Introducing the Mapping Journalism newsletter
I will be chatting with people who are pushing the boundaries of journalism on social platforms – here's why
Hello and welcome!
You are reading Mapping Journalism, a biweekly newsletter to discover inspiring journalism experiments on social platforms – explained by the people who run them.
👋 I am Francesco Zaffarano, a journalist who works on social media and audience development. In the past years, I have worked for The Economist, The Telegraph, la Repubblica, La Stampa, and VICE. I also led the editorial team of news startup WILL Media, which creates social-first content to engage with an audience of GenZ and Millennials. Currently, I am the senior audience editor at Devex, the online community for the global development world.
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🤔 Why am I writing this?
Despite recurring predictions about the end of social media, I think we will deal with platforms for a while. And I am convinced we can use platforms to make journalism more accessible, diverse, relevant, and valuable for the audiences we are supposed to serve as journalists. The problem is: how do you do that right?
My two cents: sharing experiences is the best way for the media industry to progress.
So, in the past years, I have tried my best to be part of and create spaces to share experiences that could help journalists work better.
That’s the goal of this newsletter, too.
In 2019 I started a project to create a collaborative directory of journalism accounts on TikTok. The project started with just 20 accounts listed on a Google Spreadsheet, and today there are nearly 400 accounts from publishers worldwide. In October 2022, I started a second list dedicated to journalism channels on Telegram.
Both lists were born to give journalists, audience/social media editors, and academics a tool to navigate journalism attempts on emerging social platforms. But I wanted to do more.
So, I decided to reach out to some of the people running some of the most exciting accounts on TikTok, Telegram, and other emerging social platforms. You will read those interviews in the coming weeks, and you will learn things like:
How the smartest professionals are bringing journalism to social platforms;
What is their process, and how do they strategize;
Their challenges and how they overcame them.
👀 What’s next?
I will start publishing from the first week of January 2023.
The first few issues of this newsletter will be focused primarily on TikTok — I have a lot of people I wanted to speak with, and I think it’s the hottest platform for many publishers right now. But there will be opportunities to discover many more platforms, media, and experiments, and I want to make this newsletter as valuable as possible for you. So, if you are curious about what other journalists are doing on Twitch or Discord, or if you want to talk about a great Reddit-based project, please let me know!
My email is zaffarano.f@gmail.com. You can also find me on Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, and Instagram.
To me, this newsletter will represent an additional opportunity to learn about and be inspired by great experiments and people. I hope it will be the same for you.
— Francesco