The longer story

Autocratic environments make media numbingly dull and create a sameness that is deadening. But societies are anything but. They're rich in diverse experiences that can inform, inspire, and expand horizons.

We're obsessed with transcending these limitations to inform the public—silence or noise, bias or lies—with stories well reported and told.

We have reported from, worked with, and led newsrooms in some of the world's most hostile places for journalists, including China, Myanmar, Iran, Afghanistan, and Russia. While we started out looking for good stories, we have learned along the way that impactful reporting means writing not just about communities but for them.

That's when great journalism can, in an instant, assume its own momentum and get shared, on and on, until the stories told become part of the shared narratives that are the foundations of collective identity.

How media organizations have navigated these challenges offers lessons for media everywhere on how to render them more resilient to silencing and more intentional in overcoming any disconnect from the people they are aspiring to serve.

We now work on building and supporting newsrooms, maturing their digital strategies through audience research, remote reporting, digital security, and real-world iterative product development. It's our mission to help news leaders address their challenges related to media irrelevance and disconnection.

In these projects, we've failed often and have seen many projects and newsrooms fail. The challenges are not just external (lack of access, surveillance, harassment, intimidation, and violence). They're much more often internal due to a lack of clarity on questions like "Who do we serve?" "What is our sustainable competitive advantage?" and "How do we measure success?".

Success stories have been very intentional in what they were trying to do, willing to test, iterate, and sometimes discard approaches that didn't work in pursuit of their overarching theory of change.