3 steps to future-proof your journalism
Plus: A fanzine to conquer the climate crisis and an oasis of European projects
👋 Hey there fellow curious journalists,
thanks so much again for coming on this email-ride - curating interesting bits and pieces from journalism all over Europe.
🤓A small FYI: Because of my work I have a bias towards all things strategy and visual storytelling. But this newsletter (and me) is a work-in-progress, so with each edition I’ll try to a) expand my perspective and b) cover more and more countries.
🔥 Apocalypse Not Now
How do you report effectively on the climate crisis? Why of course, you make a fanzine.
(Screenshot climaxnewsletter.fr)
👀 This approach from CLIMAX in France made me look: Next to their weekly newsletter they offer a quarterly (printed!) fanzine. Their USP: They promise no despair-inducing figures, but want to connect people to ecological questions through humor and sarcasm. And offer a quite distinct style.
CLIMAX’s goal is to inspire a change of perspective: The climate crisis is not only about restrictions, it brings new opportunities for us and our society.
Example for their tone: Taking the train takes longer than flying? Well, then your company should grant you more holidays to balance out the difference. Win-Win for everyone.
👉 Sure, up until now it’s a niche product (The accompanying newsletter has around 8.000 subscribers) and it doesn’t cover all things climate, but it has something that a lot of journalistic content on the topic is missing: It’s entertaining and fun.
🇫🇷 If you understand French - There’s an interview with one of the co-founders on this episode of the Mediarama podcast
📜 Though paper-editions seem anachronistic today, they can also be what sets you apart. Just two current examples: Katapult, a quarterly German magazine that turns statistics and studies into maps, has an edition of 100.000. And The New European from GB is selling around 20.000 copies per week:
“Launching a website in 2016 - it’s like, who cares. Launching a newspaper - people pick up their ears: ‘Who are theses idiots?’ (...) and we were on the cover of the New York Times business section.” Founder and editor-in-chief, Matt Kelly
👉 But back to reporting on the climate crisis - why should it offer something entertaining and fun?
Surveys show that there is a lot of interest in climate, especially in younger audiences, but the numbers don’t match this: Climate journalism often underperforms.
That’s what a new and very extensive report from the EBU - European Broadcasting Union - is saying. (🔖Do bookmark it, it’s worth the read!)
The report also shows how broadcasters try to handle this problem and the short answer is: Most of them still struggle to get the framing right. The content doesn’t resonate with their audience.
1️⃣ A big problem: resources. Newsrooms still shy away from allocating more of their - already tight - budget to the climate beat.
2️⃣ But it’s also a question of strategy:
“Pumping out more content doesn’t work. There is a lot of stuff out there that doesn’t see the light of day. There needs to be a strategic layer applied first.”
3️⃣ To connect on this topic to your audience, you have to “make it about a desirable future” and test “unfamiliar strategies, including gamification and possibly humour” - that is one learning from the report. And to achieve that you need a climate-literate team, time and space to experiment.
“Climate journalism is about the future; today’s journalism is stuck in the now. It needs to develop strategies to keep and increase its legitimacy in the attention economy.”
👉 Which leads to the question - how do we future-proof our journalism?
Scroll on for some answers from European media colleagues.
Oh hey, you are new here?
Hi, I’m Isabel, a journalist & digital strategist from Germany.
❤️ finding new ways of storytelling and developing formats for new platforms.
🙌 Goal for 2023: Knowing more about what my European colleagues are working on.
Come along on my journey in this newsletter:
🧰 Back to the future
"In times of change the learners will inherit the world, while the knowers will be beautifully equipped for a world that no longer exists."
Eric Hoffer, American Philosopher
Sofie Hvitved, head of media Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies, dropped this quote in Perugia - on a panel about how to orient newsrooms towards the future.
So, how can we as journalists - who by trade should be curious and learners - prepare us and our profession better for the future?
The unanimous answer from said panel: You need to do it in a structured way!
🎉 Yay for good frameworks! 🎉
There are many ways to go about it - from their (re-watch-worthy) discussion, I curated this three-steps-approach:
1. Define your values
We work in a fast-paced environment, there’s always going to be a new, shiny thing just around the corner (👋 Hey there, ChatGPT!). In order not to chase the wrong innovations, you have to really know where you want to go.
1️⃣ Sit down and think about:
“What we want to do, who we want to be, why we want to be those things.”
That is the advice from Shirish Kulkarni, who focuses on journalism innovation and inclusion.
It sounds so easy and logical, but I have worked in or with many teams / organisations where this was not clear at all or where everyone had different answers to those questions.
2️⃣ If you know your values, then you can decide if the new technology will help you to keep them in the future - or if it will distract you from your path.
2. Check your Now
Before you plan for the future, spend enough time to look at the now:
Where are your blindspots? Who is left out in your reporting? Whose perspectives are missing?
👉 If you don’t correct your Now, you end up planning for the future with the same loopsided perspective.
