🔶 #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.)