.
It’s why we’re building mental health training into our planning for The People’s Newsroom, because this is hard work that many are doing with very little external support. Every independent journalism founder I’ve met does the work because they care deeply about other people, and feel a profound sense of responsibility to their community. We want to make sure they get the care they deserve too, and by walking in their shoes over the last few months we’ve seen how important that is.
One of the things that’s helped me manage the workload is realising that sometimes things can be “good enough” — they don’t have to be perfect. Plans made on paper rarely play out exactly in practice. Together, we created a detailed timeline for the design of the EYST Newsroom project in Swansea that’s acting as our pilot. It looked great on paper, but was completely impossible in practice.
The EYST project is only currently funded until the end of February, and the key aims are to offer skills, training and opportunities for people in Swansea while also designing a product that meets the user needs of the EYST audience, and can therefore be financially and editorially sustainable.
We found that we don’t have time to do all the detailed audience insight work that we’d hoped. That research is going to have to be scaled back and run in parallel with the training but maybe “that’s good enough”. It’s good enough to do our best, and acknowledge that we don’t live in a perfect world — we’re just doing our bit to make it better.
There are also huge highs and lows in this work.
Every day I’m horrified by the negative representations of immigrants, refugees and the trans and non-binary community. It saddens me that so many of our under-represented and mis-represented people and communities open a newspaper or website with a sense of trepidation.
Another low for me comes from hearing some in the legacy media industry rail against us for “de-professionalising” journalism by hoping to make it possible for anyone to tell their story. The highs very often come from people who are doing exactly that!
I was completely blown away by “Made in Bury”, the film made by The Elephant’s Trail, in partnership with The Guardian. I cried sad tears and happy tears all at the same time. Sad, because the film laid bare just how badly our systems are failing so many people. Happy, because the way the team used journalism to build community power in Bury and make genuine change filled me with hope for the future.
I’m hugely excited that The Elephant’s Trail team will be joining us as guests at our next Community Coffee on 24th November at 11am. Our first event, with Fatima Said from Amaliah, was another thing that gave me hope. Hearing Fatima and Shazia talking about how Amaliah gave Muslim women a space where they felt they could breathe felt enormously important to me.
The other thing that gave me hope this week was attending the Cardiff premiere of EYST’s “We are Wales” project.
The project aims to construct a new narrative that reinforces the role of BAME people in Wales, not as victims, but as net contributors to the social economy and asserts a more inclusive notion of Welsh identity, focused on strengths, contributing and helping.
More tears (you’ll see a pattern developing), because the stories told by Shazia and the other citizen journalists in this project are rarely seen in mainstream media yet are a much more accurate reflection of the reality of immigrant and refugee lives. These stories show the enormous contributions they made to society and the deep selflessness that guides those who’ve often been victims of the very worst of humanity.
For all the worries, there’s no doubt in my mind that the stories told by people like The Elephant’s Trail and We are Wales ARE the future of a journalism that I want to be part of. We need to protect, support and nurture the people who are doing this work, and that crucial part of the mission will guide my thinking over the coming months and years.
These monthly notes are reflections on what The People’s Newsroom team are learning as we build the project. You can read previous notes, and more from Shazia and Megan here.
You can read find out more about The People’s Newsroom Initiative here, and if you’d like to be kept up to date with how the project is developing and how you can get involved, then do sign up to our monthly newsletter.
