By Cristian Lupșa
Illustration by Paula Rusu
Translated by Oana Gavrilă

On June 1 I turned 41. And got COVID. I was lucky to get a mild form and was able to make, just barely, the annual meeting of the community of Leaders for Justice, a leadership program I admire.

My first night there I thought it would be a good idea to play football, although I couldn’t remember the last time I’d played apart from simulations in Football Manager. I even proudly announced upon arrival, “Let’s go wild!”.

I could have backed out when I saw the other team had proper footwear, football socks and numbered jerseys with their names on them. I think I made it just four clumsy minutes into the game before I busted my left knee: blood, stuff, pitiful looks all around. Then, not one minute later, I thought I heard something crack in my foot. The next day, I could barely walk. ( At the emergency room, they said “you don’t look 41.” Erm, thanks?)

Due to that injury, I didn’t make it to Transylvania International Film Festival, although I’d really wanted to go. If the universe was trying to tell me something about lack of balance, about how my reality was sitting on top of a crumbling foundation, I didn’t seem to hear it.

That’s not exactly true. I heard it. I’d been hearing it for a while.

Why I wrote this

One of our core values at DoR is transparency: both within our organization and outside of it. Over the years, we’ve told our readers about how we’ve overcome financial trouble, how we pay our salaries or how we experienced the lockdown period.

We tell you about these things because the income you provide (through subscriptions and magazine sales) are essential for our work and we want you to know how the organization you support is going. We’re also doing it because we lack transparency in Romania: we don’t explain how we do things or what’s next, we don’t talk about what we’re going through, we don’t let others in, especially if it means showing vulnerability.

We at DoR are currently experiencing a crisis and it’s by far the most complex we’ve ever been through. What follows is an attempt to explain it to a wider audience; It’s a story that is most definitely shaped by the way I see and experience the world, but I hope it helps: to help you understand where DoR stands after nearly 13 years of existence and perhaps to help you understand where you or your wider organization stand.

How we got here

In March 2020, when it became clear we were in for a life-changing pandemic, we let go of dozens of habits and routines and invented new ones: new products, new teams, new meetings. For a while — six months, maybe more, it was fun. Then, especially starting in 2021, we fell into a kind of gridlock, a routine of uncertainty.

We were in that neutral zone: a slow transition process, with new attempts and experiments but lacking brightness and stability. This neutral zone didn’t occur just at DoR; many of us were and still are in it: at home, at work, in society. Life as we knew it before the pandemic is gone. Life after the pandemic is haunted by war, a looming recession, confusion and overwhelmingness.

In spring 2022, when I took a five-week break, it became clear to me that beyond the neutral zone lie a few worrisome quantitative indicators:

• The number of readers accessing the website was down;

• The number of paying DoR supporters is dropping;

• April 2022 was the first month when more people unsubscribed than signed up for our newsletter Concentrat;

• We’re putting together fewer and fewer events;

• Our organization’s budget is dropping from one month to the next.

And, most importantly, in the last year and a half, we’ve lost the equivalent of an entire team: 10–15 extraordinary people, most of whom chose to pursue a different career path.

It hurts to lose so many colleagues. It also hurt that some of them probably didn’t want to leave but we couldn’t afford to keep them. It was painful to make such decisions at a time when all of us were hurting anyway. It was painful to see good people choosing other professions, because journalism isn’t only unstable, it burns and it consumes you.

It is, after all, the type of profession that defines an identity, which allows you to cope but also makes you lose sight of the other pillars required for a balanced life.

I’ve done all I could to better balance our workload, our rhythm, our roles and responsibilities, but I have failed. There was no way I could have succeeded fully: everyone the world over has started questioning their relation to work, reexamining their priorities and inevitably we went through the same thing, especially as DoR is a workplace where we openly ask what would make our lives better.

For many, the answer was “something else”: a different career, a different city, a different search.

I will say this, which is not exclusive to journalism but is obvious in this particular profession: if you don’t tell stories, you don’t exist for the audience. If you don’t exist for the audience, you don’t have resources, be they financial or other opportunities. If you don’t have resources, you can’t tell stories. And so on. Being able to stop, to think, to rest, to reposition yourself, is a deadly risk.

That is why the entire profession — those who stayed, as the quitting trend is global — has come out the other end of the pandemic even more exhausted. Each industry conference this year touched on issues like burnout, work-life balance and how to better manage newsrooms (I’ll get to that).

It’s a sort of savior complex like the one we see in doctors: we’re exhausted but we can’t stop because stopping means we’re not doing our job.

The realities that followed from the list of problems above, especially during the last year, are harder to measure in numbers: caught in a hybrid way of working, with a team working around the clock, in an ailing industry, we’ve lost some of the energy and cohesion we had built in the past 5–6 years. Collaboration became more strained, we’ve become more concerned with I rather than us (what I do, how much I do, where I work), we’ve sometimes understood caring as a shield to protect ourselves from feedback that could have improved our work and our stories.

During these months I kept replaying in my head what a friend of DoR had said to me: “How many leaders does an organization need?” It was her (blunt) answer to my (modest) way of saying that during the pandemic we lost the leaders we had by our side, that I felt I was alone. It stings and it’s true. Nobody cares what the boss is going through. He has power and privilege, so our empathy for his situation is limited accordingly.

And this boss, yours truly in our case, was unable in 2021–2022 to guide nearly 20 people through the troubled waters I’ve been telling you about. Had this been a company (or even an NGO maybe?), perhaps I would have been fired and a drastic reorganization period would have followed. At DoR I also kept my job because there wasn’t anyone else who wished to take over some of my responsibilities.

I’m proud of the good things we’ve achieved; first of all, we’ve given ourselves some degree of comfort and security in a crisis, which is something that many others didn’t have. But all good intentions come with downsides. Ours turned out to be the state of affairs — a slow but perceptible downfall: of our model, our culture, of our supporting structures.

Then the war started.

Our reaction as an institutional body was telling: although our work entails responding to crises with information, guidance and stories (remember the newsletter that later became Concentrat was born on March 14, 2020?), we were sluggish. This was due to all the reasons mentioned above: fatigue, fewer resources, wobbly structures. Any plans we had to go back to staying afloat in 2022, whatever we were telling ourselves about “being present” in a crisis (something we still believe in) took a hit in the face of this new reality.

The icing on the cake was the halting of several projects that were supposed to keep us financially stable until the end of the year. So this is what I told my colleagues back in spring.

Best case scenario: the war ends, the market thaws, we have something to sell and can deliver on our promises (columns, events, classes, etc).

Worst case scenario: we cut everything down to half — number of projects, staff, work space, everything.

Most likely scenario: we’ll be even fewer come summer, probably in a smaller place.

And here we are.

In the worst case scenario.

This is where we are

I’ve told you all this for the sake of transparency and because I want you to understand something important: it’s not just about having money (in the bank or promised). That is a mistake most organizations in Romania make. Yes, money is a hygiene factor but it’s not enough for an infinite game.

Sure, if you have money you can hire people and can carry out ambitious projects, but the role of a job (at least the way I see it, and I am biased towards group work vs. freelancing) is to support the people who chose it to better themselves: both as human beings and as professionals.

And for that we need leaders. And we need leaders to raise other leaders. And we lack leaders on all levels. We have too few people who thrive on building alongside others and who can put into practice an idea that is simple but terribly hard to implement: the role of a leader is not to do somebody else’s work for them but to support them to do it themselves, to do it all the way and to perform better than they could have imagined.

Lately, I have found my limits as far as these skills go. And so here we are.

Worst case scenario, as I was saying.

As of July 1, our full-time team will consist of fewer than 10 people. There were 25 of us two and a half years ago. We are moving into a much smaller place (a quarter of our current newsroom space). We will tell fewer stories and we will have fewer projects.

At other challenging times in the history of DoR we saw such crises as transitions and transformations. Of course, that’s always a possibility. But for the first time in 13 years I’m no longer convinced there will be “DoR, next version” at the other end.

What we do know is this:

• a small group of people will stay on to finish what we set out to do until the end of the year;

• we will definitely put out DoR #49 (in September) and DoR #50 (in December) in print, which means we will continue to report and publish complex and intimate stories (including on dor.ro);

• we will continue our newsletter Concentrat, but it’s medium and long-term future is also an open conversation. We agreed to decide by July 15 whether to make changes starting September 1 or wait until the end of the year;

• we will do less social media;

• we will hold fewer event — we cannot handle a DoR Live event at the National Theater or a conference like The Power of Storytelling on a pre-pandemic scale.

So, is DoR shutting down?

I don’t know how to answer that. It’s definitely not shutting down today. Nor tomorrow. Nor in the next few months.

But DoR #50 will definitely mark the end of a major chapter in DoR’s history.

Beyond that, starting January 2023, it could be anything: it could end there, it could turn into a journalism school or a mouthpiece promoting other journalists’ efforts, we could join forces with other newsrooms, etc.

This uncertainty is frustrating. It’s frustrating on the inside as well. But this is the real world. And in the real world, the wises thing you can do is to start where you are, look around and take it step by step.

I’m hoping the next few months give us space for reflection and conversation. With you, especially, because that’s why I’m telling you all this. But also with other organizations going through similar crises: perhaps they don’t have all the symptoms we do but they too feel they’re at a turning point.

Two more thoughts

I’ve touched on this first idea before. Although I deeply believe in vulnerability and transparency and the power of sharing as a shield against loneliness, it’s hard for me to write this.

All the literature on leadership and management in the past two years has hit me hard. Leadership is to blame for everything, is the catchphrase of the day. And I understand where it comes from: too many bosses (or parents, teachers, you know) have been abusive, disengaged, cruel and have created realities and cultures that caused a lot of pain. They spewed verbal abuse, threw stuff (phones, shoes, etc.), denigrated, humiliated, punished. More recently, they showed no interest in flexibility, working from home or listening to people’s needs.

I don’t see myself in the aforementioned descriptions. But I still feel responsible for today’s reality. Perhaps too responsible for my own good, my therapist would say, because whatever the realities we build, we actually build them together. Successes and failures belong to us all.

But I wrote all this because I know I’m not alone. And because it’s good to be reminded of a few cliches: you can only control your own actions. And “this is water”: the world is not a manifestation of our wishes. It is only a miraculous system that will always tend towards chaos.

The second and last thought has to do with how we’ll be telling stories in and about the future.

My colleagues and I were recently talking about a sort of elephant in the room. It’s like in Game of Thrones: the immediate threat is visible. We’re fighting our bank account, task overload, summer FOMO, day to day upsets.

But the long-term threat is behind the wall.

The world has changed after the pandemic. In terms of information consumption, the divide is widening. Yes, in Romania many people still get their information from television. But those who do that are older and older. Gen Z is growing up on YouTube and TikTok and journalism, even the kind of independent journalism we make, is a foreign language to them.

Not to mention social and political divides. Fewer and fewer people are trying to build bridges through stories.

Studies show people are avoiding the news and journalism and one of the reasons is that we, journalists, make them feel bad, anxious, powerless. In Romania, too few journalists have the humility to admit there is truth in this; but we are reaping what we’ve been sowing for decades.

But how to really help society is a tough question. We live in a cluster of systems that need to be understood before they can be healed. How do you tell stories about these systems and existing solutions? How do you do it cultivating patience? How do you do it in a way that is current? How do you do it with citizens, not from the other side of the table?

To answer that we need to set aside some of the doctrine of our profession, and I’ve been advocating this for many years. We need to become better listeners, better facilitators, even mediators. We should be more involved in this healing process, more present in the lives of our communities without necessarily becoming activists for any party or organization. We need to understand what works in the subjectivity and authenticity we appreciate on Twitch, for instance, and ask ourselves how it can find a place in journalism.

DoR was born in 2009 out of similar quandaries. There was an economic crisis. Romanian media was in a deep crisis of ideas. What we then promoted via DoR for years didn’t really exist: the idea of narrative journalism and intimate stories about people, reported in depth and written with care. We filled a space and out of that, I dare say, sprung an entire ecosystem. Journalism today, especially independent/niche/alternative journalism is braver and more creative than ever. But I don’t know if it’s ready for the future — the future of content and the future of organizational structures to support it. So far it has only just recouped some of the distance compared to international standards.

The need for complex, intimate content that aims to make us more empathetic and help people make better life decisions isn’t going anywhere. We’ve seen it with the podcast Obiceiul pământului (The Way of the Land) and, more recently, with the profile of world swimming champion David Popovici. Both these stories reached tens of thousands of people, maybe more.

