News Isn’t Just Our Business — It’s Our Life

This is the fifth of 7 from our series The jrnal Manifesto, leading up to our official launch on June 28th. We will be releasing a new part every other day, so watch this space!

jrnal was born out of frustration but it quickly became a passion. And that means our emotions are on the line, so I wanted to share the values that drive us.

And it is us — as I write, we are a team of 4, all fully engaged in creating something rooted in the energy of bringing ideas and people together.

Love of the unknown.

We don’t see differences, we see individuals, character rather than caricature.

We believe there is no strict subculture, just culture!

We are unafraid of the outside world, and we are eager to learn about it. We will dig as far as possible, knowing that we may have as much in common with a young entrepreneur in Beirut as with our downstairs neighbor.

We are convinced that words, content and narratives can destroy the fear of what lies beyond our comfort zones.

Pride.

Who we are goes far beyond skin color, physical traits, gender and sexual orientations. Discrimination, conscious and unconscious, is arguably the greatest challenge we face as a company, particularly because we are a content diffuser.

That’s why we don’t choose censure, but instead intellectual humility; hard truths rather than sensationalism.

Intellectual humility.

Intellectual humility, namely an awareness that your beliefs may be wrong, accepting that nothing is simply black or white but is instead made of multiples shades of grey, is in rather short supply lately.

With infobesity, fake news and the post-truth era, evaluating the quality of the evidence and opting for fact-based arguments has been largely left behind.

Digital news consumption hasn’t helped, as we started living inside our filter bubble, as theorized by Eli Pariser. We now have a unique personal universe of information constructed by a mix of our facebook likes & friends’ statuses, Google searches, Amazon buying history…

Our mission at jrnal is to try to blow this bubble away and make you reconsider your most profound convictions (and us ours, for that matter).

Optimism.

We believe the difficulties in the publishing industry are not irreversible. Several points must be fixed and we’re trying to pinpoint some of them, starting with diffusion and distribution. We’re try to do this with a driving conviction: News must be both precious and accessible. That means more pertinent content with more stunning narratives that are accessible and effectively seen.

These are our values. It’s a long-term job and we’ll probably lose our way some along the way. We just hope that in those moments we’ll have the sense to come back here and re-read our first words. If you ever share the same, be welcome on jrnal

Want to know more about jrnal ? Here are the first and second episodes of our story.