Navid, you are about to launch an online television channel that offers what you call ‘Islamic content’. Why is such a platform important?

Look at the Muslim digital real estate. It’s full of extremist noise but in terms of positive ideas, it’s empty. There are many positive stories that don’t get told. People want to hear stories of ordinary Muslims: of successful business men, Graffiti artists, fashion designers and skateboarders. They want to see that stuff, not just once a year but all the time.

Do you intentionally aim at projecting a positive image of Islam?

When you describe it like that it sounds like I have some kind of moral mission. It’s more a case of making programs that I personally enjoy. I am European, I am British, I am a Londoner. But I also have an appreciation for the architecture of the Muslim world, for its culture and literature. I want to make programs about gardens and poetry, about beauty and achievement. The market is saturated with bad news about Islam. At Alchemiya, we will be looking at people who have found solutions to all those problems.

You were born into an immigrant family in the UK and have worked for the British broadcasting industry for more than 20 years. Is Alchemiya related to your personal biography?

My parents are from Pakistan. I was the first in the family who went to university. When I first started working in mainstream media, I was doing programs about design and history. After 2001, everybody wanted me to make films explaining extremism and terrorism. So I became a specialist in that area. But I got very tired of it. I couldn’t switch off anymore. As a Muslim journalist, it goes very deep. I was afraid I’d burn myself out.

When launched, how will Alchemiya work?

We are an online video-on-demand platform very similar to Netflix. About 40 percent of our content we’re producing unique new ideas and 60 percent we are sourcing from across the world. We have found many producers who feel frustrated because they can’t get their projects commissioned. So Alchemiya will work simultaneously as a commissioning house.

You have been thinking about Alchemiya for four years. How did you put your initial idea into practice?

In 2007, I started my own production company Gazelle Media. We went to the BBC and Channel 4 but weren’t very successful. After that, we did a lot of research. I went to visit different people in Kuala Lumpur, Abu Dhabi, Istanbul and the USA and learned that there is a new market of people who are looking for Islamic content. There is a blurring demand globally for people who want to watch this stuff. Because I understand this internet space, I learned that rather than being a producer and selling to the big channels, I can actually bring the customers straight to me.

When did you start setting up your team?

About two years ago I met a trustworthy guy who has experience in ‘big finances’ and I also knew an imam. It’s odd in the business world to bring an imam in, but Ajmal Mansour provides a lot of credibility to our project. At present even more people have joined us. This is exciting for them because it’s one of the first high quality tech project for Muslims.

Looking back at the development phase, what was your biggest mistake?

I wasted a lot of money and time trying to meet big investors. In this day and age, don’t go chasing investment money. Economies have changed. First you have to develop your product and harness support from customers. Then the guys with the money will come chasing after you.

Do you have any funding?

The initial funding is coming from the customers themselves. We offered them a 2-year subscription for 100 British Pounds (130 euro). It’s a kind of ‘crowdfunding’. We have asked people an advance subscription. We’re looking for 3,000 subscribers and are about a third of the way through that. It’s all done on trust. In Islamic finance, this is an acceptable mode of financing. This has secured our control over the project. We’ve also had offers of investment but we’re accepting only small amounts. We don’t want some big investor to take control over the project.

When are you planning to launch Alchemiya?

We’re hoping to have a beta version by the end of the year. A full service will come quite quickly, after a month or so.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Interview by Jannis Hagmann, edited by Kate Hairsine

Setrakian left her cushy TV job (her words) with Bloomberg and ABC News because she felt the mainstream media coverage of the Syria crisis was difficult to follow with chaotic storylines instead of thorough reporting on the war and its humanitarian consequences.

In an interview with onMedia’s Jannis Hagmann, Setrakian talks about how she wants to fuse traditional journalism with startup culture and reform the coverage of global crises.

Lara, three years after the uprising started in Syria, what is your take on media coverage of the crisis?

Certain news organizations have been doing an incredibly thorough job covering the situation. AFP, Reuters or even the Wall Street Journal have had multiple reporters on the ground. Still, I feel the overall user experience of the Syria crisis is terrible. It is very difficult to follow and to understand the context.