🇸🇪 In Sweden IN/Lab wanted to find out why young adults living in the outskirts of Stockholm don’t trust the news and how to change that.
They invited 10 young adults for a paid (!) 10-week (!) co-creation process.
The group came up with a round of prototypes that imagined news in very different ways:
What if the news came with a therapist? What if the news were music? What if the new had a time limit?
You can check out the whole journey and the prototypes in this neat documentation.
(Screenshot presentation IN/Lab)
1️⃣ IN/Lab uses these learnings in the now to expand their thinking about possible scenarios for journalism in the distant future.
2️⃣And from the variety of possible futures, they choose a preferred future - a scenario they want to arrive at.
3. Look back from the future
This leads us to Backcasting - it’s a strategy Mediahuis from Belgium uses frequently:
(Screenshot presentation Mediahuis)
How it works:
1️⃣ You take one possible future scenario - for them it might be “The end of print in 2030”.
2️⃣ This forces you to think about what this scenario entails for you, your company, journalism - for Mediahuis it would mean loss of income from subscribers and advertising.
3️⃣ Then you devise all the steps you have to take from now to 2030 to be well adapted to this scenario.
✋ Bonus advice from the panel: Don’t forgo “uncool” future topics. Uncool as in - harder to get your newsroom excited about.
Accessibility ranks high on that list. One example:
🇳🇴 In Norway the amount of dyslexic people is growing. If they have trouble reading, how do we reach them?
🧠 The Newspaper Aftenposten opted for a text-to-speech solution. They created a synthetic voice of their most popular podcast host and now users have the option to listen to an audio version of each article.
You can read up on the process and the results here.
Sounds all great, but journalists in your team or your company are not so excited to think about the future?
You could try and let them dip their toes in the future-water with a bit of gamification. At my regional broadcaster rbb, we were inspired by this Future-of-Media-Tarot and created our own:
It’s easy to set up: You group people together, lay out four cards (Year - Place - External Factor /Internal Factor - Protagonist) in fortune-teller-style for each group and let them brainstorm inside their scenario .
And just one more framework for the road:
🖼️ 80/15/5 - a formula for better visuals?
So much content that needs visuals, but only so few experts on hand to do it. It’s a struggle I faced in my own projects and saw in many other teams. So I was intrigued, when I stumbled upon the way the Financial Times approaches this topic:
They put their visual vocabulary on GitHub - for all their employees to view (and luckily for us too). It’s a big poster, plus more detailed explanations and examples for when to use what.
🫶I love transparency in organisations and between departments - so I think it’s great they explained it in such an open and accessibly way.
The newsroom then tries to stick to an 80/15/5-formula to create more and better visuals for all their content:
80 % of the visual content is created by journalists (AI will surely takeover here), with the help of the visual vocabulary and easy-to-use tools (easy charts, illustrations, fotos).
15 % is created with the input/help of experts (for ex. new story templates)
On 5 % of the content they go really big: A special team that experiments with new formats
If you are in need of inspiration:
👀 540 Digital Projects to check out
The Project Oasis was launched this April: It’s a growing register that showcases independent digital media from all over Europe. A massive undertaking - the team researched for a whole year and the result is really well catalogued - you can filter for many things like journalistic techniques, reach or team size.
🤓I haven’t yet managed to go through all of the projects (540!), but will report back here with interesting findings.
And to finish, we embark on our
Tour d’Europe
🇦🇹 The first stop is in Austria
Andreas Sator - Journalist, Author, Podcaster - recommends:
Andererseits.org for inclusive journalism. People with and without disabilities work together to give unique insights into what real inclusion looks like.
Kobuk.at. Media organizations are supposed to hold people with power and influence to account but have power and influence themselves. Kobuk has an eye on them.
Ganz Offen Gesagt. It's the best podcast on politics in Austria and really good slow journalism. Guests have time to talk about news and politics in a less stressful and more nuanced way.*
* Full transparency: Stefan is my business partner for the podcast company I have.
🌐Sidenote: If you are wondering: How can I read up on all theses examples in a foreign language? There is this fitting quote I overheard in Perugia:
“The language of Europe is translation.”
Luckily, translation has gotten quite easy: Nearly every browser has a neat translation function (or an add-on available), a lot of email providers too and there is of course your favourite AI tool to help out.
Yay, you made it this far in the newsletter! 🫶
🤔Since this is only the first edition aka. lots of room to improve: What questions are your curious about? What would you like to read? Who should I talk to?
📧 If you feel like it, let me know.
I’d be very lost in Journalism-Europe without good sources - so for this edition many 💞 go out to Andreas Sator, Vera Penêda from the EJC (Thanks for the Oasis-Tip-Off), the Mediarama-Newsletter (Great stuff in there!) and the International Journalism Festival in Perugia (Always a whirlwind of inspiration).
👋 That’s all - for now.
Stay curious.
Until next month,
Isabel