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How independent media organizations are standing together against an authoritarian government. · Journalism 2050

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome back to Journalism 2050.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Our listeners might have noticed an absence of new episodes, but we hope you didn't think we'd taken a break.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: We've actually been very busy.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: For us, discussing the past, present, and future of journalism is work that is never finished.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Before we return with a whole new series of guests though, we wanted to share some of what we've been up to.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: Earlier this summer we traveled to Tbilisi, Georgia, to attend Zeg, a storytelling festival, and interviewed some incredible people fighting for journalism's future against all kinds of enemies, authoritarians, tech moguls, misogynists, you know, the usual.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: In the next three episodes, we share some of those conversations.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: We speak to Lika Antadze and Nino Bakraza from Sinatlay Media about how independent news organizations joined forces in Georgia to fight back against attempts to cut off their funding and silence them.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: We host the inhibitable Razia Iqbal, who spent three decades at the BBC and now teaches at Princeton University, to talk about how much journalism has changed over her career and her advice to young journalists today.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: We speak to Natalia Antilava and Simon Allison about building new networks for journalism in an age dominated by increasing concentrations of wealth and power.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: Natalia is the editor-in-chief of Coda Story and the co-founder of ZEG.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: And Simon is the co-founder of The Continent, Africa's most widely distributed digital newspaper.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: And finally, we interview our good friend, the formidable Julie Pazzetti, award-winning journalist and researcher on all threats confronting women journalists in the digital age.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: We hope you find these conversations as interesting as we did.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: And we look forward to resuming the series soon.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_04: I the singularity disappeared.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_04: And I believe it has produced such a medium this Eastern.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Good afternoon, everybody.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Emily Bell, Director of the Tow Centre for Digital Journalism at Columbia University in New York City.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_09: And I'm Heather Chaplin.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_09: I'm the founding director of journalism and design at the New School University, also in New York City.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: We're thrilled to be here at ZEG 2026, Recording Journalism 2050, our podcast about the future of news, which is brought to you by the Tower Center for Digital Journalism and Columbia Journalism Review.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: So if you want to catch up with it, please go to Columbia Journalism Reviews page or wherever you get your podcast from.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: And it's done with our help from our friends at the Journalism and Design Lab at the News School.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_09: So today we are very pleased to have with us, and bear with me on the pronunciations, I'm going to do my best, Lika and Tadze, who is the executive director of Chaikana, which is a multimedia news outlet focused on underrepresented communities in Georgia and the Southern Caucasus, and Nino Bakratsa, the editor and co-founder of IFACT, which is an investigative media collective.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_09: Thank you for joining us.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_09: Lika and Nino are part of Senatle Media.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_09: Tell us what this is.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_10: Sinatle Media is a network of independent online Georgian media organizations founded last year and launched initially as a campaign initiative, and it has three main goals to strengthen, develop, and protect Georgian media that is now struggling and is in a resilience mode.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_09: Can you tell us specifically a little bit about the laws that came about last year that made this feel necessary?
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_02: So the last year was the most challenging year for Georgian independent media because a few different laws and amendments in the law have been passed.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_02: So the most difficult and challenging law for the Georgian media was a grant law and the amendments made in the grant law, which basically prohibited us to get the international funding, which was like a the major of our funding was coming from the international organizations and donors.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_02: So now the Georgian media exists without this funding and trying to like invent some very creative ways to get funding somehow.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_09: And we've seen that some of the organizations in your network have lost up to 90% of their funding because of these laws, is that right?
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, that's right, yeah.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: Who are the organizations that were funding you before that are not now allowed to fund you?
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: Who internationally would have been helping support Georgian journalism that can no longer do it?
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_02: In our case, for instance, my media I fact was getting the funding from European Union, NED, which is National Endowment for Democracy, ED, a lot of different uh international funders across Europe and US.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: So one thing I wanted to ask you both this is a storytelling festival, we're journalists, is just to tell us the story of the past year.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: So, what has it been like to be in your organizations?
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: How has that unfolded for you?
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: And what were the moments really where you felt things were changing?
