How Gen, știri is giving a voice to young Romanians on Instagram
Plus: introducing the list of journalism accounts on Instagram
Hello! I'm Francesco Zaffarano, and this is Mapping Journalism on Social Platforms, a biweekly newsletter featuring chats with people pushing journalism's boundaries on social platforms.
Welcome to new subscribers from USAID, Pink News, and Aeon. If someone forwarded this email to you and you want to subscribe, you can do it here:
📌 The Mapping Journalism directory is now covering Instagram too
Two weeks ago, I wrote that I was working to expand the directory to other social platforms. Today, I am happy to share that there is now a list of journalism accounts on Instagram, too. I uploaded the first batch of 600 accounts over the weekend and am working on a second batch of 500 more Instagram accounts. As always, you can flag more accounts here.
If you like the directory and want to help, please be in touch. I have been working on this project for four years and could do with an extra pair of hands. 😅
And now, let’s dive into this week’s Q&A.
Q&A: Gen, știri is changing Romanians journalism with news by and for Gen Z
In this issue, I speak with Diana Filimon, a civic activist, and the co-founder of Gen, știri, a social media-based news brand for Gen Z entirely produced by Gen Z, and one of the most prominent Romanian news publications on Instagram.
As of today, Gen, știri is followed by nearly 51k people on Instagram and 28k on TikTok.
FZ: How did Gen, știri start?
DF: Almost seven years ago, I started a civic NGO in Romania called Forum Apulum. The focus of the NGO is to help young Romanians become more civically engaged and more active in their community. We work on different projects, from using art for civic engagement to promoting election participation.
Three years ago, we came up with the idea of making a magazine for a young audience, produced by a team of young people already involved in other projects we were running. We gathered 15 kids, coordinated by journalists, artists, and writers. We called the magazine Gen, revistă.
We made three issues in print, and then we started running some writing workshops, during which we realized there was a huge gap in how young Romanians read the news. Every time we asked, “Where do you get the news” there was an awkward silence, and if we pushed them, the answer was from Instagram and Tiktok.
They were barely able to name a few Romanian media outlets. They had no idea. The mainstream media was like a parallel universe for them. They associated mainstream media with the world of adults and didn't feel included in that conversation. So the co-founder Teodor Tiță and I said, okay, let's try to do something about that, and we started an Instagram account one year and a half ago called Gen, știri – where “știri” in Romanian means news.
We decided to use the account as a new branch, but for news, and so we started posting every day. The project started to grow more and more quickly with the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
FZ: What is your role in Gen, știri?
Teodor Tita and I coordinate the whole project – he has a background of 20 years in journalism and managed some of Romania's biggest newsrooms. He is the journalistic part of the brain, while I am the activist brain.
The rest of the team is all under 24 years old. Most of them joined through previous projects of the NGO, while some of them were recruited online.
FZ: How is the team structured? How did you choose the right people?
DF: 80% of the team grew up with us in other projects we had so, and they somehow organically found their place in the team.
When we started, we had five reporters. Two of them had some experience in journalism, and three were in journalism school in Bucharest.
The real problem was not finding people but making them unlearn how to write so that we could find our way of writing for this specific project. So it’s easier when we bring a new team member with no journalism experience.
FZ: Are they volunteers or paid journalists? How is the project working financially?
DF: They were volunteers for the first six months, and as soon as we had proof that the project was working, we started applying for grants to pay the journalists with part-time contracts.
We didn’t ask for public money because we wanted to be independent and free to criticize the government.
We are also becoming commercially interesting, so we started some paid collaborations. The project is slowly becoming sustainable, not just from a granting point of view but also from a commercial point of view.
Donations and subscriptions, instead, don’t work for us because our public is 60% under 24 years old and 80% under 30 – they're pretty much without any money or at the beginning of their careers.
FZ: What is your main platform?
DF: It’s been Instagram from the beginning because we had a better understanding of the platform from previous projects. But we were already keeping an eye on TikTok, and we knew that was the place where we needed to go eventually.
At first, TikTok was very complicated. We had to do a lot of trial and error. We decided to split the team into Instagram and TikTok teams because we felt like we needed two different brains in the newsroom to be wired to the different algorithms and ways of communication.
Instagram is still the main platform, but TikTok is growing as well.
When we did a one-hour live-streaming during the weekend to cover the protests, we had over 1,000 people constantly watching. And that’s a lot if you think we had 25k followers on TikTok then. And the most interesting thing was that the viewers constantly commented on what we were saying.
FZ: What kind of content do you publish?
As of today, we publish approximately five or six pieces of news per day on Instagram and TikTok. We publish stories from Romania and the rest of the world, and we have a mix of news and explainers. When the war in Ukraine started, for example, they started to hear talking a lot about NATO, so we published an explainer to explain what that is. We do the same when there are a lot of talks in the news about institutions in Romania or to profile people who are in the news for some reason.
We also have original content. A few weeks ago, for example, the team went out to cover four protests that were taking place at the same time in Bucharest and other cities in Romania.