In December 2012, you launched the single-story website, Syria Deeply. How is it different to traditional news sites?

We have a combination of social media monitoring, news aggregation, select curation and data visualization. Our most important consideration was user-centricity: how do we put users at the center and how do they capture as much information as possible?

Why do you need a single-topic platform for that? Why focus just on Syria?

We need more space and flexibility than traditional news platforms can provide. We have a lot of stories about what some would consider boring everyday life. But the truth is, everyday life is very important. We want to explain the broader dynamics of what’s going on through a snapshot of everyday life. There is not much attention being paid to what’s happening inside Syria. As soon as it became difficult to access the story inside the country, the internal dynamics basically disappeared and only coverage of the diplomatic front and other easier-to-reach aspects were available.

You have a video box and a Twitter feed on your site but also reports from your staffers in Syria. How do you tackle the problem of being denied access to the country?

We find individuals in Syria who would have been our fixers but train them to write for us and empower them to tell their own stories in a professional way. These are people who write in Arabic. Therefore we wouldn’t usually hear from them. But investing the energy in training and engaging them and then translating their work gives us access to a whole new realm of storytelling.

How many people work on Syria Deeply?

We have six full-time staffers and 14 Syrians working in various capacities. We hope we can make more of these people full-time. Western journalists tend to treat locals as assistants. Locals generally don’t get the credits, the training or the capacity building. But we want these journalists to thrive so that one day, when we all move on to the next story, they still have the skills to perpetuate an independent media.

But for now, the Syrians who work for you are freelancers?

They are freelance but write quite often. They send us stories and we often go back and forth several times and ask for more specifics. We do our utmost to make sure that they know what it means to file a piece as a journalist – not as an activist or revolutionary but as a journalist.

What measures do you take to protect your correspondents in the field?

We use pseudonyms for all of our reporters and we don’t show people’s faces. We do our utmost to protect identities and are very cautious of cybersecurity issues. We’ve also engaged with partners like the Committee to Protect Journalists to implement some of the best practices they recommend.

What is the most important lesson you have learned creating your own media project?

There is a great power in consistency. When you are consistent with something, there will be many boosts along the way. People will come to you, you’ll become magnetic, you’ll become an address for sources and resources. I’ve also learned a great deal about how to fuse journalistic culture with startup culture. The ability to approach the type of journalism we do with a certain kind of project management has given us an absolutely power-packed approach.

Does that mean that being an entrepreneur is among the required skills of journalists in the Digital Age?

Journalists have to be much more creative and resourceful. They have to think about all the different ways their work can manifest, all the different sources that can input into their story. Journalists need to be aware of what they are delivering to the end user. They have to think more like startups.

What plans do you have for the future?

I’m extremely dedicated to whatever it takes to figure this out and to get this right. I’m personally extremely dedicated to Syria, I plan to stay dedicated to Syria until we finalize a sustainable model for excellent news coverage but I am very passionate about what we can do beyond this – extending the model to other sorts of issues such Arctic Deeply, Ocean’s Deeply or Alzheimer’s Deeply.

A first-generation Armenian-American (her partents fled the civil war in Lebanon), Setrakian’s first foreign posting was to Iran and her use of social media in covering that country’s 2009 election protests was widely acclaimed. She worked as a foreign correspondent for more than five years, covering the Middle East for television, radio, and digital platforms. Speaking with onMedia, Setrakian says she sees giving up her televsion career for the uncertain world of digital journalism as an opportunity to facilitate human understanding of a complex issue. “It’s more important to me than being on television,” she says “than any byline because I do believe that journalism is in the global pulic interest.” 

Syria Deeply is currently financed through foundation grants plus has some independent revenue sources from using their technological skills to build websites for others.

Interview by Jannis Hagmann, edited by Kate Hairsine

Three years since it was founded, Storyful has attracted some major clients, including ABC, Al Jazeera and the New York Times, and generated hundreds of articles about its innovative take on news gathering – though the company has yet to break even. DW Akademie’s Kate Hairsine talks to Mark Little about why he started up a social media news agency in the first place, his belief in journalism and why he thinks journalists can make great entrepreneurs.