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_02: So, for me personally, the last year was a story of how very undemocratic political power wanted to fuck up Georgian independent media, and they failed.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_02: We survived, and we continue our fight and resilience.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_02: We are in still like a fighting mode, but we continue this fight, and that's a very important one.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_02: And the last year was a story of uh huge solidarity among Georgian independent media.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_10: In addition, obviously I do agree, it's a good story in the end, and it still continues.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_10: Also the story of a quick shift, where you are like in this mode where you need to figure out that this is a new reality.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_10: And for me, it was also this big smear campaign against us individually, as media managers, journalists, and also as a network, us being attacked and just being called traitors and agents.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_10: It was surprising and shocking.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_10: And uh then I do remember this moment of like, okay, we need to we need to talk in a media community, like we need to get together in some space and just discuss what's happening, what's happening to us and what the system is preparing for us.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_10: So it was also uh uh this shift that was really shocking in a way.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_10: It was very unpleasant, very unpleasant.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_10: But then there came hope.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_10: We got organized, let's say, like we got ourselves, our minds around of what's happening, and then we're here.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_09: So our podcast comes out in America, although we do have an international audience as well.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_09: But can you talk a little bit more about the smear campaigns and the attempts to intimidate for maybe reporters who have not quite experienced that yet?
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_02: So when uh Sinatla Media as a unity network started its activities, it was like a very first flea market, which we organized in December.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_02: Immediately the propagandistic TV stations started to attack us, like the media organizations who are part of Sinatla Media.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_02: They started to attack us and blame us to being a foreign agent in a country, which is like a very traditional narrative.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, classic narrative from them.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_02: And they said that we received 17 million dollar euro.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_02: We don't know yet, but it was 17 million.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_02: And they blamed us to serve the like a foreign interests here.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_02: That was uh like in December, then they promised to their audience that they would suggest and deliver more evidences regarding our like uh work and what we do in a country.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_02: But since then they never did it uh because they uh saw and understood that the society did not react the way they wanted.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_02: They gave up uh to this, but they still continued attacks and smear campaigns against individual media organizations, not as a unity, but like individuals.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's a really interesting point that I'd just like to hear a little bit more about when you said that people didn't react to those smear campaigns.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: Why do you think that was?
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: Because I'm not saying this has happened in America, obviously, Heather, but imagine you have a president who says fake news media.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_09: Wait, hold on, let me boo.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_09: Okay, okay, yeah.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: But if you imagine that um and boos journalists and encourages a backlash against journalism, sometimes that's been very effective, even in places which celebrate the First Amendment, etc.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: How did support show up for you and why do you think that was?
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_02: I think because uh when Sinatla started the very first campaign, we felt quite a solidarity from the people from the audience because we are very small media outlets in this network, and we have uh quite close bonds with our audiences.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_02: So we are kind of a niche media, investigative medias, independent, really independent media who had impact in the past.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_02: And the people know how we exist, how we fight, how we live, and how we work.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_02: So it was like a not scandalous enough.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_09: That is such an important point, I think, because in America, people are always talking about what's the new business model, what's the new business model, why are all these newspapers collapsing?
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_09: And what you're basically saying is that you had really loyal audiences who trusted you, and so they were there for you, which made you more resilient.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, and there was a big march only for supporting media in November, and then since then, a lot of people, when we organized flea markets, for instance, a lot of people are ready to give us their like expensive stuff to sell there, do some charity for us, to volunteer for media.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_02: So it's all how it happened.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's all why they failed in this propaganda.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: I I love this idea of flea markets.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, a lot of Heather's work is in how do we get networks of in society, small organizations, where it doesn't have to even be a newsroom where you get people together.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: But the flea market is a genius idea.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: Have you had any other thoughts about how to bring people together?
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_10: When it launched, so when we started, it was last year in August when we started with the campaign.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_10: The idea of the campaign was that we will deliver the message that uh Georgian media is not going anywhere.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_10: So we're staying despite the pressure, and we're staying strong and we're staying together.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_10: So that was the message out there, and we were just it was kind of a test mode to see, okay, would we get any you know feedback?
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_10: Would we get people actually supporting us?
