What it takes to build independent media under pressure
In a time where it seems as though stories about legacy media companies cutting entire teams of staff are just as frequent as the daily news they produce, many journalists find themselves wondering if they should find a bigger boat, or build something new.
To address this topic, the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships (JSK) at Stanford University assembled a panel of current and former fellows at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy. The panelists all started out as journalists, had their careers upended for one reason or another, and pivoted to starting independent media organizations of their own.
“What we do at Stanford [JSK] is bring journalists from around the world together to work on some of the challenges facing journalism, and many of them are not waiting for the legacy organizations to fix things,” said Djordje Padejski, associate director of the JSK Fellowships, who moderated the panel. “They’re building their own newsrooms, ventures, organizations, platforms and models.”
The panel featured 2019 JSK alum Roman Anin, co-founder and editor-in-chief of iStories, an independent Russian investigative news website; 2021 JSK alum Maritza Félix, founder and director of Conecta Arizona, a bilingual and bicultural news organization by and for immigrants using WhatsApp; and 2026 JSK Fellow Sérgio Spagnuolo, founder and executive director of Núcleo Jornalismo, a data initiative that investigates digital technology’s impact on society.
Over the course of the hour-long discussion, they covered what sparked their journeys from journalists to founders, the growing pains of starting an independent organization, and the future of journalism.
“We’re here to talk about some of the challenges of building something new, what they learned, how it might inspire others and where journalism can take this next,” Padejski said.
The pivot: From journalist to founder
In order to start independent organizations like iStories, Conecta Arizona, and Núcleo Jornalismo, each founder had a crucial decision-making moment.
For Maritza Félix, the impetus for starting her company was a mix of survival and addressing gaps she saw in news coverage.
“I was doing freelance work and producing documentaries when the pandemic hit,” said Félix, who was a 2021 JSK Community Impact Fellow. “The U.S. closed the border for nonessential travel, so I thought what am I going to do when I have my whole year built around this documentary that was postponed?”
She said her idea to start Conecta Arizona, which shares news you can use with Latino communities across the United States and Mexico border via WhatsApp, came after her mother sent her misinformation about how cultural home cures could prevent COVID-19.
“So I started fact-checking for her, understanding that all the ancestral knowledge we have in our cultures were being challenged during that time, and I created a WhatsApp group (to share information with a wider audience),” she said. “Six years later, we’re still here as a team of eight working with 40 freelancers as a very healthy and sustainable organization that connects communities.”
For Anin and Spagnuolo, the decision to become founders came from the realization that the type of news organization they wanted to work for hadn’t been built yet.
“When I got back to Russia after completing my JSK Fellowship, I was thinking about how the environment at Stanford and in Silicon Valley is built to inspire idiots like me to ‘not be afraid to fail,’ ” said Anin, who built his investigative newsroom after facing political repression in Russia. “And I realized that if there’s no ideal media outlet where I wanted to return, maybe I could build one for myself.”
Spagnuolo, founder and executive director of Núcleo Jornalismo, shared similar views.
“The reason I started my news organization back in 2020 is that I had a vision in mind and I couldn’t bring it anywhere else. No one picked up the pitch,” Spagnuolo said. “I wanted to work in a place that embraces people’s first ideas, where you bring your idea and we try and figure out how to do it.”
Growing pains
In addition to the excitement of making their professional dreams a reality, starting these organizations came with several hurdles, some of which journalism prepared them for, and others that caused growing pains.
“There were so many things that were new for me, including learning how to do HR, insurance, accounting, taxes and fundraising, so it felt like a third language that I didn’t speak,” Félix said. “And then the founder's language also felt like its own thing— you don’t say ‘I need to hire people,’ you say ‘I need to build capacity,’ because it sounds sexier.”
Anin added that curiosity and stress resistance were key journalistic skills that became crucial in his leadership journey.
“When you work as an investigative reporter and then as a founder you face numerous bigger stresses,” he said, "like, okay, all of the sudden 30% of your budget is frozen (and) you have to solve this crisis in three months.” Anin was referring to the impact of the Trump administration's abrupt cancellation last year of foreign aid programs that included support for independent media organizations around the world.
“Curiosity helps because every time we work on a story, we have to learn a lot of new things,” continued Anin, who had to move his team to Prague after being raided by Russian federal security agents.
On the future of journalism
The main panel discussion was followed by a Q&A session during which journalists from around the world asked about how to inspire social change, and the future of journalism.
“On the point of changing journalism or society, my group is only 15 people with 40,000 subscribers, but some of the work that we did has changed policies in Brazil around child safety and hate speech,” Spagnuolo said. “It doesn’t always have to be something huge that’s broadcast everywhere, but if you reach the right people who are doing specific work you can have an impact.”
Anin added that journalists’ work as historians is just as important as what they do to change the future.
“(In many cases) we don’t change the world, but we preserve history, which is really important, because imagine a world in 50 or 100 years, without all of the knowledge we have been able to gather,” Anin said. “Even if we don’t change the world, describing the world is also a very important mission.”
Note: All photos in this post were taken by Richard Urli and are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-ND 4.0).
