Surrender to serendipity at Stanford
A stand-up comedian, a former Wall Street bond salesman-turned-financial journalist and a best-selling author* contemplated the state of public service in the United States during a recent series of talks at Stanford University. The discussion ended with a suggestion that storytelling (and journalism more broadly) should become part of the standard curriculum at schools, just like mathematics and literature. It makes sense: critical thinking, curiosity, tenacity, the desire to dig beneath the surface, and the ability to differentiate facts from fiction should be taught to everyone these days. Especially at an early age.
It was a chance encounter. Initially I did not plan to go to this seminar, yet it made me think. What if my organization, Bellingcat, would involve itself more in partnerships with disciplines broader than just the media industry? Sciences, technology, business, education. Just a thought, occurring during one lecture. But it is precisely these unexpected encounters which expand your horizon. Insights do not come planned. Instead, it is the unplanned conversations, the lectures someone else invited you to, the classes you attended accidentally, the exchange of ideas with people from completely different areas of expertise, which lead to new ideas.
It is something I had to give in to. I came to Stanford as a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow with many ambitions: to develop further the funding model of Bellingcat, to learn about managing a fully remote and distributed team, to see if non-profit governance can adopt best practices from corporate governance, to follow the latest AI developments and how they affect journalism, to develop networks and partnerships for investigative collaborations, to learn about community building, about product development, about design thinking. Too many “to dos.”
The fact that Stanford has such a wealth of resources, variety of subjects and incredible quality of faculty and classes made me want to pursue everything. If it was possible to clone myself in three and absorb all that the place has to offer, I would do it immediately. Apparently, it is what often happens to fellows, especially in the first weeks of their Stanford experience. Our JSK directors have some sound advice on how to deal with the shock and awe which engulf you from the start — “uncertainty is certain”, “clarity is kindness”, “trust the process” and of course, “less is more.”
One word that was consistently used and that stuck with me during our orientation time was serendipity: surrender to chance, “see what happens” and embrace unexpected insights. Initially, this sounded counterintuitive. As a business director at Bellingcat responsible for finding resources to keep us going, leaving things to chance and unplanned discoveries feels scary, dangerous and irresponsible. Waiting to see what happens is not what I associate with a sound business strategy to fund an independent media outlet in this day and age, against all (and ever increasing) odds.
The question that keeps me busy back at home, and the main question I came to explore at Stanford, is how to develop my organization’s funding model into one that is realistic, community-centered, agile and sustainable. A model that combines generating our own resources (from sharing methods, not subscriptions for content) with donations (small and large, individuals and institutional) and grants (for specific training or conducting crowdsourced research). Bellingcat is an award-winning international collective of citizen journalists that pioneered the use of digital open-source investigations — a methodology that is now used as a standard journalistic practice, but which didn’t exist 10 years ago. Bellingcat was the first to discover the method and share it widely. It was a group of gamers and bloggers (with no formal journalism education or experience) who came together coincidentally that gave journalism an innovative and powerful way of finding digital data to cover events and determine what happened without even being present at a scene.
In line with Bellingcat’s values of sharing knowledge and empowering a global community of citizen journalists to conduct fact-based research on events of public interest, Bellingcat’s investigations are published without a paywall. Those investigations are high impact and high intensity, each investigation requires weeks, sometimes months of effort by multiple staff members and volunteers. Such a product is not easy to finance, especially in the current realities of AI proliferation, resources drying up, decreasing interest in quality journalistic content and unrelenting competition. How do we stay relevant and distinguish ourselves from thousands of other media? Are we too small or too niche to survive? How might we “engineer” serendipity and combine it with deliberate effort?
Leaving things to serendipity seems off. However, after just 60 days of forcing myself to systematically surrender to serendipity, I value it more than I could have imagined. It leads to new plans, and possibly new cooperations. For instance, journalism is often seen as a single discipline and is classified under humanities. However, journalism is actually interdisciplinary: art (for creativity and curiosity), science (for almost forensic research and investigation of facts), law (for supreme argumentation of conclusions based on evidence), psychology (for storytelling and engaging formats), history (for context of how events transpire and root causes), education (for building critical thinking), business (product development and innovation) and perhaps many others. Why not engage all these disciplines? So, I sought out almost at random for multiple courses searching for serendipity: at the business school, at the engineering school, at the law school, at the design school. Trying to connect learnings from classes, random encounters and concepts from science to art and everything in between.
These thoughts and encounters at Stanford leave me with the understanding that serendipity was and is at the core of many of the incredible investigations we published at Bellingcat. It’s not just how the crowdsourced efforts formed organically without any planning or design, but also how open source data was discovered and different dots connected (which seemingly had no connection at all). As I explore ways to make Bellingcat’s journalistic work both continuously meaningful and financially sustainable, I realize even more that creativity and a space for unplanned discoveries need to go hand in hand with purposeful and professional content development, intentional collaborations, building an engaged community and deliberately maintaining rigorous practices of accuracy, transparency and ethics.
In my time as a JSK Fellow I hope to gather even more insights, both planned and unplanned, from different disciplines and fields that affect and will affect journalism. Most of all, I hope to make connections and learn from the vast pool of talented students, fellows and expert practitioners. I would be happy to connect, share practices and explore ideas and can be reached at dessi.damianova@stanford.edu.
* W.Kamau Bell, Michael Lewis and Dave Eggers were in conversation as part of the “Which Side of History?” course at the Stanford Continuing Studies (the seminar was on 27 October 2025 at Stanford).