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_10: Because one important thing to consider is that unlike maybe US, Georgian audience doesn't have a pattern of uh paying for the media content.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_10: There has never been a culture of, oh, you know, let's support independent media out of my pocket, you know.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_10: It was always granted that yes, they do exist because there is this foreign aid, there is this philanthropy, there are the grants.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_10: And now when that got removed, we just had to see if people are willing and people see what we do.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_10: It turns out they do.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_10: After the campaign, then the campaign CEO and uh our lead, they had this idea that let's bring people physically together.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_10: Let's just ask people if they would want to donate their stuff, and then all the income would go to single media uh media members.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_10: And it did work.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_10: And what was also surprising that people were willing to bring very expensive stuff, like very expensive drawings and things that they had at the very kind of rare items they had uh at home, the family items.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_10: And I think everyone was like surprised that from the community that has not been paying for media content ever, they were willing to do this.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_10: And the shift I was telling about was also that.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_10: That must have felt amazing.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_02: That's extremely it was like an affirmative auction.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_02: So we organized auction and this very rare stuff we sold out.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_02: It's interesting, you know.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_09: Emily and I were talking beforehand how to ask this question, and I'll be honest that we didn't figure out what the question is, but I'm gonna tell you something we were talking about before, and you can respond.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_09: I know Chicana means tea house, which evokes this idea of bringing people together in a physical space for discussion, and what you're talking about is actual people coming together physically.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_09: I've always been really interested in the connection between the right to assemble and the rights of the press.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_09: Can you talk a little bit about both that as a tactic to keep your organizations alive and what sort of repression you might be facing or worried about facing about bringing people together like that?
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_02: So the dangers and threats are like uh very yes, we experience a lot of different stuff every day.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_02: So it's a like a surveillance, it's physical and digital surveillance, smear campaigns, like a financial unstability and a lot of troubles related to that.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_02: But I think the Georgian media and people who work in the media, they are mission-driven people.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_02: And none of us thought about, for instance, to give up that easily and quit what we do here because uh we prioritize the interest of our audience and the needs of our audience, because we know that if we for instance go in exile, which is like a one of the choice right now, yeah, we will lose our audience because it's like a distance will be like uh far bigger between us and we won't be able to serve our mission in the right way, and they will miss the information what we provide them, fact-checked information, for instance.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: Do people want to be journalists?
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: Do young people want to be journalists?
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: I think you're a young person.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: You want to be younger.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, not so much I guess.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_10: Uh I don't think so.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_10: Now it's a popular uh career choice in Georgia.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_10: Uh for the last two years, let's say.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_10: And also uh you need to understand that uh universities are also struggling because uh universities had to recruit and had to have programs supported by the foreign aid that was teaching journalists.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_10: I mean the ones that are trusted, and you can uh know that you're you're gonna learn really independent ethical journalism.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_10: So that was a challenge for them as well to recruit uh you know newcomers and the new generation.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_10: But I think what is also important of uh having Sinatra media now launched and having this network is that to sustain the ecosystem.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_10: So at some point, maybe, when the not maybe, but when the situation changes and all these laws are restrawn, you have a new regeneration and new blood coming into the sphere because otherwise uh you wouldn't get it if the trend continues, you would be out of people to employ simply.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_10: So this is the important.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_10: And one thing that I'm gonna add with the Sinatra Media, when we said that we want to retain the ecosystem and it's not about just survival of one media, because survival of one media would not guarantee the ecosystem is there after years.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_10: So I think that was a very right approach to say that if we survive, we survive together.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_10: Leave no one behind kind of approach.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_02: And have all 22 organizations stabilized an appropriate word, or is that so all of us, the money we collect together, we have kind of a principle in the Sinatl network that bigger media outlets from TPLC, we always share our money share to the smaller media in regions.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_02: This money sometimes is enough for them to survive for months or two and cover like a basic expenses there.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_02: And we have media outlets in a network who are like only one main media.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_02: One man does everything.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_02: So this money sometimes is very crucial for them.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_02: If there is more money, then bigger media also get some share, but that's how it works.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_02: And I think this 22 media somehow we managed to survive.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_02: And now we have to move further and start thinking about the sustainability, how makes this network more sustainable.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to ask you something there about the platforms and how this change in the laws has affected what kind of platform technologies you have access to and what your relationship with those distribution platforms are, because often we've seen in the past it's been well, it's great because Google is here, or it's great because Meta is here, and they're an alternate route to market.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: What's happening with that?
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_10: They never were here, so the Google and Meta were not in Georgia, and uh the support was always difficult.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_10: So I think Google News Initiative did support some media projects, I'm assuming, uh, from Georgia.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_10: But meta support is quite difficult.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_10: I don't know what has been your experience, but if they do something wrong, you have to like wait for I don't know how many months.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_10: The important uh part is also that uh Georgia is very Facebook-dependent community and the audience is also still, by the way, which it changes with the young generation, obviously, but there is the hard dependence on Facebook where you would have like officials making official statements on Facebook sometimes.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_10: The amount of smear campaigns and propaganda spread on those platforms, now already on TikTok, are just rising, I think, every day, because uh we are up against the system that has basically never-ending resources when it comes to promotions, launching some strange media, media type of uh platforms, and you just have to monitor it and everything kind of works against you.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_10: So in that sense, it has been a reality, but now it's even more because they are also making the communication active, right?
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_10: Because they have to pass their own agenda with the laws, with everything.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_10: And uh, on the other hand, it's us now who might not have any amount to even promote our content sometimes online.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: So you're seeing that alignment between the platform companies and the government?
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_10: Personally, I think that by itself, the fact that whoever pays more gets more views in today's information environment does not serve an organization like ours.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: So, what's the alternative when you have a population which is very Facebook dependent and you're trying to get messages over to them?
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: Well, how do we see past that?
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think this is a big dawning realization in the states as well, that this is not a sustainable way to reach people with independent journalism.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_10: That's a big question to answer, but I guess just to this idea that uh because these platforms are not made for the responsible media content, right?
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_10: They're made for it's a commercial, it's a it's a fully commercial product.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_10: So uh maybe yeah, prioritizing something that is real, something that is fact-checked, something like this.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_10: But obviously, I think I'm not the first one saying it.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_10: It's been a narrative in the media sphere for a long time.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_10: So but this is the way because it's a commercial platform.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_10: Whoever pays more gets the views.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_02: But I think we have to promote our own platforms more, have offline communication with the audience as much as possible, because it's like uh more realistic, more tangible for them, and to promote our web.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_02: Web should be like a central platform for uh for media still.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_09: I feel like I could ask you about 15 more questions to satisfy my own curiosity, but I know there's other people in the room who probably have questions as well.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_09: So we have to have and we're gonna ask if people can be really diligent about talking into mics again because we're we're recording.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_09: So if the questions down here.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_02: Hi, thanks for sharing uh your journeys.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_02: In your fight for survival, do you think AI is a friend, enemy, or frenemy?
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_02: With the journalism, we do like a bit deep research for investigation, we said, but obviously we fact check it because we never trust anyone else.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um so we fact-check it.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_02: We do some social media calendar scheduling some of our posts based on our articles and a lot of various stuff.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: Do they pay you?
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: Do the AI companies?
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: We pay them.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: You pay them?
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to that's wrong.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: Can I just say I think that's very wrong?
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um I have no more you pay them.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we pay them.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_03: Hi, thank you so much for the talk.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_03: Um, I was wondering, uh, it's more of a question because you got the foreign agent law with funding, and I was curious, there's been a big rise now outside of Georgia with uh Substack with wonderful journalists now able to have a direct line to their audience.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_03: Even drop site news uses Substack.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_03: Do you use that?
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_03: Or is and what's the deal with the foreign agent law if you end up with a subscription via Substack?
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_03: Does it count as foreign agent law or just curious about that?
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_03: How you find that?
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so Substack is a very good platform, but you have to have an English language audience mostly to use this platform for the communication.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_02: In our case, majority of our audience are still Georgian language, and the Georgian language audience very rarely use Substack as a source of information.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: For instance, as for the subscription, that's not treated as a violation of the law.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_02: So, for instance, my organization, and now Sinatla also launched a newsletter.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_02: And subscription of the newsletter is one of the ways how we see to get income from international audience and from the local audience as well.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Canadian and Canada is also a very Facebook-dependent country.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_01: And for complicated political reasons, Canadians can no longer post media content or news media content on Facebook.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_01: I'm curious about how you think about that dependence on Facebook and specifically about the role of print media.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_01: Is there an active print media?