The project is growing faster than we expected, and the rhythm is imposed by the needs of our readers, who are constantly asking us what's happening, especially in Ukraine.
And it's more than just posting news – we have stories that generate a lot of comments and spark debates because the members of our community feel safe enough to share their views.
And if they see something wrong, they witness abuse, they come to us and ask to investigate.
This project is a weird animal, one I don't have a term to describe. It's a mixture of explaining the news, covering news, and community activism.
FZ: What formats perform best for you?
DF: The truth is that we don’t know – we had good and bad performances on all kinds of content, with or without a face, with or without a creator style. I think the subject is the lead in the end – if we put our finger on an interesting subject for our audience, it doesn't matter how it's done. It just goes. Of course, both length and quality matter, but the format it’s not as relevant as the subject.
We have news stories presented using carousels on Instagram, videos from big events, explainers, and vox populi on the street with young people when something big happens.
For example, recently, there was this news that the level of trust towards the European Union in Romania decreased greatly in a month because we were not admitted to the Schengen area. So we went out and asked the kids how they felt about it. It’s a way to take temperature over a subject, continue the discussion on big stories, but also ask questions to our audience to understand it better.
FZ: How do you measure success?
DF: Besides the numbers, which we analyze every week, for me, the most important measure of success is the messages that people send us.
For example, a few weeks ago, we started a paid partnership with Samsung, and they started writing messages from which we understood they were uncomfortable with this new thing. So we decided to explain to our audience why we did this paid partnership. We explained how we work, the fact that we started as volunteers but that you can’t do volunteering forever, and how we are trying to fund our work to survive.
We received tens of comments public and private thanking us for the explanation and saying they trust us because we are transparent and do not hide this partnership.
I don’t want to sound too emotional, but for me, this is a measure of success. Our readers care, and this project is very important to them.
FZ: Where do you sit in the political spectrum?
DF: We try our best to be impartial, even if we have our own beliefs and our own political opinions. We are very obsessed with being impartial, and we are proud to have readers from the far left to the far right of the political spectrum.
For me, this is a crucial point because everything feels so polarized. Sometimes we have to swallow our words just to make sure that we stay impartial.
Next year, we will have four rounds of elections in Romania, and we expect many readers to come to us to understand politics better. So, it’s fundamental that they can trust us because they don’t see us like the left or right media.
FZ: Which topics perform better with your audience?
DF: Every subject goes well with our audience, as long as we manage to make it interesting to them.
FZ: And how do you explain this success?
DF: There are two main reasons. First, is that all the people on the team, except two, are not from Bucharest. They are from all over the country, which means we, as a newsroom, have a better and more grounded understanding of Romania.
The second element is that, from the beginning of this project, we had a persona in mind: we are talking to a 17 years old person from a not-so-cool and not-so-big town in Romania who is going to the not the best high school in town. This person doesn’t know if they will go to university. We don't talk to young people who already know things and read the newspapers.
I would say that more than 75% of our audience is not media-literate. A relevant percentage of them will just get the news from us, but some might be curious enough to check out our news sources, which we always share.
The secret is not selling them bullshit and talking like you want someone else to talk to you.
FZ: Where do you see the project going in the next three years?
DF: We should move to an app of our own – I feel very uncomfortable being so dependent on these platforms, which can be very moody, as we see with Twitter now. I don’t know if a proprietary app is a medium or long-term project, but it’s where I would like us to go. At least part of our plans.
FZ: Can you suggest to me three good journalism accounts you like for the work they do on social platforms and why?
DF: Berlin Fresh (DW on TikTok), because I got the chance to be mentored by Johanna Rudiger and I know a little about their amazing work on the project. I love how they allow themselves to play and stay cool.
Washington Post on TikTok were my go to place during the pandemic especially, they are doing a great job, congrats to them.
And The Economist on Instagram and TikTok, because they are nailing it everywhere.
Jobs corner
Daniel Levitt kindly curated this list of social-media-related jobs. To see more jobs, subscribe to his newsletter:
Daniel has also recently released his annual free list of 300+ internships, many of which are social/audience related. Check it out here.
🇺🇸USA
The Washington Post, Sr Editor for Global Audience Strategy, in D.C.
Dotdash Meredith, Audience Conversion Manager, in Des Moines
NY Times, Editorial Assistant, Opinion Audience, in NYC
USA Today, Audience Editor, remote
🇪🇺Europe
GIJN, Social Media and Engagement Editor, remote
🇬🇧UK
BBC World Service, Senior Social Media Journalist, in London
Daily Mirror & Daily Star, Social Media Editor, in London
Yahoo UK, Head of Audience, remote
Things to read
📌 The Economist is reaching new audiences on TikTok [INMA]
📌 Mapping of Telegram channels in Ukraine, a year into the full-scale war [The Fix]
📌 TikTok Tracked Users Who Watched Gay Content [WSJ]
📌 Fear of TikTok ban pushes creators toward Instagram and YouTube [CNBC]
That’s all for this issue. If you liked it, please share it on social or forward it to your colleagues and friends.
— Francesco