But we have told many other stories in the last year and a half that we thought were important but which went largely unnoticed. This is partly because of the information overload in everyone’s lives. Partly because you too have chosen to pay more attention to yourselves than the ecosystems around you. (Which is understandable; Romania is sometimes even more tiring and burdensome and this is definitely one of those times). And partly because our way of telling a relevant story is perhaps not as interesting or contemporary as it used to be.

To recap: this summer we’re downsizing our team and activity to be able to tell the stories we need to tell by the end of the year and to celebrate 13 years of existence and issue #50 of the print magazine.

I like the symbolism too much to not want to reach this round figure, regardless of what comes after it: a break, a revamp, or an ending. But until then, we still have some time.

Since the first issue of DoR came out of the printers for the first time 11 years ago, the community of readers has been at the heart of the growth that followed: from a magazine that was meant to be a one-off in 2009 to a 42nd issue at the end of 2020; from print magazine journalism to digital storytelling in Romanian that reaches 100.000 readers online each month; from writing stories to producing podcasts, newsletters and bringing storytelling on stage in front of 1,000 people, as well as starting conversations about our journalism in schools, local communities and more recently, on Zoom.

The community has been there to support us since day one, from donating furniture for our first newsroom, to sharing our work and collaborating with us to add more depth to our stories — whether by answering our own calls for suggestions on particular subjects or proposing topics themselves.

Their financial support, as well as the encouragement, has been invaluable throughout the years. The number of paying subscribers had been slowly increasing before 2020, as DoR started formulating a clear strategy to rely more on reader-revenue to create a more sustainable business model.

As the pandemic shook up our plans for the year and eliminated several revenue-generating events from our calendar, the process of growing our community of paying subscribers had to accelerate in order for DoR to be able to continue its work.

Our goal was to double our community from 2,250 members to 4,500, and we were going to get there with the help of our current subscribers (at DoR, we use the words members and subscribers interchangeably — our relationship with our community has always included “memberful routines”, but we use the Romanian-language equivalent of subscriptions to refer to ways for readers to support DoR).

We achieved this goal in a campaign that lasted six weeks (1 Oct — 15 Nov), with the help of 565 ambassadors from our community. Our best day brought 208 new members. Our slowest day brought 13. This has been our most ambitious campaign to date, as before November 2020 DoR has never topped 3,000 subscribers.

Here’s what we learned from this campaign and what worked in the process.

Planning six weeks of campaigning

While a community-building effort of this size was new to us, there were several resources available to us to be able to prepare for what might come next — Zetland’s success in bringing additional members on board with the help of its existing community was an inspiration, among others.

We had heard of the “middle of the campaign” slump that strikes crowdfunders, where interest is hard to sustain throughout the entire period of the fundraising effort and there’s usually an inverted bell-curve with a strong start, a low middle, and, hopefully, a triumphant ending.

We anticipated this and built our communications efforts around it. However, we also risked more by choosing to campaign for six whole weeks, rather than three or four weeks as most organisations do. We chose to do this because we wanted to end the campaign on November 15, DoR’s anniversary.

This six-week run time worked well for us in the end.

The launch of the campaign was a strong push for endorsers (public figures with large follower counts on social media, who knew DoR and could recommend our journalism) and for ambassadors (members of our own community who volunteered to help) to share the word. The start was strong, with social media being a big traffic and conversion driver from the beginning.

We planned several types of content ahead of launch day, to make sure we had our key promotional material covered. We asked ambassadors to send us video testimonials about why they support us, which we published throughout the six weeks. DoR staff recorded their own video testimonials about their work at DoR, and wrote personal essays answering the question “Why I write”.

For our ambassadors, we prepared an “ambassador kit” that included visuals they could post to their own accounts, and a personalised URL would keep count of how many of their connections subscribed to DoR during the campaign — a gamification element that would then also reward ambassadors who brought 5, 10 or 15 members to the DoR community with surprises such as illustrations or workshops. (30 ambassadors reached the 5 members milestone, 6 ambassadors brought 10 members, and 3 brought over 15 new members.)

The first couple of weeks of the campaign focused on announcing the launch and the core message: that stories heal.

The healing potential of journalism and storytelling is the thread that runs through many of our editorial decisions: the stories we publish are human-centred, following experiences that transform people as well as communities.

By showing the human experience at the centre of systemic issues (inequality, domestic violence, education reform, etc) or by highlighting how transformational our relationships can be, whether with our families and friends as well as with how we perceive ourselves, our journalism can have a direct impact in our readers lives. And more so during a global pandemic that has shaken many of our lives nearly to the core.

Some are prompted by our stories to reach out to friends and family they lost touch with. Some are faced with experiences that closely mirror their own and it’s perhaps the first time they see their feelings reflected back. Some are inspired to take action in their own communities to start or quicken the pace of change.

Under the Stories Heal messaging we transitioned into the middle two weeks of the campaign — where many fundraisers stall. Talking about our campaign target to bring in an additional 2,250 members took a step back, in favour of us focusing more on the impact of our storytelling, sharing links to archive pieces that made a difference and that were linked to the healing theme of the campaign — such as personal essays.

In a month where we published little new journalism after a busy start to the autumn, it was important to make sure our work, past and present, was known to our readers and that we could accurately communicate our mission.

We were overwhelmed during the campaign with kind public messages from our readers and collaborators about what DoR meant to them — a story that hit a note at just the right time; a first illustration job when they were trying to break into the industry, and more. Each support message our community posted during the campaign was a testament to our mission being on the right track.

The final two weeks of the campaign brought back the focus on numbers, with a daily countdown about how close to the target we were, with a new design, to drive home the urgency of the message.

We reached our target early, and exceeded it, bringing 2.550 new subscribers (1,386 annual, 1,164 monthly). As we’re publishing this in mid-December, we’re at 4,920.

Organising the campaign team

Before there was even a campaign, there was a “pilot campaign team” that worked to establish the mission of the project, set some of the foundations of the process, identify the technology needs of the campaign, its targets and how success would be measured.

The campaign team that followed and worked together throughout the project was interdisciplinary and included five people filling in the following roles: project manager, communications manager, visual editor, product manager, newsroom manager, front-end developer, and community manager. Some roles were only needed for parts of the process, others were involved from beginning to end.

To enable the team to work together, those who were physically present in the newsroom worked on the same floor — at a suitable safe distance. Daily morning check-ins where members working from home could dial in helped keep the energy going, identify priorities for the day and analyse the efficiency of the previous day’s efforts.

Another meeting once every two weeks looked at the larger picture surrounding the campaign: what part of the narrative we were currently at, whether there was a need to generate new ideas and how to go about doing that. For this one, DoR founding editor Cristian Lupșa, who was not part of the core campaign team, fulfilled the role of an outsider with a fresh view, challenging the process.

Several spreadsheets helped the team keep track of the project timeline, a communications calendar and the sales targets. Breaking down the total number of new members we wished to bring on board into daily targets was a helpful figure to track progress — but we had to be mindful that the days where this target was not met did not have a negative impact on how the team perceived their work.

While not everyone in the organisation was part of the campaign team, all DoR staff pitched in: writing emails to subscribers to invite them to become ambassadors; posting about the campaign on their own social media channels; writing short essays about why they write, that were promoted as part of the campaign etc.

The two-pronged communications strategy

As the success of the campaign relied heavily on our ability to engage ambassadors, the communications manager and the project manager (who looked after the ties with the community) kept track of implementing separate outreach plans during the six weeks of active campaigning.

The first was the community-based communication, in which the wider team actively participated by inviting existing members to help. This side of communications included support with the ambassador mechanisms on the website, which were newly built to accommodate referral links; a weekly newsletter keeping the ambassadors up to date with the progress; updates in the dedicated Slack channel, and keeping track of videos our ambassadors recorded.

The other side of communications was public-facing, hoping to reach as many people as possible — some who have heard of us but were not yet subscribed or were past subscribers who didn’t renew; or new readers who were just discovering us.

We started the campaign with the deep belief that we couldn’t rely only on DoR’s social media channels for reaching potential readers — because our reach has been historically volatile. Our decision to get the community involved as well as to ask specific people with additional wide reach to become endorsers addressed this in part.

But of course these messages would only work if they reached people who were already familiar with our journalism, our past events and our mission. In order to showcase our commitment to conversation as an integral part of the editorial cycle (a journalist’s work on a subject doesn’t end upon publication), we hosted three free online events:

• A conversation with Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Jacqui Banaszynski and journalist Ioana Burtea about telling personal stories;
• A discussion with coach and trainer Paul Olteanu and newsletter host Nicoleta Rădăcină (who looks after DoR’s daily Concentrat newsletter that goes out to more than 8000 subscribers) about how the pandemic is shaping our minds and how our brains are shaping how we interpret what’s happening around us in these uncertain times;
• A Fishy Zoom with journalist Lulu Miller, marking the launch of the Romanian translation of her Why Fish Don’t Exist book, with special guests Sophia Țigănaș, journalist, writer and high-school student, and Andrei Pacea, illustrator.

These three events were an opportunity to showcase the DoR universe. They mixed contextual, big-picture discussions with practical, what-you-can-do-tomorrow advice. They brought personal stories and solutions in the same space and were the interactive, live and breathing proof that stories do heal. Their wide reach, especially that of the conversation with Paul Olteanu, confirmed the need for journalism that offers tools and a space to be heard, beyond useful information.

At the end of the campaign, to mark DoR’s anniversary, we hosted an open newsroom during 11 hours on Zoom for our community, split into topic-specific sessions. While we organized it rather quickly and had little time to promote this, we still had between 10 and 20 attendees for each session, making these 11 hours on Zoom a valuable moment of connection, and an opportunity to gather feedback on our work.

What now?

We are in the extremely privileged position to have doubled our community in less than two months. This means our plan to rely increasingly on reader-revenue is working, and that readers see the value in the products we have built during our ongoing digital transformation and in the stories we have been telling since the first print issue in 2009.

But growing quickly from 2,250 members to nearly 5,000 poses a new set of challenges for us: how do we engage them all in our work? How do we keep as close to our community now as we did when we could recognise all their names at an event? How do we not only keep up with this change but build a process that can sustain change?

Going into 2021, we are faced with many challenges that others in the media will recognise: we need to equip and invest for growth while at the same time surviving tightening budgets. But now we know it’s not about doing more with less — it’s about identifying what makes our journalism impactful, and doing more of that together with our community.

Save this to your notes: Our campaign must-have list

• Daily targets;
• Daily morning check-ins with the team;
• Meetings twice a month with a colleague who knows the plans for the campaign but who isn’t part of the main team — an outsider check;
• A campaign calendar;
• Direct outreach through email engaging our existing subscribers in the campaign;
• A firm and direct call to action, telling members of our community that we need their help and what they can do to help;
• Ambassadors’ kits and weekly newsletter;
• Video testimonials about why you should support DoR, from team members and subscribers;
• A new channel in our community Slack space with campaign updates;
• Plan for the middle-of-the-campaign slump;
• Collection of stories from the archive to help new readers discover DoR.
• A stretch goal because we’re optimistic.

Article by Cătălina Albeanu, digital editor, and Carla Lunguți, community editor and campaign project manager.

Journalists talk a lot about change: changing the industry, the business model, changing themselves. But finding the time and energy to actually enact this change is often difficult. When the world seems in constant turmoil, remaking yourself into a better and more engaged listener, for example, shouldn’t be that high of a priority. Right?

At DoR we answered “wrong”: in a world changing at breakneck speed, it’s precisely what we need.

As audience engagement and revenue have grown over the past few years, we’ve all heard about the new roles journalists can play. Yes, we’re a watchdog; yes, we keep power in check, but is that enough? The skills it takes to lead a room have little in common with the skills it takes to write a good headline, and we knew if we were to build lasting relationships with more of our readers, we needed to get to work. Were we listening enough to our communities? Were we involving them? Were we actually optimized to earn their trust and serve their needs?

These are the questions we had at DoR as we embarked in late 2018 on a two-fold journey: to transition from a print magazine mentality to a digital-first publication, and to train our team of journalists for new roles as facilitators, moderators, mediators, listeners, partners, and students. Both these priorities have one thing in common: our community, and serving them better. Journalism — especially if it’s built around membership — is a relationship business. Our journalists were good at building relationships in the field, less so with the audience, so we wanted to improve on that.

