🔶 #69: The hive mind that started it all

Hello from the third of six airports I'm visiting this month (🫠) and welcome back to the News Alchemists newsletter!

And a first welcome to new subscribers from Agência Mural, Daily Maverick, and all of you brave souls working independently.

I didn’t know it at the time, but it was almost exactly two years ago today when the idea for this newsletter started germinating in my head.

That first seed already had a lot of the features that today define this space we share every week:

• A collection of interesting links – curated not only by me in that case;
• A post on LinkedIn, of course;
• And many people with great ideas and experiences generously sharing drops (or entire seas sometimes) of knowledge and inspiration with each other.

I was a fellow with the International Center for Journalists at the time, and the original News Alchemists community was just taking its first steps.

The concept of people-centricity was starting to emerge – although I called it extreme user-centricity initially – but I didn't have a clear definition yet, and I needed more examples to understand it.

So I went ahead with the only way I know to conduct "research" as the non-academic collaborative spirit I am: I asked my network on LinkedIn for examples: