🔶 News Alchemists #65: Seven interesting media outlets you might not have heard of.

Hello, and welcome back to the News Alchemists newsletter!

And a first welcome to new subscribers from Jnomics Media, Sjællandske Medier, Mašina, Contlab Media, Bold News, and all of you brave souls working independently. I hope you like it around here.

Last week I was in Vienna at the International Press Institute's Media Innovation Festival.

With Sarah Alvarez and Jeremy Gilbert, I hosted a conversation on "Redefining journalism's essential functions", which went very well – partly thanks to a simple people-centric decision: we invited questions and opinions from the audience after the first 10-15 minutes rather than talking among us for 55 minutes out of 60.

Sadly the conversation wasn’t recorded, but if you’re intrigued by the topic, you can read more about it here and here.

Beyond our own session, I quite enjoyed the event — most of all because I didn't know 90% of the other people in the room.

That’s rare at journalism conferences, and it was by design: IPI is consistently good at supporting and spotlighting lesser known small- and medium-sized organisations with interesting stories to share.

So I’m using this email to share the people-centric experiments of seven organisations that IPI has supported in the last year, from an investigative outlet in Afghanistan, to a local media in Ukraine, and a fact-checking organisation from Catalonia.

I’ll stop here with the review of the event and spare you my thoughts on a panel on media funding that managed to annoy me both because of the format (6 speakers! 75 minutes! Big NO to both things) and for the takes expressed by some of the funders on stage (core funding = bad, because these silly journalists can't be trusted with using our money wisely).

Alright, enough with the rage bait. Enjoy the links, and see you next week! 📚

P.S. Best quote from Vienna: “Impact is not something you hope for.” — Hiba Monzer, Impact and Innovation Lead at Daraj Media, Lebanon.

P.P.S.: The conference tour continues this week: let me know if you'll be at Newsrewired in London this Thursday! (Still a few tickets left, I'm told.)

1. Recorder: Romanian investigative outlet is building a CRM that creates value for their community 👉 LINK

🧩 Recorder is an investigative media outlet from Romania that invested in a new CRM to centralise information about its supporters and better understand their behaviour.

2. BehanBox: Innovative approaches to amplify the voices of marginalized communities in India 👉 LINK

🧩 BehanBox is an Indian organisation that focuses on bringing the voices of women and gender diverse people to the centre of public discourse. Through rigorous impact tracking and a deep commitment to its community, the team led by founder 🧞Bhanupriya Rao embodies people-centricity on multiple levels.

3. Cukr is making Sumy cool through slow journalism and community-building 👉 LINK

🧩 Cukr is a media outlet from and about Sumy, Ukraine – launched by a group of journalism graduates in 2019, tired of hearing that "nothing ever happens" and that "there are no prospects" in their town.

4. ZanTimes: Investigative outlet from Afghanistan fosters audience engagement for solidarity and sustainable journalism 👉 LINK

🧩 ZanTimes is an investigative network of Afghan journalists, both in exile and in Afghanistan, that successfully pivoted to a reader revenue model after a significant loss of funding in early 2025.

5. Siena is reimagining sustainable journalism through business mindset and community building 👉 LINK

🧩 Siena has nothing to do with the beautiful city you should probably visit on your next trip to Italy: it’s a small investigative journalism outlet from Lithuania that punches way above its weight.

6. Maldives Independent: A successful formula for a lean and product-focused membership scheme 👉 LINK

🧩 Maldives Independent is a news organisation that relaunched in 2025 after a 5-year hiatus, betting on membership "to secure long-term sustainability without compromising editorial independence."

7. Verificat’s strategy to strengthen audience engagement and community trust 👉 LINK

🧩 Verificat is a fact-checking organisation from Catalonia, Spain, that helps people move from passive readers to active participants through a combination of engagement activities that includes "educational contests, workshops, public debates, and youth fact-checking initiatives".

And the most clicked link from the previous edition is... 🥁

The JournalismUK piece about "stand-out Perugia speakers that might have flown under your radar":

10 lesser-known talks at IJF Perugia

Sometimes, star speakers can overshadow important voices that the journalism industry needs to hear. We spotlight sessions that perhaps didn’t get the attention they deserved

Journalism UKJacob Granger

The fact that this piece was so popular is part of the reason why I thought you'd like to know about seven more organisations that are not often in the spotlight.

⇲ The LinkedIn Corner

A section of this email in which I highlight LinkedIn posts written by newsletter readers that, for different reasons, may not make it to the 7-links league, but are still interesting to share. This week...

1. Dan (Oshinsky, of must-read-if-you-work-with-newsletters Inbox Collective) asks: "Should we all be thinking about inventing our own metrics?" Interesting examples in his post and in the comments of how organisations and creators measure the success of their newsletters.
2. Camilla shares a reflection on two camps in the journalism industry approaching the question "What is journalism FOR now?" in completely different ways.
3. Tom wrote about why "the idea of future-proofing sounds reassuring, but it rests on a false premise."

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