We believed that if we learned more about how each of us operated in the world, it would make our journalism better, and the connection to our community stronger. So over the course of the year we brought in numerous trainers and experts to help us integrate ideas from other practices into our own.

This is our curriculum and some of what we learned.

What we learned and from whom

HOW WE THINK. First, we took the team through a series of courses about neuroscience and communication, looking at how patterns of behavior influence our daily lives, and then looking at how these influence teams, groups of people, and various types of organizational cultures. Romanian culture can be passive-aggressive, so we focused on developing a more constructive culture. The simple idea here, was simple: if we learn what pushes our own buttons, and how we can de-escalate conflicts and troubleshoot communication loops, we could more mindfully moderate a space for our community to express their views;

HOW WE SELF-CARE. We had a stress management and burnout training with our friend Zuzanna Ziomecka, an amazing journalist and mindfulness coach, who came all the way from Poland to build on our neuroscience knowledge, and show us the dark side of being always on and not listening to the needs of our bodies. Journalists shy away from being vulnerable and asking for breaks, so having a couple of our colleagues raise their hands to say, “I might be burnt out right now” was a tremendous win.

HOW WE CHALLENGE OURSELVES. Even though we’re in the larger world of communication, we do a pretty poor job of communicating clearly, and giving ourselves feedback that is challenging, but also constructive. So we worked with a leadership training company to learn how to strengthen a team by leading with values, building strategy from a core mission, and then using feedback to stay on track.

These lessons reminded us that we tend to ascribe motive and assume the worst without checking. When coupled with journalistic skepticism, this can become a barrier to listening both inside and outside the organization. But all of the above, coupled with our own internal routines of sharing, focusing on our mission of helping people navigate their lives, have helped fortify a culture of openness, and MRIs (most reasonable interpretations).

Putting these new skills to the test

In addition to learning how our minds are wired and how team culture gets created, we learned hands-on skills for interacting with our communities. This is why:

• We talked with Joy Mayer about the importance of trust in a news organization;
• A community organizer spent a few weeks working with our team, teaching us how to approach a community from a place of curiosity (rather than certainty) when going in;
• Todd Breyfogle, the Aspen Institute’s Managing Director of the Aspen Seminars, taught us about moderation. We learned how to create and hold space as facilitators with an expert in „theory U”, a change-management framework meant to aid people and communities in a transition from fear, to a more inclusive world.

All of these happened as we started hosting reporter-driven events with 10 to 50 community members where we could practice these skills. We started with conversations on covering domestic violence, mental health, and rural development — sensitive topics that the training helped us handle with empathy. We started holding occasional “state of the DoR” events where we brought in our community to talk about how we’re changing, what we’re covering, and find out how we’re fulfilling our mission.

We then hosted eight hours of conversation with various artists, community leaders and entrepreneurs at one of the largest music festivals in Romania. This happened right before we took our team on our largest experiment yet: a pop-up newsroom in a town in Transylvania, where we did journalism, offered classes, and met with the community. The pop-up newsroom just won a European Press Prize for innovation.

Speaking about everything we did last year, my colleague Oana Sandu, who covers domestic violence and gender disparity, says that it’s a miracle to see you can have power to connect people as a reporter. “Here’s what comes out of putting people in contact and facilitating their interactions as a journalist: victims find advice from lawyers, readers get involved in NGOs, survivors find support groups. People find motivation, and inspiration, and strength to report wrongdoing, so others can live a better life. It’s what good stories do.”

Oana adds that the classes we held at DoR over the past year — neurosciences, self-care, how we communicate and build teams — helped her become more conscious of her strengths, but also of her natural human limits when covering trauma. “It’s never easy to do journalism with empathy, while at the same time taking care of your own mental health, but with patience and presence, and awareness of yourself, you can do this work better.”

Our experiments with creating new roles for our journalists continued.

For one project we went to Vaslui, an often-talked about, left behind region in Eastern Romania, where we spent a collective month on the ground last summer and fall, reporting on a number of topics suggested by locals, from migration, to agriculture, to unemployment, to youth activism, and then discussed the published stories at a local event.

We interviewed some of the people we wrote about on stage, and then listened to an amazingly diverse audience — high school students, public officials, and entrepreneurs, among others — discuss how today’s issues affect Vaslui. Local media there is just focused on news, so this space of conversation and listening was empty, and needed.

We also began using our newsroom more intentionally for events. For one, we brought together more than 20 people who turned 30 in 2019, an important benchmark because Romanian communism fell in 1989, the year of their birth. We just held the space for them while they took over the conversation, sharing thoughts on what it meant to be part of their generation, and plotting projects. Many of them left that night with plans to see each other again.

One participant wrote in a feedback note that she avoided interactions with strangers out of fear, but that DoR felt safe, and so she came. She says she left thinking about a moment when she was six years old, hanging out with her friends, but then being too scared to jump a fence alongside them to snatch fruit from a tree. „I was afraid”, she wrote. „And I told myself that if I don’t jump now, I’ll never jump. And so it was. Today, after the DoR meeting, I happened to pass that fence. Well, from now on, I’m all in.”

Looking to the future, through a pandemic

Given the financial pressures facing our industry, these trainings might seem like a strange use of our resources. But we did so with a goal: to cultivate the facilitation and empathic skills that a subscriber/member-driven newsroom needs in order to cultivate lasting relationships with audience members.

In early March we even moved to a new office, with a large open-space, that we planned to use to continue having conversations and hosting communities.

The pandemic put a stop to that for now, but it has also proven to us the value of the trainings we went through. Our team mobilized quickly to organize our work around serving the community in ways it wasn’t being served by other media. We created a daily newsletter, we moved our subscribers to a Slack space to interact more frequently, and we took our events to Zoom. Just this month we’ve hosted conversations on making small farms sustainable in the pandemic, helping parents deal with the stress of managing work from home and raising kids, and talking to teenagers about their struggles with living a life online.

After everything we’ve learned over the past year, it seems natural we responded to the pandemic the way we did: adjusting the work to a new reality without abandoning the mission. But I don’t think it would have been as easy to do if we didn’t have the language to discuss our fears as things around us changed, to understand that these feelings exist among our audience as well, and to know how to respond to them with an invitation to conversation.

Learning how we’re wired, how we operate as human beings, and how different people communicate is essential to listening. Practicing our new facilitation and moderation skills built courage to adopt the new roles we are expected to play as journalists today.

Text by Cristian Lupsa, editor, DoR. Images by Cătălin Georgescu, Mihai Ciobanu and DoR.

We are publishing this piece June 11, the day we were awarded the European Press Prizes’ Innovation Award for our Transylvanian pop-up newsroom last year. It’s both an honor and an opportunity to celebrate our amazing team, community, and partners; we couldn’t have done this without all of you.

If the EPP news is what brought you here, welcome. We are DoR, a publication out of Bucharest, Romania that tells true stories to empower its community, to help it be more empathic, to point it towards solutions, and to be a guide in how we can live a better life. We have been around for more than 10 years, and have gone from a print quarterly devoted to narrative journalism, to a digital-first publication, events organizer, and innovator. (Yes, we still publish the print edition).

We have been through a lot of shake-ups and changes, some chronicled in our Medium archive. Our latest transformation came courtesy of the COVID-19 pandemic, and this is what this story is about: what has stayed the same, what we lost, and what changed in the past few months.

At the time of writing we didn’t have to cut salaries or staff, but our future, like that of most newsrooms today, is uncertain. (We will probably be losing money by September if we don’t bring in new revenue). But we have an amazing and award-winning team, and a community that believes in our work. These are both gifts at times like these, and they allow us to persevere.

— Cristian Lupșa, editor

What hasn’t changed

The mission, vision and values of the organization

We continue to tell stories that support people and organizations become better versions of themselves. And we are adding a more precise aim to our work over the next 18 months: to guide and support people through crisis and reconstruction that we’ll endure, especially as the pandemic has not ended.

Tip: What helps us stay connected to our mission is discussing it often and making choices asking ourselves whether a certain project, piece of journalism or behaviour fits with the mission and the values we have set.

The stories we told

There’s no Olympics or World Cups for journalism, and sometimes — if you’re lucky to live in a society that doesn’t experience trauma often — you don’t even have friendlies. It’s a job you do every day, and you get better at it. A training routine you don’t really know why you’re going through until something like COVID-19 hits.

That’s what I was training for, you say to yourself.

For some, especially camera crews, photographers and news reporters, it means being on the front lines. For those like us, who offer context, deep dives and intimacy, it simply means sitting down at your desk, with your phone, email and chat apps heating up, and saying “here we go!”.

The pandemic has been a complicated time for many, but for journalists it’s also the time when the profession we chose can be more valuable than ever. We felt this while working on almost 100 stories that we published in the two months Romania was in a state of emergency and in over 70 daily newsletters. And we saw the validation of our work in traffic numbers (sometimes triple of a normal month), in engagement and reader feedback.

Team rituals

A solid team has rituals that bring people together. Even though ours — both formal and informal — were tied to a physical space, we adapted quickly by moving to Zoom.

Now we start the week with a check-in, Mondays at 10:00, where we each say thank you to colleagues whose work we appreciated the previous week, and we each answer a question, usually linked to what we’re going through at the time: how are you getting along with your family, what’s good about spending time at home, etc. Each Friday at 18:00, those who wish gather for a (virtual) glass of wine.

We’ve continued our monthly Story Time sessions, moments when colleagues share a part of their life story. Our birthday celebrations have also moved online — birthday cards turned into Google Docs, which made them more creative. On top of that we have our editorial conferences and other meetings about day-to-day work.

Tip: At the beginning, it’s going to be embarrassing to build new online routines and moderating them might feel artificial, but it’s important to be patient and persevere. The need for connection and sharing exists, and with time, the mechanics of it becomes natural and invisible.

Openness to vulnerability

This closely ties into the rituals an organization has put in place to build trust among team members. But it also ties into the way the organisation sees its role in the staff’s lives: we want to help our colleagues be the best version of themselves. To get to a place where the experiences you have at work also help you in your personal life.

One of our guides over the past three months has been psychotherapist Domnica Petrovai, who helped us put into words what we were each going through in the pandemic, and who showed us tools that can improve our lives and our work. She also supported us in having complicated conversations and in searching for the right balance — a complicated issue especially at a time when, working from home, you don’t know when work ends and life begins, and the other way around. Domnica isn’t our only guide, and we’ll always recommend to other organisations to spend time with an external psychologist, coach or facilitator that can help them become better.

Tip: To know what we’re all going through, we found it helpful to write into a collective journal that eventually reached 200 pages and from which we published excerpts. We wrote about our anxieties caused by isolation, but also about our wishes for when the pandemic is over.

What we lost

Plans and teams

We started the year with new plans and structures which, in this new context, we are rebuilding. The teams and management structures we had did not withstand these past two months, and they swept up by role changes, projects coming to an end, and colleagues leaving DoR.

One of the sources of tension, we realised, was the difference between process management and culture management. At this time our organization has more people inclined towards the latter (and many informal leaders, which is great), but the lack of the first type of management sometimes leads to insufficient attention towards structure and process, which leads to results below our true potential.

We also decided that, in the medium-term, we cannot sustain an in-house communications department. To amplify the impact of our work we will continue outreach efforts in the editorial team, and we’ll start working with agencies and other partners, but inside the newsroom it’s more important for us to focus on doing journalism

Tip: Mihai Zânt, a trainer, coach, and a friend of DoR, told me to “never waste a good crisis”. What I took from that was that it’s important not to freeze in the face of a crisis. Whenever we felt that a decision we made before the pandemic was weighing us down, we discussed it, and we either transformed it, or overturned it. Yes, change and loss can be painful, but they can also be liberating.

Colleagues

We have also lost team members — three during this pandemic. All departures have been cordial. Two initiated by colleagues who needed a new environment or chose to focus on family, respectively. We parted ways with the third colleague because, even though we had a good rapport, we wanted different things.

I was very nervous at the beginning of this crisis that we would lose colleagues simply because we would run out of money to pay salaries. For me that was the main meaning of the word “care” in our values: care that the team doesn’t suffer even more in their personal lives than they would anyway because of the coronavirus.