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_01: Do people subscribe?
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: Is there any sort of resurgence in print or is print a dead medium?
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_10: It's pretty much dead.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_10: The print media is pretty much dead.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_10: One of our members, the regional members of Cinatlit, does produce the newspaper, how it goes?
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, there is there are some, but it's very like I don't know, if you would do statistics, it wouldn't even come up as an important revenue with the print.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_10: And the Facebook dependency, as I said, it's when you're up against a system who's pouring a lot of money into just spreading uh information against you and calling you an agent and a traitor, it's just super difficult.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_10: I think we've all seen this amount of funds they've uh spend on promoting their own content.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_10: I mean the the pro party uh news channels, the TV, and also online.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_10: I remember looking at it and saying, oh my god, they literally are having our six months budget spent on like 10 posts, literally, and I was shocked.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_09: Do we have another question over there?
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah, um Lika and Nino, you spoke earlier about the importance of your audience in keeping journalism here in Georgia alive.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_07: But I feel like that was very eye-opening for me and perhaps for the rest of the audience because I feel like audiences of journalism do not understand their power in keeping media alive.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_07: So, what is your message to audience members of journalism, not just here in Georgia but around the world, about how they can better keep media alive to think about the needs of uh audience and prioritize how they look at the social events, for instance?
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_02: You have to understand their thinking model, what matters for them, what doesn't.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_02: Because if you want to build the bonds with them, you have to provide them very valuable information, which is like uh on a daily basis is needed for them.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_02: For instance, in our newsroom we try to engage our audience a lot, and not all of our investigations are audience-driven, but we try to produce at least three big investigations, which is very important, very valuable information for our audience.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_09: Prioritizing their needs are the way to build this trust between the and what um I just have to follow up on this because how much of that was a again, because I'm thinking about the United States where people are like, oh, they're still sort of getting their heads around what they call audience engagement, and it's changing, but it still is the vanguard to be thinking about a more collaborative relationship with the community and sort of having the community as the center of the model, not the newsroom.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_09: So I'm so struck by what you're saying.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_09: Was this something you were aware of and working on, or was it more that since you've gotten the support, you look back and realize it?
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_09: And can you tell us a little bit more how you build that trust, maybe a specific example?
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_02: So the building the trust is very long.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_02: Uh Terry.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_02: You have to be trustworthy.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_09: That's the hard part.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_02: So you have to be trustworthy, and all of your information should be correct, and you have to guarantee that what you publish it's is true.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_02: And if you make mistakes, and when we make mistakes, it happens very rarely, but if it happens, we apologize.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_02: We say that we made this mistake, this is uh right information, correct way, how it should be.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_02: And when the people see that, I think that's a signal for them that okay, that these people do something in the right way, we can trust them.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_02: We started it quite early.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_02: Before this crisis came, we we segmented our audience first and we understand who they are, like by persona, who they are.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_02: International audience have their priorities, their interests.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_02: Local people are pretty different, they have different interests, and if we want to serve both, then we have to produce something for both.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_02: And it can be like a totally different story, but we have to feed them with the like a right information, right content.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: Just wanted to ask as well.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: We've sort of skipped over almost the idea that you've been pretty successful in keeping the audience on your side and coming up with strategies that support you.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: The government has failed to put people off journalism and what you're doing.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: But our experience is that that makes governments angry and they don't necessarily react well to that.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_00: What are you thinking about the future?
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_00: So, in other words, does success become a bigger problem for you?
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: And what do you do about that?
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_02: For us, we are investigative reporters.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_02: So our life has never been easy, never will be easy, and we are here to annoy them.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's our job.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_02: So it's normal that they are angry, and um, we never expect that they will be loyal to us.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_02: That's not like a big dilemma for us, so whether the success will be more kind of a danger for us or more problem.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_02: The main thing for us is to have an audience on our side, have the loyal audience, and the government should be angry because that's what we do.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_05: Other questions?
