Journalists, it’s time to abandon our desks
How diving into the unknown might lead you exactly to where you need to be.
The last time I saw her, she was facing the Moldovan armed police, holding an upcycled 20L water bottle turned drum-set. Aliona is now standing right in front of me, calmly holding a beer. “You’re back,” she says with a smile.
It’s October 2019 and we’re in C51, a renovated 150-year-old bar in the center of Chisinau, the capital of Moldova. The place is a meeting point for a group of young Moldovans who regularly organize protests against the government’s mass corruption. Exactly a year before, this bar was the venue where our small team of journalists launched a multimedia story about the protest Aliona was part of. “Do you believe our project had any impact?” I ask. She takes a minute to think about my question and frowns: “Actually, the BBC just called me. They wanted another interview.”
She tells me that she’s become a kind of national celebrity. These days, when international news channels want a young person’s perspective on Moldova, our story seems to lead them right to Aliona. “Thanks a lot,” she adds sarcastically. “I’m just an individual — there are so many more interesting perspectives to cover.”
Fast-forward to April 2020. In my current state of quarantine, while staring out the window, I’m taken back to our conversation. Aliona’s story and that of her fellow protesters was the type of reporting I so desperately wanted to, but couldn’t, do when I was interning as a journalist at a Dutch newspaper and national broadcaster.
Sure, my articles took readers all over the world and I was guided in my research by foreign correspondents, fixers and experts. There was one problem, however.
I wrote all these stories from behind my desk.
That felt wrong. No matter how long I would research a story, it always felt as if I was telling somebody else’s story. The people and places the newspaper covered seemed to be mere shadows of who those people really were. Instead, I wanted to create stories with communities, not just about them.
I started daydreaming of alternative ways to write about people and places: interactive maps filled with stories from all over Europe; digital graphic novels brought to life with motion design; and, of course, immersive multimedia stories with 4k background videos. These dreams, however, were immediately met with obstacles. How am I going to convince my editor? Am I experienced enough? Will there even be financial room to experiment?
Looking around the editorial room, I saw talented journalists on temporary contracts, awaiting their dream position. A newspaper torn between two realities: print and online. Evaporating revenue streams from advertisements and subscriptions, and with them the financial capacity to experiment. The space for new ideas seemed limited.
Everything changed when I met up with three old university friends. Suddenly I felt that I wasn’t alone. We shared the same frustration with “mainstream” media, and we were about to find out that we were far from the only ones. We dreamt of a place where borderless stories could be co-created by multidisciplinary and multinational teams and journalists could reinvent themselves. Are We Europe was born, and with it, a collective of more than 700 European storytellers.
We started working on Are We Europe in 2016. We saw how Europe was changing quickly, but how our national newspapers failed to describe the change from a broader, European perspective. We saw how both freelance creators and the media were struggling for survival at a time when their role was more important than ever. We wanted to try to turn these problems into an opportunity, so we started building a collective of talent to explore what it means to be European and how to create border-breaking stories.
Doing so implied not only questioning what Europe actually was, but also what made us reevaluate the role of journalists in today’s age. For journalism to thrive again, we thought, we need to go back to the core of our work: telling impactful stories. And we soon realised that we shouldn’t always be the ones telling them.
Every 60 seconds, 300 hours of YouTube videos are uploaded. 500 million tweets are posted every day. The only way for journalists to stand out in this information storm is not to simply tell stories, but to tell unique stories.
Instead, we started telling stories that were rooted in our community’s local perspectives. What local story is still desperately missing according to a group of local, talented storytellers? How can they use their collective creativity to tell this story in the most engaging way? We created a format called the Story Design Sprint — a workshop methodology that gives journalists the tools to cooperate more effectively — , reminding them to always keep their readers in mind. In addition to our traditional formats (articles, documentaries, and radio reporting), we drew inspiration from new techniques. Why not use gaming techniques to create augmented realities, photogrammetry to create 3D models or scraping tools to create data sets?
Thanks to social media, everyone — from your neighbor to mega-companies — can be a publisher. Every 60 seconds, 300 hours of YouTube videos are uploaded. 500 million tweets are posted every day. The only way for journalists to stand out in this information storm is not to simply tell stories, but to tell unique stories.
So that’s what we aimed for. We designed custom websites per magazine; we decided to facilitate stories from the source, rather than parachuting to a location and writing on their behalf; we began to identify what format(s) each story needed so that we could find the right creator(s) to tell them, and we stepped away from our desk and applied design thinking to explore how readers would like to engage with our stories.
Our project in Moldova originated from this mindset. Upon arrival we were welcomed by a local and interdisciplinary team: a graphic designer, cinematographer, photographer and journalist to create one of the best stories we have made thus far, which was nominated for the European Press Prize Innovation Award.
At times, following your passion can also lead you to the kind of solutions that will eventually sustain it. The innovative character of our project in Moldova raised the attention of organisations and other media, who became interested in collaborating.
Not much later, we were invited to Greece and Bosnia to create new Edges of Europe stories. We partnered with the European Press Prize to create videos for their award ceremony and with the music festival, Eurosonic Noorderslag to create stories about border breaking music.
This realisation, together with our desire to create more paid opportunities for European creatives, led to AWE_Studio: the storytelling agency that helps socially engaged organisations to create innovative and inspiring stories.
Are we there yet? Certainly not: creating a sustainable revenue stream is one of the holy grails in journalism and we haven’t found it yet. But we did learn that you shouldn’t hesitate too much to explore new ideas. Taking the first step soon leads to a second. Four years later, our team and collective have grown, both in size and enthusiasm.
Aliona was right when she told me that it was about time that international media found a new person to interview about her country. Still, I’m happy that they found her. Let’s work together to make sure many more perspectives, experiences and borderless stories are told.
This story was brought to you by Ties Gijzel, co-founder of Are We Europe, a media-platform for European ideas. His mission is to develop new journalistic formats and business models to kickstart journalistic talent.