We quickly ran the numbers and decided that, regardless of what happens, we’ll be able to pay all salaries until the end of May. Now, nervousness for what happens after June is still there for me, but the path forward is not so unknown anymore. We reduced costs, reallocated budgets, were lucky to receive support from our community and we applied for a series of local and international grants. (We didn’t get an EJC grant we were hoping for, but all is not lost).

The New School

One of the most difficult decisions we took was to no longer edit the New School project (Scoala9), which is a digital publication focused on education. This was an idea we were already discussing before the pandemic, but the news became official in mid-April.

The time that we were involved in the New School project was also a time to experiment running different products inside the same ecosystem. As we kept building the team we realised that it’s important for Media DoR to communicate with a united voice, which was not entirely possible through separate brands and platforms.

The end of our collaboration with BRD, a bank and the financial backer of the New School project, came partly from our colleagues wishes to work more together, as well as from our wishes to concentrate more of our resources and energy into products that belong to us 100%. It was a difficult one because the financial resources covered the entire salaries for a team of five, a team that, with one exception, is still a part of DoR.

Events and, well, money

Aside from canceling the newsroom workshops we also decided to cancel larger events that became essential to the DoR ecosystem in the past years: DoR Live and The Power of Storytelling.

DoR Live is a special form of showcasing our journalism, with a visceral and immediate impact. From a financial perspective it had always been more of a marketing instrument, because it did not directly generate new revenue.

We decided it would have been a huge cost of energy to move it online, as we would not be returning too soon to theatre halls with 500 seats. And because we are not an events company, it wouldn’t make sense for us to convert it to an online event. We will get back to the concept when we can put it together offline, on stage, in front of an audience.

For The Power of Storytelling, it was clear to us from the beginning that it would not translate well online, because it is built around the energy we can bring in the room. The time we now have to put it together (we will organize it in 2021) will give us the chance to better evaluate the potential of the brand after its 10th edition. But giving up The Power of Storytelling in 2020 also meant giving up the around 20–30.000 euros, which we would usually invest back into our journalism.

Tip: We wondered whether we should wait longer to make a decision and see how the pandemic evolves this summer, but we decided that a “not in 2020” answer is more freeing than a “maybe”, especially as we can continue fulfilling our mission in other ways.

The print subscription

An unexpected benefit of the lockdown and of working from home was the acceleration of our digital transformation. DoR started in 2009 as a print magazine and since 2018 our website is no longer just an online warehouse for our print work. However, we’re still battling with the quarterly print production paradigm.

But with almost 100 stories published online these past few months, we barely thought about print. Or we rather thought about it as that bonus that can repackage some of the journalism that we primarily publish online.

The entire team now understands how vulnerable we would be if we didn’t step away from the process imposed by the print quarterly: the couriers have been overbooked, and the bookshops and press distributors have been closed up until recently. Many copies of our spring issues were returned because its launch and delivery to our subscribers coincided with the beginning of the state of emergency in Romania.

In 2019 we printed 5,500 copies of each issue, and only about 300–400 would go unsold. For this spring’s issue, because of the situation outlined above, we expect about 2.000 copies to make their way back, another reason why for our summer issue, which we will publish in July (not June as usual), we will print just 3.500 copies.

Understanding these realities has helped us sort our priorities and make an important decision: we are no longer offering readers the option of a print subscription. We will continue to print the magazine, you will be able to purchase it in our online shop, and we will honour our existing print subscriptions. But the subscription that can support us at this moment is the digital one, and it will be the only one available starting June.

What we gained and how we are transforming

A new direction and new forms of organizing

It was quickly apparent to us that this crisis is also an opportunity. The reality that follows the pandemic will be complicated. A series of lives will need to be rebuilt, many people will be unemployed (more than 500.000 have lost their jobs during this time in Romania), the medical system will be exhausted, the education system will be confused, the rural economy will hurt and people will be scared of each other and will question the line between the need for closeness and personal safety.

But there will also be solutions.

There will also be new initiatives. There will be voices that will offer hope. There will be ideas about the future: about the importance of the environment, now that we know what an exponentially growing tragedy looks like; about the importance of quality and equity in education; about the need to be there for vulnerable people; about how we can train to better handle future crises, as individuals and groups. That’s what we want to document: how do we recover and rebuild a more resilient Romania. To do this to the best of our abilities, these days we are reorganising the newsroom and the roles of our reporters and editors — we will be more focused on a few subjects to become experts over the next 18 months.

Tip: We wanted this transformation to be participative, so we all split into four teams of 5–6 people to come up with a new model for DoR: new products, new stories, new business and new structures. The brief was simple: imagine an organization you would start from scratch at this time and will need to operate for a while in this reality.

The team got together (online) and strategized, and for an entire day in April we shared presentations and suggestions: to give up print, collaborate with Netflix, sell consultancy — every possibility under the sun. Starting from these presentations we formed a crisis team (we nicknamed it the crisis cell) which, in May, transformed these ideas into decision: how do we split into beats? What projects are we shelving? What should we invest in?

The Pandemic Journal

On 14 March, after two days of brainstorming and design, we launched a daily newsletter that two months later reaches nearly 5000 subscribers. The journal was our daily connection with our readers, where we send them news, stories, tools, advice and recommendations. About half of them open the newsletter each day, a constant open rate that’s above the industry average.

When we asked them for feedback, we received 700 replies in just a few days that helped us validate this product and choose to continue it.

We decided a daily (Monday-Friday) newsletter would become our business card. Our objective is to reach 8000 subscribers before the end of the year.

Community

Our DoR supporters are essential to our work and, although we had to pause our weekly community newsletter (which will be back in June!), we didn’t want to lose touch.

So we created a space for direct communication, on Slack, a tool which we have been using internally at DoR since 2015. We chose Slack because we wanted a safe space to talk about what’s on our minds at this time, to see how we could better support each other, how we are handling working from home or simply how we manage to take our minds off things. We also hosted several Zoom meetups, including two storytelling webinars and meetings where we talked about how we’re handling things at DoR these days. (If you’d like to support DoR, you can subscribe here.)

Tip: We have a monthly team ritual called “State of DoR”, where we keep each other up to date with organizational updates. We started hosting occasional open “State of DoR” meetings last year, as a live activity report for our community. The most recent was on 11 April, on Zoom, on the day we celebrated 11 years since the idea of DoR.

Flexibility

After 11 years we have some experience with crises and we often talk about the importance of flexibility and the impossibility of avoiding uncertainties, especially in an industry that doesn’t have a clear business model.

The pandemic has shown us that going through the previous crises was a good exercise for handling this one: we quickly adapted to working from home and to another publishing rhythm; we quickly adapted to the reality that we’ll have to stop several projects and plans. I like to say that DoR is a well-organized lack of certainty. Over the past few months, we’ve fully lived this.

Goals

To round off, it’s important to mention our qualitative and quantitative objectives for this year, which we chose in January and minimally amended after the start of the pandemic. They are our benchmarks for measuring our evolution at this time:

Quantitative objectives:

• 3.500 paying subscribers at the end of the year;
• 500.000 RON in reader revenue (subscriptions and product sales);
• a monthly average of 150.000 unique readers of dor.ro;
• 8.000 newsletter subscribers;
• a minimum of five journalistic material of impact built collaboratively. We’ll learn how to measure impact together, but it could be about reach, or about galvanising change in a community.

Qualitative objectives:

• to communicate who we are: We want DoR readers to understand our mission and values better than they do now;
• to be together and feel safe: We have a system for regular team meetings, where we talk about how we’re feeling;
• to have initiative: We are building our skills of asking difficult questions, of initiating and challenging ideas (from small changes in the newsroom to moments of collaboration or mutual help);
• to have impact;
• to innovate: We often think about different methods of thinking, writing or packaging a product;
• to work with the community: To find ideas and document stories through community engagement.

So here we are, after two months of intense lessons and transformation. When I look at the news of thousands of journalists who have lost their jobs, I feel like we are among the lucky ones.

Personally, there are few days when I don’t feel both joy and panic. In this new world of accelerated uncertainty, it’s difficult to know whether you’ve made the right choices.

So I sometimes come back to the words of Simon Sinek in The Infinite Game: “Leaders are not responsible for results, leaders are responsible for the people that are responsible for results.” And this means building an environment in which people feel safe. This is more in our power than we believe, no matter how many quarantines we go through.

Illustrations by Paula Rusu. This story was originally published in Romanian and you can read it here. Translated to English by Cătălina Albeanu.

Social media tends to be a workflow question mark at DoR. We’re a team of 20 people, with more than half focused on editorial work. As we’ve shifted from a print product to a digital first editorial strategy to include more online storytelling, with a focus on growing our community of members, our use of social platforms and the need for repackaging our content grew as well.

We know there’s a constant need for experimentation to keep up with social platforms, and over the past couple of years we’ve spent an increasing amount of time producing engaging visual experiences, particularly for Instagram and for newsletters. But the workflow supporting all this social media output has needed constant improvement, especially as independent newsrooms usually don’t have resources for a dedicated digital marketing operation (or a visuals team).

Some questions we’ve tackled over the years as we worked to improve the workflow include:

Who shepherds the entire process of creating promotional material for articles, from copy to visuals to uploading, both on Facebook and as well as on Instagram, Stories?

How much resources should we invest in creating these visuals for Stories? Should we have a designer involved? Should it be part of the art director’s job?

If we take turns looking after social media accounts and we all create the Stories as we wish, how do we ensure a coherent brand style?

And if creating visuals for social media is part of someone’s job, how much time does it take them and could a part of that time be better spent on reporting, if they’re a journalist; or building relationships with illustrators or photographers, if they’re an art director; or producing engaging storytelling experiences on our website, if they’re a designer?

How much of all these tasks can be predicted and automated, especially in newsrooms that don’t have resources for a dedicated communications department?

Those were some of the questions we wrestled with when we decided to apply for the sixth round of funding from Google’s Digital News Innovation Fund.

We received prototype funding for Story Maker, a tool that would make producing visual content for social media more accessible to those of us without Photoshop, and would simplify the decision-making process by, firstly, gathering all the materials you have to work with in one dashboard, and secondly, having a clean, simple template for each type of post you wish to create.

With Story Maker, we now can:

• See all the images published alongside an article, as well as key quotes, in one place, by just inputting the URL;
• Mix and match the image and a quote to create a Facebook visual, an Instagram post or Story, or a general widescreen visual that we could use in newsletters, for example.
• Add additional images, text or audio alongside material imported from the article page, and mix them together in a uniform style.

The steps Story Maker goes through when producing a visual were mapped by designer Andrei Grosu. It mirrors the process he went through — he basically automated the process from the moment we publish a story to when cards or stories are ready to be shared on social platforms.

Bringing all the images and text together in one screen helps you add more value to the story, he explains, because you notice connections better than when you’d be scrolling independently through folders or different files.

The templates for the different visuals are created with an “image first” mindset, with the image and text slots kept separately on each card, so the text doesn’t appear over an image.

If you’re producing directly in Instagram or Illustrator, you can control the variables, such as text size, dominant colors and margins, but using a tool where the aim is to produce visuals with only a few clicks, you really want as few decision-making points as possible.

Using set templates also helps keep the content consistent: you know everyone’s going to be using the same font, for example. We’re starting up with a minimalistic, white background template, as it’s versatile and covers the majority of use cases for us, and there’s always an option to create custom backgrounds for different products if required in the future.

While still working on Story Maker, Grosu created templates in Google Slides for the team to use to create their own Instagram Stories related to the articles they were writing.

He chose to do this because it made the process more accessible to reporters. You don’t need specialised software and some visual parameters are already determined; it’s much easier than everyone learning Illustrator or InDesign.

Having such tools also means reporters or editors can input corrections or make updates to the text in an Instagram Story without having to go through a third party (the designer) for simple changes. Once Story Maker becomes part of our workflow, it will speed up the process even more.

2020 finds us in a different place than we were when we first started working on Story Maker. We are publishing more stories each week than ever before. We are producing a daily newsletter exploring how our lives are changing during the pandemic.

We only have one visual editor on staff, and no dedicated communications staff. Using this tool will make reporters more independent when sharing their work, which will allow DoR to focus on new strategies as we continue to navigate the new normal brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.

If we’ve ever felt the need for more time to focus on strategy, big projects and mission-driven work, it’s now, and we’re looking forward to adding a new string to our bow.

The first week of March found DoR with a new home: we moved from our previous newsroom to a larger place, where we hoped to host community events. We had already filled the calendar for March and April with a fair number of workshops.

We were also doing the first round of magazine deliveries from our new place, as the move coincided with the spring issue of DoR going to print.

But only a few days later, a different world started appearing around us. The spread of coronavirus around the world was officially declared a pandemic on 11 March — that was our final day at the office. We chose to postpone all the workshops that were due to take place in March, and to work from home. At the end of that day, there were 47 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Romania.

What became clear very quickly was that our editorial plans could not continue as they had been set out until the end of the month. Our minds were somewhere else entirely now, and our readers’ interests had also changed. Everything we knew about our lives would be challenged. Although at that time Romania was not under lockdown (but would be soon enough), we had seen what happened in China and Italy and believed we were likely headed that way. Schools were already closing and events over a certain size were banned. We would all be faced with uncertainty and our lives would be disrupted in ways we couldn’t even imagine. So we decided to shift all our editorial efforts towards making sense of our new reality.

The daily magazine

We’re not a news organisation, so our journalism takes us away from breaking news regarding the latest COVID-19 cases and towards the implications of the pandemic and the state of emergency in our country in our lives: the jobs lost; the changing family dynamics with schools closed and parents working from home; the impact of isolation on our mental health; how aspects of our lives we took for granted are no longer possible, like jogging in the park.

We chose to start a daily newsletter, Jurnal de pandemie (The pandemic journal), where we would curate the latest updates about the spread of coronavirus in Romania as well as the human stories we were actively documenting. It’s a newsletter through which we try to make sense of what’s happening together with our community. It went from idea to design to the first edition in three days, arriving in inboxes for the first time on 14 March and daily ever since.

We have been sending several regular newsletters in the past couple of years, but our most frequent were weekly newsletters, with one exception: a pop-up newsletter in 2019 that went out twice a week. This was new.

Jurnal de pandemie was sketched as a daily magazine: it has predictable elements, an intuitive and repetitive format, it’s built on sections, but there’s also room for serendipity. Each day a reader knows they’ll get the highlights from Romania and from around the world, plus the Good News of the Day, but the rest is supposed to be surprising. There are recurring features: what’s new in schools, in rural Romania, in our readers’ lives, but there are also surprises. These have included: advice for keeping mentally and physically fit, a visual essay of a day in the life of an illustrator, short “pandemic fictions”, where we publish prose or poems by local authors, a recurring “postcard from..” section that has taken us to Italy, China, Spain, and also into the intimate lives of many Romanians.

The tone mixes the informative and serious, with the playful and the hopeful. Our mission is to bring people together, and help them connect, empathise, create a path for action, and see solutions to the problems we’re living through. News-speak is not apt at many of these, and this is why the newsletter is conversational. It should be a friend you can trust in these trying times: both with information, as well as with personal worries, and hopes for the future.

As well as getting used to working from home in the current climate, a big change was figuring out a rhythm for putting out a daily product without burning out. The process was a learning curve, but we’ve now settled into a workflow based on a rotation and nobody is constantly on call without a break.

In addition to the newsletter we also ramped up our reporting efforts, and published around 30 stories in March, a working speed that’s a big change of pace for DoR. We tackled how students and teachers are coping with online lessons; how the homeless population in the country is affected by the pandemic; how church leaders are dealing with the sudden interdiction to welcome worshippers to mass on Sundays; how the isolation affects domestic violence victims; and how our relationships are changing in this time.

A new relationship with our community

But in order to direct efforts towards making sense of our new world, and do so with a focused and rested mind, we had to give up several other projects. By the end of March, our previous newsletters — on rural development, food culture and education — had to be shelved for the time being. The online community space, which had its own editorial flow since its launch in December, was also paused. In order to ensure we are serving our readers and subscribers to the best of our abilities, we had to reinvent how we connect with them. We wrote to them about our plans and the reasons behind them, and we thanked them for their support, which enables us to do the best version of our work in times like these.

We started a team collective journal, where we share how daily life is for us these days and our hopes and fears. We combined it with a form people can use to send us their stories, which we occasionally publish on the website but most often they help us inform our reporting. We started a community on Slack, because we felt it was important to offer a space for people to connect and feel less alone in these times of isolation and uncertainty.

In March we also hosted our first two webinars, which had been planned before the crisis as a way to bring our community from outside Bucharest together, but now offered us an opportunity to test whether online versions of our workshops could be a good solution for the near future. A webinar on creative writing hosted by our colleague Georgiana Ilie brought together around 30 people from all over the world, and became a space for them to share and feel connected, and an opportunity to suspend thoughts about the coronavirus for a while, as many of them emailed afterwards.

And although our membership offering was built on a few benefits we have currently paused, we believe our readers understand the reasons behind the change. They support us because they believe in our mission, not because they receive a particular product. As long as our reporting and actions continue to reflect that, we hope they will continue to be part of our efforts, as much as their own resources permit it at this time.

Future scenarios

We know our lives and our work will not return to normal. They will enter a new normal at best, and we have to be ready for it. As a small media outlet we’ve always had to struggle through uncertainty, but this is maybe the most complex challenge we’ve faced, as it has rapidly disrupted our way of doing journalism, as well as our business model, and our way of connecting and collaborating as a team.

The crisis has found us in a relatively lucky place compared to other small organizations. We know we can pay salaries through the end of May without changing anything. We know we will keep bringing in revenue from projects that were not disrupted, but we don’t know yet what will happen starting in June. DoR is still heavily supported by our events, including The Power of Storytelling conference in October, and should we have to cancel or postpone it, our financial resources will be impacted from the beginning of the summer.

We won’t wait and see, as that would mean decisions would be made for us by external factors — not a position you want to find yourself in as a small organisation. We have a strategy in place that allows us to stay in control, as much as possible at this time. Think of it as a decision tree, with a deadline for each branch. We know by which date we have to choose whether to postpone an event, or go forward with the plans, and the impact each decision will have on our cash flow.

It’s highly likely that we won’t be able to spend as much as we have recently for a while, which highlights this idea of a new normal where maybe we change roles, maybe we scale down a little. But our chances grow the more we keep moving and looking for opportunities to deliver on our mission in the new reality awaiting us.

How is your organization adapting to community needs at this time? How are you planning for the next few months? Leave us your thoughts in the comments or in a tweet at @decatorevista.

Article by Catalina Albeanu, with contributions from Cristian Lupsa and Georgiana Ilie. Newsletter visuals by Alex Munteanu.

We’ve read a lot about starting from scratch with a membership model for a media organisation. Or starting up a new product within the wider organisation that has a membership model. But there haven’t been many examples we could find of organisations shifting an already hybrid business model to prioritise reader revenue, while also aligning our existing community initiatives with industry standards around engagement and membership. The ones we could find were from large organisations who could afford the resources and had the expertise for audience research, development, special projects and experimentation.

This article is the second in a series that runs through the transformative moments at DoR in 2019. While the philosophy of membership was present from the early days, when we didn’t know what to call it, and connecting with readers was done with more instinct than method, this year has been about identifying processes and improving our tools. Read the first part here. In this part, we’ll share some insights into the process of finding technical solutions to support our ambitions. All quotes are from interviews with DoR staff.

DoR entered 2019 with a fragmented set of tools it had been using for a few years to manage online sales of the magazine, subscriptions, billing and shipping: a separate shop where orders came in, a database that had to be kept up to date manually as the orders weren’t automatically added, a billing system where bills were created manually, and a shipping processes that involved a lot of hands-on packaging and delivery work.

In addition to this rather convoluted and time-consuming process, our tools were also not enabling growth.

Aside from a newsletter we sent out weekly to our community, there was no clear online connection between those who supported DoR and our online journalism. The DoR shop, the point of entry into the community, was on a separate subdomain, creating a type of digital wall between those who supported our journalism and our content.

Meanwhile, our community was growing, and with this growth came a higher workload for order processing and shipping. Our goal was to offer more options for readers who wish to support us beyond a traditional magazine subscription, where they would receive our four issues of DoR each year, a newsletter, and occasional perks. We wanted to strengthen the links between the newsroom and the community, and we knew that in order to do so, we had to invest in better systems to create ties online as well as offline.

We also wanted to grow our community, and the fragmented process made it difficult to gather insights on how our existing customers interacted with our products. What was the real conversion rate? Where were they coming from — our website, social media? We knew there were better ways of managing this process.

We had identified our pain points, but we did not have the know-how inside the newsroom to identify and implement the right solutions. We knew we needed development resources, which come with a particular set of challenges: finding the budget to contract developers to work together on the project, and finding people who would choose DoR from the many other potential contracts they would be able to find in a market where development skills are in high demand.

We were incredibly lucky that we were planning our digital overhaul at the time that The Engaged Journalism Accelerator at the European Journalism Centre was opening up applications for grants. We applied to be part of the programme with our plan for a technology upgrade in the newsroom, and our application was successful. The issue of “How are we going to pay for this” was solved.

How we were going to execute the plan was a different issue. It was a new process to everyone in the organization, from the big picture strategic thinking, to planning, to smaller processes such as finding collaborators for development.

Our plan was to build a team of two developers in order to identify and implement as much of our dream tech solutions before mid-fall 2019, when we would launch new online membership options on the 15th of November to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of DoR.

Research led us to REMP, a suite of tools built by Dennik N that powers their own online subscription success: a great CRM that would easily integrate with the editorial platform, so you could have subscriber insights in the same place as your readers could access online membership perks, such as following their favourite writers and receiving alerts when they publish new stories, or saving articles for later. REMP is open-source, which meant we could tailor it to our needs, and it wouldn’t break the budget in the long term. (Read more about Dennik N’s strategy and tools here.)

We consulted with an existing collaborator who previously built our website throughout the process to identify skills we needed in order to rebuild our tech infrastructure. We also brought him in at the interview stages to cover the more technical aspects of the conversation.

We knew we had to work with people who could also provide solutions and help us identify the risks and benefits of the tools we considered, and we were overall successful at that. After a couple months of reaching out to potential collaborators, we started working with Mihai Ciobanu, front-end developer, who got in touch with us after we wrote about our search for developers in our community newsletter. We also hoped we would find collaborators with strong back-end development skills, and we even met with agencies to explore the possibility of working in this formula. Eventually we settled on continuing our collaboration with the developer who had helped us identify the required skills in the first place.

For the first couple of months we focused on testing and identifying the work required in order to make REMP work in our case. We reached out to Dennik N, the developers of the suite of tools, who were immensely helpful at getting us unstuck. But it soon became clear that we couldn’t make it work in time for our proposed deadline, and we couldn’t identify when we would be done if we built the entire infrastructure we wanted. We didn’t have the development resources in house, nor the time. We knew we needed to build our own integrations — payment processing, automated billing, emailing, connecting to the shipping system etc — and they were a big unknown.

So we started looking for alternatives, and while we didn’t find another ideal tool that could do everything we needed and was open-source, we settled on using WooCommerce, an e-commerce solution for WordPress that had recently updated its subscriptions and membership options. It wasn’t free, but it wasn’t prohibitively expensive for us — our current set-up costs around €2.000 a year to run, but the costs may vary in the future depending on the functionality we require.

It was a huge learning curve for the team. Here’s how we did.

What didn’t work so well:

• Finding the balance between planning and communication, says Mihai. We didn’t spend enough time on planning and as we changed the technology we were implementing, we assumed some things were already done when they weren’t. We could have been more efficient and not underestimate things so much.
• Because the process was so new for everyone, we learned along the way how to organise, which meant we didn’t know the right questions to ask in order to evaluate our progress, says Cristian Lupșa, DoR editor. We didn’t know how to set benchmarks and ask questions about where we are, whether we are moving forward fast enough, etc. It’s easy to look back and say we could’ve got where we are now a lot faster.
• We didn’t have all the stakeholders involved in the process early enough. We figured it out along the way, but if the technology is supposed to solve issues regarding distribution, billing, and community management, those actively working in those fields should be present in meetings a lot earlier than when we brought them into the process.

What worked well:

• We answered the “should we have a paywall?” question with an elegant tech solution, says Mihai. We built a Community Page with several sections that are available exclusively for members, including behind the scenes content, playlists of audio versions of our stories and reading recommendations, while keeping our journalism available to all for free on the website.
• The process was “freestyle” and this enabled us to always ask for opinions and integrate new ideas, says Mihai. Other tech projects are much more rigid. We surveyed extensively and organised focus groups with our community members, as well as tested the tools inside the newsroom.
• The shop, the community page and our own editorial sections are on the same website and smoothly integrated with a cohesive design.