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_05: Yes, thank you so much.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_05: I it sounds like you've been really successful in building solidarity between different uh news outlets within the country.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_05: I'm curious whether uh you've also been in touch sort of internationally with other outlets that have faced similar problems in their areas and what lessons you've learned from how they've reacted, or if you feel like Georgia's challenges are different, you know, how you feel like they're different.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_10: Chai Khana, before it uh got its uh focus on uh Georgian audience, we were also covering uh Azerbaijan, so we're serving Azerbaijan audience and definitely not a good example of success, but uh you know for us as a team it was familiar how it feels like to work in an environment where there's a very limited space for the media to work.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_10: And all these examples, including uh the one in Belarus, uh the examples of Russian exile media, it does scare me.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_10: I don't like remembering it.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_10: And uh, even though we're here and we are not planning to go into exile, and uh this decision that we took together that you know we are staying, it's very inspiring, and I'm all in support.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_10: It just also feels like that with the government's failure, it's it's still a process, right?
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_10: They don't think that they've failed, even though we do not care whether they're happy or not, but I don't think they think that they've failed.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_10: It's a process we're in the process right now.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_10: And I think uh what we could do in this situation is always to talk to journalists and to talk to new media outlets who are going through it.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_10: So I think it's always like to prepare for the worst but hope for the best situation.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_10: So again, the Azerbaijan example that is really heartbreaking, and uh examples of our other uh colleagues from other media outlets, it's very difficult.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_10: And one thing I've realized uh for the last two years is just you always hear these stories, right?
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_10: So we used to go to the conferences all the time and hear the stories of how media is repressed, you know, how it is that you have to be in exactly like all these stories that I've heard before everything started in Georgia, and it's just that how it feels when you're actually experiencing and how it is when you are listening to someone telling you the experience are very different things.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's such an important point.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_00: And we teach in classrooms in the United States, which never thought it would have these problems.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_00: And this year we always I teach a class called information warfare reporting, and we had dissident journalists coming in, literally telling American students this is what you need to be careful about, this is how you and and that point about how it feels different when you're experiencing it is I think so important because it's not like a oh dear, journalism is repressed.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's like you get up in the morning, what do you do?
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_00: And what is different about what you're what you're doing?
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_00: So you say it sort of feels different, is it is it personally what are you doing that's different?
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_10: Quickly for for me, for example, I never knew that uh working in a repressive environment would make you a little bit question your own judgment of whether this is a reality or am I overreacting?
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_10: That's been going for so many times inside of my head.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_10: Is it overreacting or is it a real danger?
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_10: So I never thought that actually this environment would make you a little bit um questioning of what is the reality and questioning of if whether you're making this up.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_02: So each my morning starts with a mantra.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_02: When I open my eyes, I repeat that Nino, you have to stand up now, go to work, and make them very angry and uh torture them.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_02: So that's my mantra each morning, and uh that's how I'm keeping this stuff to work somehow because it's super hard with two children and the Georgian dream at the same time.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_02: Uh that's how my day starts.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_02: So it works so far.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_06: So are there more questions?
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_06: Thank you.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_06: So uh in Georgia we have um our colleague, who is arrested uh imprisoned uh uh two years, and um uh researchers came up with the term Nzias effect, which means that they punished NZIA, one of our colleagues, and they thought that there would be a chilling effect, and other journalists would stop because she was punished.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_06: But what they received, they received opposite effect.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_06: And I think the whole media ecosystem and Sinatla itself, it's a kind of um Mzia's effects results, if we can say it, because we didn't give up, and as Mzia said, um we fight before it's too late.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_06: So it's a some kind of perception from my side.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_09: That's great, thank you.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_09: It makes me think also if what we're witnessing, sort of this move to the right around the world and curtailment of f of of press freedoms, it's a long game.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_09: So what you all have done is amazing.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_09: How do you keep this up?
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_09: How do you not give in to the fear?
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_09: How do you keep your audience wanting to support you?
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_09: How do you think about 10 years from now, or are you just day by day at this point?
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_02: I hope that doesn't sound like a 10 year is too long because we don't have a luxury to think about stuff.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_02: What happens after 10 years?
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_02: Our maximum sometimes is one week.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_02: What happens one week?
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um so uh I think um what we want to as a synatle establish here is a culture of solidarity among us as a media outlets, but not only among us, among the society, audience, and the media.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_02: And we started, I think, pretty well.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_02: It was a like a very good start, and we plan to continue this way and build up this solidarity.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_02: And that's the only way I think that's the only future of media to have loyal supporters.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_02: Otherwise, we cannot survive.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_02: The international funding can come back at some point because nothing will last forever, or some other advantages also can come back.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_02: But I think the solidarity from coming from the audience is the most valuable thing, and we should keep it like working.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_02: That's great.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_08: Are there other audience questions?
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_08: Um in your plan for the future, do you also rely on the education of future journalists?
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_08: What is your role in the education?
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_08: Are you allowed to, or is it state-owned?
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, similar to the previous the question of whether the new generation is coming in a sphere.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_10: Not all the universities are stain-owned.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_10: They're also private and they're running journalist projects.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_10: They used to run it more before the restrictions came in.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_10: I would say uh now the young generation is now very reluctant to join media, seeing that the sphere is might be closing due to this repressive law.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_10: So we used to do a lot of capacity building with uh young journalists, uh, the newcomers and the ones studying journalists.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_10: Now we shifted the focus, and definitely we're doing uh something uh different now.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_10: I wouldn't say there is now big space for bringing in new blood.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_10: I think now we are in a space where we need to stabilize to guarantee that the ecosystem stays.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_10: So when young journalists grow up and they want to, you know, pursue the career, so there is something left here, so they don't have to just switch the careers completely.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_10: So now I think this is our baseline.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_00: I was gonna ask you a question about that as well, which is influencer creator economies obviously are being talked about everywhere.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: It annoys me a little bit that it's not journalists, because I think journalism is very cool.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_00: Is that something where you're looking at different parts of the information chain, whether it's creators or civil society organizations, as helping bring that new blood in?
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_10: Civil society is a bit tricky now, also, due to the fact that they've been under all these laws and they've also been struggling a lot lately for the last few years.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_10: And with the influencers, yes, there are a lot of content creators, but as I said, most of them commercially driven.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_10: There were some supporting our campaign, which was very important, and obviously they have a large influence.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_10: I guess what we're also trying to do within our media outlets is to, you know, show the faces of our journalists to turn them into people who are trusted for the audiences too.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_10: I think you've been doing it a lot lately, and uh, we're also trying to do it and to survive this chaos online chaos.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_00: It sounds trite to say it, but I think it's really interesting that when the pressure is really on, that actually journalism is a very specific discipline which works in a way that other allied disciplines don't work.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_10: So in my opinion, this is the reason why our network has been successful.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_10: The message we're bringing that you know lights must stay on.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_10: You might not care, you might not be a you know uh person scrolling news or scrolling media content, but by the end of the day, no one wants to stay in darkness.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_09: So we only have uh a minute left.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_09: So let me ask you to ra as we wrap up: what ways can the international community still support Georgian journalists?
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_02: By our products.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_02: Like we we became the kind of uh product producers now.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_02: So Sinatle, for instance, recently launched a newsletter.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_02: Basically, the audience, as we see, should be international society, but some of the individuals outside the country.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_02: Please, if you like uh want to where is a QR?
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_02: It's a Sinatle Media.ge S-I-N-A-T-E-L-E media.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_00: So just to wrap up, one wish which either the community or the audience can give you, or anyone who's listening to the podcast, or that you would just if you could just wish for anything other than complete political change, because we'd all wish for that.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_02: My wish uh is like next year when Zeg will be the next year, if we come here and tell the story of our final survival, how we survived finally, not in a process, not something that very proudly could say that we survived, and that was a success story.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_02: That's my wish.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_02: That next year we will tell this story.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_10: Um in addition, um and uh very practical, I would say number of subscribers rising crossing Atlanta Media for the newsletter, and I uh would love to see more people, just random people, just strangers who are not in the sphere, just discussing and saying, Have you seen that amazing story that I don't know IFEX published last week?
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_10: This would be my wish.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_00: That's a great wish.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for joining us.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_00: Power to your campaign, to your mantra and your kids.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and let's hope that we're back here in a year's time with your wish fulfilled.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much, everyone.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_04: So, so