Three things we wished we knew when we started:

1. It’s unlikely that there is one tool that will solve all of your problems.
2. To be more mindful of the integrations with the payment processors, billing, shipping and other services. These are things you use every day, so even if there’s a plugin that seems to be working, test and test again.
3. Ask whether you are advancing fast enough, and make decisions based on that. If you’re using a new tool, check in with others who have already implemented it. How did that process go? Where were they successful, and where did they get stuck?

Ultimately, if you’re an organisation that’s starting from scratch, with no digital membership options, check out as many tech solutions as possible. It will help you identify your needs and make better decisions about what to prioritise, where to compromise and what the deal breakers are.

We’ve read a lot about starting from scratch with a membership model for a media organisation. Or starting up a new product within the wider organisation that has a membership model. But there haven’t been many examples we could find of organisations shifting an already hybrid business model to prioritise reader revenue, while also aligning our existing community initiatives with industry standards around engagement and membership. The ones we could find were from large organisations who could afford the resources and had the expertise for audience research, development, special projects and experimentation.

This article is the first in a series that runs through the transformative moments at DoR in 2019. While the philosophy of membership was present from the early days, when we didn’t know what to call it, and connecting with readers was done with more instinct than method, this year has been about identifying processes and improving our tools. In this part, we’ll share some insights into the process of putting together our membership packages. All quotes are from interviews with DoR staff.

DoR has always been about community — it was supposed to be just one issue of a magazine, an occasion for the founders to prove to themselves, and to readers, that you could do magazine journalism with high quality standards at a time where the mainstream press in Romania wasn’t delivering that. The bet paid off and the first issue was hugely popular — and they made it stick around, with everyone’s support — from words of encouragement, to donated furniture to outfit the first ever newsroom, to being ambassadors who went as far as delivering copies of the magazine to friends abroad when they traveled.

10 years later, DoR has a community of over 2,500 subscribers, an additional 2,000 readers who buy DoR from shops, and a growing readership that has surpassed an average of 60,000 monthly unique users reading its journalism online.

But the road to growth has been difficult: the logistics of delivering a magazine to subscribers in all corners of Romania and abroad, from New Zealand to California, have proven challenging. With an online shop (custom made), a payment processor, a billing system, and a shipping service that don’t all connect to each other comes a lot of administrative work. There’s a lot of customer service involved on all the different platforms — from Instagram DMs to the good old landline phone — to troubleshoot orders, update addresses, track down missing packages.

And there’s the newsrooms’ ambitions to do journalism as we think it should be done: identifying the most relevant approaches to complicated subjects together with our readers, and continuing the conversation after a story has been published. Examples include our stories about responses to domestic violence, that led to DoR hosting meetings of people working to address it; our response following the murder of a teenage girl this summer, who was killed by the man who gave her a lift home, where we consulted with out readers to identify the best approach — we wrote a collaborative journalism piece about how safe or unsafe teenage girls feel and how they discuss these issues; and stories about beekeeping in Romania, where we found sources after several call-outs on social media for community recommendations.

A more cohesive membership strategy is the one opportunity for DoR to connect all these initiatives and the larger events we organise together in a sustainable way: add some new technologies into the workflow to help with the administrative workload; add some new online opportunities for readers to interact with the newsroom; offer an online option for those who wish to support us but don’t want a subscription to a print product; and find better ways to connect our events to our online conversations with our community.

TL;DR takeaway: While a move to membership is not about altering the journalistic practices at DoR, it requires a lot of thinking about how we communicate our mission, in order to ensure that our readers and supporters understand the value our work brings into their lives. In January 2019 we organised a three day brainstorming to start the year with a shared understanding among all DoR staff about what the values of the organisation are, and about why we do what we do. The notes we drafted then now make up our “About DoR” section on the website.

Start with the readers

Our main goal with the membership drive is to consolidate the DoR community and build a foundation of tech and better workflows that enable us to grow. We couldn’t do this without first checking in with our subscribers to find out more about their relationship with DoR, what activities encourage them to interact with us, and what’s missing from their DoR experience or from their experience with other media organisations, that we might be able to provide.

To answer some of these questions, we created a survey in Google Forms and consulted one of our friends and subscribers, a sociologist, to make sure the survey was statistically relevant and that the questions were asked clearly and didn’t put off the respondents. One of the things we learned was that too many compulsory open-ended questions could lead to respondents abandoning the survey and not submitting their answers, if they feel like it takes too much time to fill it in (a sad finding for journalists who love open-ended questions).

In the end, we went for a mix of demographics questions (as we hadn’t done this type of research in a few years) and questions regarding our subscribers’ view of our journalism, their information needs, and how we could improve our offering. We chose not to include specific questions about features on the website, as our goal was to identify their wants and identify common trends in the community, and then find the best way to answer them ourselves.

We were overwhelmed by the response. We promoted the survey through our newsletter for subscribers and through direct emails to our community of just over 2,000 members, and received 529 responses.

An exciting takeaway was that, for a question regarding how much respondents thought our journalism was worth financially, 80% said it was worth more than we were currently asking for in subscriptions, with 40% saying it was worth double or more. This gave us confidence that we could raise more funds from readers and count on their support for new membership packages in the future.

The survey enabled us to understand some of the ways our readers were finding our journalism online (mainly through the newsletter), and how they wanted to interact with each other and with the DoR team. For example, they wanted an online space for the community beyond the open comments on the site, which we will work to provide in the next year, and they wanted to meet some of the people who are at the centre of DoR stories.

The survey also highlighted that a number of our readers who lived abroad or outside the larger cities in Romania wanted some online way of participating in our offline events — we will be investigating opportunities for this in the next year.

While this questionnaire gave us a useful birds-eye view of our community and our role within it, we felt we needed to go deeper and organise interviews with a few of our subscribers. This would be an opportunity to follow up on some themes we identified in the survey, and to ask more abstract questions, such as what they think of when they hear “the DoR community” and whether they feel part of something.

Our interview questions were heavily geared towards understanding subscribers’ perception of the DoR community because it will be a central part of our membership offering. We didn’t consider putting our journalism behind a paywall (and still don’t plan to), so our membership benefits will centre around consolidating a community spirit, a sense of belonging and shared connection to DoR’s mission.

Everyone at DoR, from reporters to the newsroom manager, design and developer, took part in the interviews. We organised pairs of DoR staff who would contact survey respondents who ticked the “I would like to talk more” box, and conduct interviews following a question guide.

We found several interesting insights:

• Some of our subscribers are only interested in the print magazine, and are not up to date with everything else we are producing;
• Some feel they are part of a community in the sense that they feel part of the newsroom, not part of a group with the other readers;
• Many would be happy to act as ambassadors for our work;

TL;DR takeaway: Get the whole staff involved with community surveys and interviews. It helps create a shared ownership of the initiative and also helps gather valuable feedback on the clarity of the questions you’re planning to ask before you speak to your readers. Read more about working together with your audience in this story about the ingredients of resilient journalism from the Engaged Journalism Accelerator, and find out more about what makes a good survey from this engagement playbook by Krautreporter.

Boosting offline engagement

The survey and interviews were not the only opportunities to consult with readers this year, ahead of sitting down and strategising membership. We organised several community meetups, with the support of DoR’s former distribution manager, and current community manager, Carla Lunguți.

Until this year, her role was centred around processing orders for subscriptions, customer service, and supporting campaigns to drive subscriptions. She now has an overview of everything community-related, and plays an instrumental role in the production of events that bring our readers closer to our newsroom. Speaking about the first event with 50 guests she organised this year, Carla says “there is a little energy that goes into something that has a great effect”. “If you know roughly what you’d like the event to look like, there’s not a lot of time you have to invest in making it happen.”

She settled into a workflow that keeps events a shared responsibility for everyone at DoR. “You can make mistakes whether you do it all yourself, or share the work,” she says. “What I share is the logistics side at the event, there’s a need to have more people there. We always split roles — who welcomes people, who has the guest list, who runs the slides, who turns off the lights.”

For the past month, we had weekly “meet the reporter” events in our newsroom, and organised three meetups with our readers to celebrate 10 years for DoR — with presentations from founding editor Cristian Lupșa about the journey to where we are today and our lessons along the way.

TL;DR takeaway: Creating the context for offline meetups with your readers is a valuable method to foster a feeling of belonging. For everything to run smoothly, make sure you have a checklist with tasks that need to be done and who’s taking care of each one, from greeting people at the door, to turning the light on after a film screening.

The strategy and finances

Carla’s role wasn’t the only one that changed profoundly this year. Since September, DoR has a chief operating officer, Jo Ilie, previously editor in chief of Școala9, the education website powered by DoR. After attending a fast-track MBA in the first half of 2019, Jo realised DoR’s story was similar to those she heard while in class. So she wanted to make a difference in steering the ship. First, she left her role at Școala9 to become more involved with the transition to membership, and found several other responsibilities along the way — eventually assuming a role that puts her in charge of our administrative and financial efforts. These were duties our editor-in-chief used to split with two longtime colleagues who this year have left DoR for new challenges in different industries.

One of Jo’s first initiatives in her new role was to get the entire team together for a collective, one-day brainstorm about what might change in DoR’s relationship with the readers, and what won’t. The full-day meeting took place on 1 October, and involved outlining all of the reader-focused initiatives we’ve had since the beginning of DoR (which filled a rather large whiteboard), discussing feedback from the reader interviews, and discussing the labels we want, or don’t want, to attach to our readers: subscribers; members; supporters?

For Jo, discussing how the way we communicate what we do to the world is changing, and coming to a decision together, was one of the most valuable achievements this year.

She worked on financial forecasting with different types of models — both in price, and frequency: monthly, quarterly, annual. “There was a learning curve — I read, went to conferences… There was a moment when it all came together. What kind of support do we want most from readers, what is the cost of this package, and what is the revenue it can bring? What would a worst-case projection look like, and what would a projection based on the current behaviour of our subscribers look like?"

“I think we’ve reached this point naturally”, Jo explains. We didn’t want to receive donations, we wanted for people to see the utility of our work. To support us because they need us, not out of compassion but out of solidarity.

The difficult part starts after the new options will be online. We have to offer something that’s worthwhile, and we have to reflect the relationship with the members in our work. “We haven’t had a chance to think a lot about this yet. It’s not about cash flow, it’s about slowly changing the way we do journalism,” Jo added.

TL;DR takeaway: Run the numbers for the “minimum expectations” scenario, as well as the best case scenario, and set targets for membership growth accordingly. But know that projections won’t necessarily show you the reality, you have to launch and closely monitor the figures to see which scenario you are heading towards. We are close to hitting the play button and seeing which scenario we will face in 2020!

The membership packages we settled on:

Digital with monthly payments;

Digital with annual payments;

Digital + print with annual payments;

We were planning another digital + print package with quarterly payments, but decided against introducing it yet because of difficulties regarding recurring payments (e.g. how would we know that everyone will keep their subscription going for the next quarter if the magazine goes to print on 25 February and some members have their next payment date in March?) and the complexity of having to communicate the logistics of this package to our audience.

Here are all the ways DoR interacts with its community:

• Customer service through email, Facebook, Instagram, phone;
• Newsletters;
• Questions in newsletters about subjects we are working on and our community’s experiences with these topics;
• Using Hearken and other reader-interest gathering initiatives;
• Pop-up newsrooms;
• Surveys and interviews with our members about their relationship with DoR;
• Meetups with the community about the inner workings of the organisation;
• Meetups with reporters, in our own newsroom, elsewhere in Bucharest and other parts of Romania;
• Taking stories to communities that are affected by the subject, e.g. gender inequality discussions in schools;
• Mediating conversations with stakeholders in certain subject areas (domestic violence response for example);
• Live storytelling events and opportunities to connect at those events and stay connected afterwards (pledge support cards)

In part 2 of this story, we discuss the technology underpinning DoR’s membership effort, including a big change of plans in September, only a couple of months before launch, and talk about product management and project management in a media organisation without particular expertise in either of those.

DoR would not have been able to update its subscription packages without help from the Engaged Journalism Accelerator, and we are grateful for the advice and encouragement the team provided this year. We recommend their Engaged Journalism in Europe database and their Stronger Journalism Through Shared Power report.

This series is written by Catalina Albeanu, digital editor, DoR. Reach out with questions or comments here or directly at @catalinacma on Twitter. Photos by DoR.

Between 22 and 26 July we moved our entire newsroom — 30 people — to Târgu Mureș, a town in Transylvania about 350 km away from our usual location in Bucharest, Romania. Our goal was to document and publish the most relevant stories for locals, as well as organize meetings with our community in the area and make new connections.

Bottom line, we:

• Published 26 stories (with four translated into Hungarian, the language of the largest minority population in the area);
• Published 29 portraits of local people and five portraits of local dogs;
• Published a print magazine dedicated to Saschiz, a village in the region;
• organized six events.

All of this happened in technically four full days of work.

A pop-up newsroom like the one we organized in Târgu Mureș comes with a lot of uncertainty. What if we don’t have enough time to find the most relevant stories? What if we misrepresent them? What if we misunderstand something? And how can we move beyond what many call parachute journalism — being a media organization from the capital city publishing stories from an outsider perspective, barely scratching the surface or digging in the completely wrong place?

There’s been a lot of discussion — and backlash against — “parachute journalism” in recent years, particularly as urban news organizations venture outside major cities to understand the forces of populism. Our mission for the pop-up newsroom was different, but some of the concerns were the same. We also wanted to produce journalism that would be relevant to local audiences as well as to a wider readership in other parts of Romania.

We knew we needed close dialogue with the local community in order to validate or correct what our journalists discovered in the field. We arrived there with a list of possible topics and then gave up on half of them because the people who allowed us into their lives and spaces showed us more relevant subjects to document.

We discovered the city through its food and architecture, got to know stories from its minority ethnic communities and approached subjects from agriculture to education and local politics. We even covered a breaking news event.

Here’s how we pulled it off.

Before we got there

Media DoR is a non-profit, independent journalism platform that helps readers connect, understand one another and what they can do to tackle the problems of modern-day Romania. We publish a quarterly print magazine featuring longform narrative journalism as well as digital storytelling, and we organize events for our community, from live journalism shows at the National Theatre in Bucharest and The Power of Storytelling conference, to smaller meetups for our community members to discuss common topics of interest.

The project in Târgu Mureș was the first time we included the entire organization in an out-of-town reporting initiative, but we’ve taken such trips before, which helped us understand what goes into such a pop-up journalism experience and how to blend reporting with community engagement.

In April 2018, our journalists spent a few days in Alba Iulia, Transylvania, covering stories together with students interested in journalism, and in March 2019 the team covering rural development for DoR spent nearly a week in Bucovina in northern Romania, building connections and documenting stories about local businesses, tourism and farming in several villages.

These experiences are grounded in our belief that the most relevant stories for our readers are found when we can be deeply embedded in the communities we are documenting and when we have established a dialogue built on trust that helps challenge the assumptions we all bring to the table.

Our previous pop-up reporting trips taught us a lot about how we can do better journalism in the field, how we can work better under time pressures, and also how we can make the best logistic arrangements for the team. So when we started planning, we knew it needed to be a shared responsibility, from the project management all the way to researching the first leads for stories.

We designated a core team of organizers who had an overview of different key aspects of the plan:

• The project budget;
• Logistics: getting to/from Târgu Mureș, accommodation, transport while in the town;
• The editorial workflows and roles during the pop-up;
• Community events;
• Events for our team;
• Partnerships and sponsorships for the project;
• Marketing and social media, before and during the project.

We started by outlining the goals of this pop-up newsroom, which would determine all our decisions regarding the program and the events we would put forward:

• Document stories that were relevant for the local community and reflected modern life in one of the oldest towns in Romania;
• Get to know our community of readers in Târgu Mureș and have their insights included in the reporting process;
• Create a team-building experience for DoR staff.

Building on these three pillars as well as our knowledge — and mistakes — from reporting trips, we made several decisions early on that defined the experience.

The editorial plan

For the first time, we used Hearken technology and guidance to gather questions from our community, both from Târgu Mureș and other parts of the country, that could shape our reporting in the city. It helped us make connections in town and following up on some of the questions received through Hearken helped inform us about residents’ view of local authorities and the local education system.

It was important to us to have everyone in the organization, including non-editorial staff, participate in the initial research and have as many people as possible looking for stories once we arrived, so we put together an assignment. We split everyone into groups, trying to mix up teams and get people together who might not work with each other every day, and asked them to come up with three story ideas, three community event ideas, and three ideas for staff activities while we were in town.

We pulled some key leads from the lists and assigned further research and planning to teams based on the existing beats of DoR where appropriate, education and rural development. It was important to have some meetings planned in advance, especially for stories that required visits to villages and meetings with entrepreneurs, but we also benefited from the flexibility of journalists who arrived with open diaries and ready to start from scratch.

We made sure to allocate roles according to the needs that the newsroom would have during the week in Târgu Mureș, which meant several people were in new roles for the duration of the project, such as our front-end developer who became a photographer for the pop-up newsroom.

Logistics

Our pop-up newsroom was made possible thanks to our hosts Lateral, a technology company with offices in Târgu Mureș that lent us office space the week we spent in town. We used it not just for for writing time and staff meetings, but also as an event space to invite our community into our newsroom and for special events, which we did on several occasions.

Help from Lateral also came in the form of local insights and tips. We were joined by a Lateral employee at our editorial meeting at the end of the first day in town. They were one of the first to help debug some of our thoughts about the stories we were planning on working on.

Additionally, we set up collaborations with Memento Bus, who allowed us access to a couple of their coaches to travel to and from Târgu Mureș, and with Continental Forum Hotels, who made our stay that much more peaceful.

We also planned a couple of experiences for staff as an opportunity to disconnect from the daily grind and enjoy the pop-up newsroom as not just a journalistic challenge, but a team experience.

Establishing such partnerships helped us stay within the budget for the trip and having a local host like Lateral was extremely valuable to have a space to call home for the newsroom.

Events

We planned several community events in advance, using Google Forms for RSVPs in order to know who we were expecting to come and to prepare for the right crowd size.

On the first day, we organized a community talk in Saschiz, a village that experiments with various community engagement models to revive the place, where we brought together all the local actors and explored how their models can be replicated in other villages. We organized a meeting with our readers (in the months leading up the pop-up, around 2,700 readers accessed the DoR website) where we shared some information from behind the scenes about DoR and our journalism, and then split into groups to discuss what our readers thought we should be reporting on while we were in town. The next day we organized a visual storytelling workshop for teenagers, followed by a Q&A with photographer Alex Gâlmeanu on the final evening of our stay there.

From our experience in Bucovina, where we had hoped to organize community events but failed to because we didn’t begin planning them until we arrived, we knew having all the logistics in place well in advance helped make sure we could put together a quality experience and people could plan to attend it.

On the ground in Târgu Mureș

On the first full day in Târgu Mureș, those who weren’t already in nearby villages for interviews went on guided tours of the town. We booked three different tours — one with a Romanian, one with a Hungarian and one with a guide from the local council — to hear the town’s story from different perspectives, getting to know the history and current challenges of Târgu Mureș as well as getting our bearings. We were, after all, new to the city and didn’t know much about its neighborhoods, architecture or local transport.

The stories we heard on these tours turned into an article presenting the town from three different perspectives, and our guides’ experiences helped us understand more about the relationship between town residents and the local authorities, which later became a topic for one of our stories published during the pop-up.

We developed several content formats that would help get everyone involved in writing:

• The dog of the day, starting with a Facebook-famous pug;
• Portraits of people we met in our reporting, published on Instagram and Facebook;
• 24 hours in Târgu Mureș, where reporters each covered an hour on the clock in different parts of town;
• A New York Times-style 36 hours in Târgu Mureș.

The designated editors for the pop-up newsroom spent most of the time at our office at Lateral, while everyone else was encouraged to spend as much time as possible in the field and to attend our community events.

To get around town during our stay, we used rental cars from Autonom, our staff’s personal cars, taxis, and bikes where possible. The local taxi drivers proved a valuable source of information about the town.

While the workload and the adrenaline of being in a new space and new reporting scenario kept everyone busy and sometimes working late into the night, the scheduled breaks and planned activities for the team were very welcome. An evening spent at a winery in a nearby village and one spent at an award-winning restaurant helped everyone pause and enjoy each other’s company away from the pressure of deadlines and experience the city as more than an editorial project.

Thanks to not planning in advance too much, we were able to jump on a breaking news story about a social housing centre closed for renovations, its residents being evacuated, and many having nowhere else to go. This drove home the idea that you need to have a flexible mindset when going into a pop-up newsroom: do your homework about a place, but don’t plan every hour of the working day and be open to your plan being challenged by what the town throws at your at the last minute.

To make sure knowledge circulated across team, we had regular meetings every day with updates on each project, as well as more informal conversations — contacts and ideas exchanged over dinner, and general chat in the newsroom meant everyone could feel they were working towards a common goal.

To make sure our journalism was accessible and had an impact in the local community, we first printed a magazine for the La noi project, our rural development beat, which covered several stories from the same village near Târgu Mureș. The magazine collated all of the stories about the community in the village we documented and produced during the pop-up newsroom. It was printed during our stay and delivered to the village on our final day in the county. We also translated several of our stories into Hungarian, as the largest minority in Târgu Mureș is Hungarian.

Gains

On the last morning of the trip, we gathered all the team in the meeting room of Lateral, our hosts in Târgu Mureș, and asked them what they gained from of the experience. Here are some of the things they said:

Reporter: I was reminded of how efficient we become when catapulted into a strange space and how open locals are when you admit that you know nothing and you want to learn from them.

Community manager: I am glad our readers who participated in the community events wouldn’t go home at the end of the night. In smaller towns, our readers’ desire to know us and spend time with us is much bigger than in the capital city. For us, as a team, we had the opportunity to see how the others’ work looks like, what is difficult for them, why it is difficult to be a reporter and I think this will help us work together better when we return home.

Fundraiser: It was useful to understand how my colleagues work in the field and this will help me explain our work and mission better to commercial partners. And I’m happy those envelopes are so heavy with messages they’re almost falling off the wall. (One day, a whole wall was filled with envelopes with the team members’ names on them and everyone was invited to thank their colleagues or leave them little notes in the respective envelopes, to take away at the end of the trip.)

Front-end developer: I had the opportunity to do the job I would’ve done if I wasn’t a developer: photographer. Also, I feel like we shook this place a bit, we left our mark and I’m sorry we’re leaving. I would’ve stayed one more week.

Reporter: Before coming here, I was stressing out about what I would write, but then I remembered an experience like this is about being present and about admitting you know nothing.

Creative director: Two things for me: one, I managed to assign art to local artists and photographers, over the phone, and I received excellent work on very short notice; and two, I managed to make all of you take photos, so from now on we’ll keep doing that. There’s a camera there and you all know how to use it.

What next?

This experience has been proof for us that journalism produced in close collaboration with the audience can be valuable and more relevant to the community than some ideas cooked up behind screens. We will continue to find ways to include readers in the editorial process where they want to contribute, and we’re working on communicating exactly what engaged journalism means to our community.

The way we worked in Târgu Mureș inspired us to take more questions from our audience at an early stage in the reporting process and helped us identify ways in which to do so that work better for us. We invited the public again into another out-of-town reporting initiative, and while it’s not a pop-up newsroom, it’s an opportunity to work together with the public to learn the local angles and add value and depth to a city’s narrative in the national press.

We would also like to return to Târgu Mureș to continue the conversation we started, and are working on ways to do so over the next twelve months — a new election cycle awaits the country, and with it come new reporting challenges.

Toolkit and lessons learned

The following week, we discussed what advice we would give to other newsrooms who want to try this and what could be done better next time. Here’s what the team recommends:

Technical musts:

• A WhatsApp group for team-wide announcements;
• Google Drive and/or Dropbox for collaborative work;
• Accounts with the most popular social network in the area, in our case Facebook, for quick contacts and planning with residents;
• As many cameras as possible;
• External batteries;
• Cars/bikes for mobility;

Do:

• Plan some editorial things ahead, but be ready to change everything;
• Tour the place with local guides both to get the physicality of the area and to hear what narratives the locals have about their city;
• Be mindful of the narratives you bring as an outsider and validate them with locals;
• Involve locals in creating content;
• Have a safe space as a newsroom;
• Open your newsroom doors as often as possible;
• Ask for things: advice, feedback, contacts;
• Offer a learning experience (give a lecture or run a workshop, if any takers) or learn something from the locals (a local craft, how to make a dish);
• Have several editors;
• Pull a “Humans of ….” It’s a basic journalistic exercise and it can get everyone on the team involved in reporting, photographing and writing short profiles;
• Pull a “Pets of…”. Not only humans live here;
• Daily updates on everyone’s progress;
• Clarify tasks in advance so everyone knows their role for the next day;
• Have enough brains working on the operational side and logistics to enable the reporting to go smoothly;
• Leave enough time for getting lost around town and exploring;
• Translate work if applicable;
• Take breaks — for a couple of hours, do something other than journalism (wine tasting works wonders);
• Clear your newsroom’s schedule of anything else. Be there and just there;
• Find delicious local fast food;

Talk about it:

• Have a hashtag for the event and plan a social media presence;
• Partner with local media to ensure republication of stories in the local newspapers/websites;
• Leave a physical proof of your stay: a zine, postcards, etc;
• Have a team debriefing at the end to assess the impact.

Do better than what we did:

• Get lost more;
• If you plan any products that require planning (such as the “24 hours in…” story), plan ahead, so it’s on everyone’s mind;
• Don’t plan things for after the community meetings (let people stay as long as they want);
• Have more cameras at hand;
• Sleep more.

We couldn’t make up our minds about:

• Wearing branded t-shirts. We did. We kind of looked like a cult. But we were also easily recognizable and people approached us thanks to them. Up to you.

This pop-up newsroom was made possible by funding and guidance from The Membership Puzzle Project.

Text by Cătălina Albeanu and Georgiana Ilie. Photos by Cătălin Georgescu, Mihai Ciobanu, Oana Barbonie and Andrei Grosu.

The past two years have been essential for how we work and how we define our journalism. We’ve transformed, we’ve grown and we learned along the way. Here’s what happened.

By Cristian Lupșa, editor, DoR.

The idea of DoR was born on a night when a handful of journalists drank too much beer and built a concept for a magazine. That was April 23, 2009, so 10 years ago. The plan was to only publish one issue, as living proof of the potential of this medium, which we felt was not sufficiently harnessed by the mainstream publications available at the time.

Only it wasn’t just once (issue #36 is coming out in June), and many things have happened since. In fact, this is one of the only constants at DoR: change. If in the first few years, change and the uncertainty of tomorrow would prompt anxiety, I now welcome them as necessary conditions.

DoR hasn’t been just a magazine for some time now. Media DoR, the association that publishes DoR (we’re an NGO) is the umbrella for many projects: a digital publication about education (Școala9 — The New School); an international storytelling conference that sells out each year (The Power of Storytelling); a series of live shows that brings journalism on stage (DoR Live); a series of podcasts (of which Pe Bune is a pioneer on the local scene) and many others.

Most of them are not new ideas, but it’s only in the past 12–16 months that we can say we have configured the way we work to be able to support them all, to give them the resources they need and to define them as pillars of our work.

This is the story I want to tell: about where we are now, about how we work, about how we define the journalism we produce, and some of the lessons we have learned (in no particular order). It’s likely I haven’t covered everything, and I am looking forward to questions about how we work and how we aim to build a certain kind of organizational structure — one based on autonomy, non-hierarchical collaboration, transparency and care, both for the product and towards one another.

New roles

Last year we hired an events manager, we defined a role for a fundraising manager, and we tried to bring a communications coordinator on board as well. I believe we are the independent newsroom with the largest number of non-journalistic roles in Romania, and that’s because we learned that journalists can’t, and shouldn’t, do everything a modern publication needs to do to grow: from amplifying journalism, to financial and administrative hygiene, to creating new contexts for storytelling.

Some roles we managed to fill successfully, but we still haven’t found the right communications person. (And I think we’re also discovering a need for some sort of operations manager.) We’ve learned that it’s difficult for an organization that exists to tell stories to tell its own story — especially as there is a natural tension between the promotional language of advertising and PR, and how a journalist writes.

We’re not actively searching for a communications person, but I think we have a better idea of who we’d need: a person who’s able to see the big picture, but to also be a reporter and a storyteller that sees DoR as a beat.

New colleagues

One of the things we keep saying in the newsroom is that, over the past 14 months, the number of new colleagues has overtaken the previous headcount.

The wider Media DoR team, which includes colleagues who don’t work from the newsroom as well as interns, is just shy of 30 people. If we count close friends, we hit 50, and if we also count contributors, we are heading into triple digits.

Staff changes

Growing the team and the number of projects we are working on has also led to difficult times. We’ve lost important staffers: veteran journalists who decided the media was no longer the industry they wanted to work in, as well as a key person working at the intersection of events and fundraising.

In addition, we also had a change of financial institutional memory, which has been one of the most complicated transitions we have ever navigated.

When colleagues leave — and we’ve also parted ways with people due to incompatibility, or our inability to find financial resources to keep them — a type of uncertainty settles within the team, which needs to be managed.

My role

This is a longer conversation, but the short story is that I’ve happily accepted that my role today is firstly that of a manager. Creation — mostly idea generation, and editing — comes in second. What I mostly spend my time doing these days, aside from constantly repeating the mission and the values that fuel DoR, is to build a context for my colleagues to excel and grow, and for the projects to succeed.

There were many years where I accepted the role of a leader as a necessary evil — I would tell myself there has to be a boss who takes the blame. Now I accept it as a privilege, and as an enjoyable challenge. My stomach no longer aches if I have to have a complicated conversation with someone, both from within the team or from outside DoR. I can explain what value we offer, and few things seem impossible anymore. I no longer tremble on the inside before I have to speak in public, and it’s not because I am better at it, but it’s because I have done it enough times now that my brain has learned to say: “You haven’t died last time.”

It was the same with management: I’ve learned about making decisions while making decisions. I am enjoying this role because I’ve blended it with a creative goal: that of a space and of a culture that can take our mission further than it could have gone before.

Organizational culture

I’ve learned there are people that are a more natural fit with the way we choose to work than others and that the responsibility of building this environment lies with us. So it’s not you, it’s me.

We built a workplace where we place great emphasis on moments of connection and collaboration, which doesn’t match all journalists’ desires of independence. The culture of DoR, which aspires to be constructive, autonomous and responsible, has many anchors and team rituals: State of DoR (updates about the organization), Story Time (when colleagues talk about events in their lives), DoR Days (an internal team-building event), and others. We do this because we believe that you can bring your entire self to work — with fears and vulnerability. If we spend so much of our lives working, why shouldn’t we do it in places where we feel we can be ourselves? Why shouldn’t we define success as the results of all of us, and not one individual?

The management team

Starting last year, leadership at DoR has been spearheaded by a management team comprised of colleagues who are responsible for the larger projects and initiatives. The aim is to build, with care and intention, the culture we desire. We have a code of conduct (one of the principles says the management team “serves the team and takes care of the organizational culture”), we’re in a leadership training programme with Trend Consult, we’re learning how to think more strategically and, most importantly, we learn to give each other feedback that helps us grow.

Salaries

Almost the entire team is employed on full-time contracts, which translates into significant costs that we have taken on because we want to be a fair employer. (This has created financial issues at the end of 2018). We have been working on a standardization of salary bands and we hope that we’ll soon find the best way to make this transparent.

At this point in time, the majority of the team earns between 2.000 and 4.000 RON net per month (about 3.500 to 7.000 RON costs for the employer, for anyone with entrepreneurial plans in Romania). This sum is lower for interns and higher for developers. In total, we spend over 100.000 RON each month for salaries and taxes. (This is slightly over €20.000.)

Events

In 2018 we hosted the largest DoR event to date: DoR Live in the main hall of the National Theatre, with over 900 people in the audience (we’re doing it again this July!). We had a first pop-up newsroom last spring, in Alba Iulia, and one in Bucovina towards the end of March 2019 (the latest was also the start of a new vertical on rural development: La noi). We organized DoR on the Road at the end of the year — a series of workshops and events in four cities across the country. In November, we took our Pe Bune podcast on stage for Pe Bune Live. We organized an exhibition for the project “100 for tomorrow’s Romania”, where we also organized two events a day — a meet-up with readers and a panel (on education, entrepreneurship, civic action, etc.).

Community meet-ups

Alongside the larger events, we organized smaller meet-ups and discussions, from an event where we outlined our plans to our community of print subscribers, to a day where we opened our newsroom to the public (called Open DoR) and to small groups brought together by our reporters to talk about specific issues: justice, domestic violence, or personal writing.

These meet-ups are part of a larger strategy of involving the DoR community in the work that we do — from communicating more frequently about our plans through newsletters, to involving the public in our journalism.

A new website

In September 2018, we relaunched the DoR website, made by a friend and DoR collaborator. We received the domain dor.ro as a gift from our friends at Autonom. From April 2019 we also have an in-house front-end developer, and bringing better tools and processes into the newsroom has become a priority, especially as we’re gearing towards launching digital memberships.

The business model

DoR is a hybrid. There are plenty of ways modern entrepreneurial media organizations are trying to find a sustainable model and nobody has the perfect solution yet: some take the traditional commercial route (heavily ad-funded), others look to donations, others towards contributions, different types of subscriptions or membership (reader-funded), others turn to grants and philanthropy. It’s tempting to think that one choice can prove the right one.

So far, DoR has relied on a combination of revenue streams: our most important sources of funding for editorial are revenues from subscriptions and magazine sales, as well as grants. For the events, the most important revenue stream is sponsorship from companies.

Brand partnerships

We have several important commercial relationships that have carefully outlined limits. For example: BRD Groupe Société Générale funds Școala9, but doesn’t get involved in the editorial output. With UniCredit Bank we share a number of projects, such as 24/7, a guide for the creative entrepreneur. And with Fan Courier we have an essential partnership: they support us with delivering the print magazine to subscribers.

International grants and presence

2018 also meant the growth the international profile of DoR, which is starting to be seen as one of the most interesting entrepreneurial organisations in European journalism. This is the context in which we applied for several grants, both local and international, which we successfully received at the beginning of the year.

• A local grant from the Romanian-American Foundation (RAF) to develop a vertical about rural Romania (La noi), which is also a space for experimenting with solutions journalism (for which we have also organized a micro-grants program), participatory reporting, and ways to measure impact.
• A grant from the Engaged Journalism Accelerator which supports our digital development and the introduction of digital membership.
• A grant from the Membership Puzzle Project for learning and development for the team, bringing useful skills from outside the media industry (facilitation, for example) into the newsroom.
• A grant from the Google Digital News Innovation Fund to experiment with automated repackaging of stories for social platforms.

Our international presence has also grown: we publish this occasional diary about what we learn at DoR, we write about how we see the challenges and opportunities for entrepreneurial journalism, and we participate as speakers at industry events, such as the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, where three members of the DoR team spoke on five panels this year.

The role of the journalist

I think all of the above shows that the role of a journalist or that of a journalistic organization is becoming more nuanced. I grew up in this profession with a definition that says the role of a journalist is to enable citizens to make informed decisions. This role stays central, especially for journalists who produce news, analysis and investigations.

Equally central at DoR is the role to tell the stories of the world we live in, so that people can see their feelings and experiences reflected, and so feel less alone.

But there are other roles a journalist who wants to be close to the community they serve has to fulfil: conversation organizer, facilitator, moderator, listener, partner, student. We want, just as this article says, to complicate narratives.

Mission

The Mission of DoR has become more nuanced over these past 10 years and we also spend more time talking about it. The theory of change that underpins our vision says that stories can make people more empathic, braver, and more open to connections. This is why our dream is to help build such a society in Romania, through DoR.

From a pragmatic point of view, we have made a difference between the mission of DoR (the magazine) and Media DoR (the umbrella association for all the projects).

They complement each other and today they sound like this:

• Media DoR is a non-profit association that tells, publishes, teaches and promotes true stories as essential tools that transform our lives, our organizations and our society, and that bring us closer to one another.
• DoR is an independent publication that tells true stories to empower its community to understand more, to be more empathic, to discover solutions and to act.

We have a lot of questions about the future — we have a lot of doubts too, and many plans. A lot of the transformations here, especially those about the culture we are building and how to get there, or about how to become financially sustainable, are works in progress. That’s why the words we live by in 2019 are: consolidation, courage, and collaboration.

We are continuing our adventure and we will continue to share what we find along the way, but we’d also like to know your questions. Get in touch here or on Twitter at @decatorevista.