Where did the idea for Storyful come from?

I was a foreign correspondent for the Irish national TV station, RTE. In about 2009, I realized the job being done by professional journalists was increasingly being done by ordinary people, by people with camera phones which enabled them to share pictures and essentially create journalism. I realized that this was the opportunity to join forces with these newly empowered citizens and tell stories about the world. But the problem is as soon as everyone can tell a story, who do you listen to? A hundred hours of video are now uploaded to YouTube every single minute. How do you find the video that actually shapes the great stories of our time? I realized that the only way to do that was to bring professional journalists back in to manage this overabundance of information. They would be the ones that would add context and shape the stories around these incredible images coming from places like Syria. So I thought, “let’s break the old news agency model, let’s start again from scratch” and that’s where Storyful came from.

Weren’t you concerned about leaving your safe job with a national broadcaster to become an entrepreneur?

Some people said to me later they thought I was leaving because I had had a nervous breakdown. I was leaving a well-paid job as the anchorman for the evening news program and it was a nice cushy lifestyle that I easily could have gotten used to. But I imagined my child 20 years later asking me, “what did you do Dad when you had that great idea?” and answering “nothing” – that would have been worse than falling flat on my face trying. I realized I wanted to be able to answer, “I tried”. On the other hand, it was also survival. I wanted to create a sustainable business model for the journalism that inspired me when I was a kid. And if I don’t do it, who else is going to do it? I think we all have a personal responsibility right now not to moan about the problems facing journalism. Instead, let’s do something and create something.

What skills did you bring with you that helped in founding a news agency?

Storyful was conceived so it wasn’t just about news; it is about stories and storytelling. Being Irish, I think we have a particular tradition of storytelling, it is something in my DNA. I had also been a foreign correspondent and I had been self sufficient. I had essentially been an entrepreneur in the field because I had set up the first Washington bureau for my station and I had been on my own in very tough situations. Getting up in front of a group of investors is far less scary when you have been shot at in Afghanistan. These experiences gave me the confidence to just do it. They also gave me a sense of vision. I had spent 20 years believing in journalism and that is a pretty infectious thing.

Where there times that you stood up in front of a group of investors and thought, “oh dear, I wish I knew more about business”?

I can’t count the amount of times that I have sat in rooms full of people who have MBAs and I just shut up because I didn’t know what they were talking about and that is still the case today. But I think one of the great things about being an entrepreneur and a journalist is that they are very complementary. They are both about leadership and about vision. Once you have those skills, you can learn everything else. You can’t learn vision and leadership. They are things that are built into journalism and that is what  makes journalists potentially great entrepreneurs.

Foreign correspondents aren’t renowned for their teamwork though – aren’t they too individualistic to inspire a team?

As a foreign correspondent, you are incredibly driven and egoistical to a certain extent. But at the same time, you have to have certain skills of persuasion to get your team to get in the jeep to follow you to the frontline or get on the plane with you where there is a risk of dying. So I have never felt there’s a contradiction between the two because that is also what business is about – it is about egotistical people with missions who manage to bring people with them.

It’s normal now to see YouTube videos and Twitter photos being used by serious news organizations but this is quite a recent phenomenon. How difficult was it three years ago to find investors for your idea of a social media news agency?

When I was leaving my previous job someone said, “you just said the word tweet on air” as if I had said an expletive. I remember thinking there was an underdeveloped notion of what was going on. It was of course much more difficult to try to raise half a million euro in Ireland in 2009 and 2010 when the country was going off the cliff. But at the same time, investors aren’t looking to imitate what is going on: they are looking for the next new thing. From that point of view, it wasn’t that difficult to persuade people who are by nature disruptive to invest in an idea where there was no market, there was no product, there were no landmarks and no precedent. There was nothing. There was just the sense of vision.

How are you making money?

We have built up a subscription model so we have news organizations around the world who pay us a monthly fee to discover and verify the most valuable content on the social web. This can be big news events but also trends that are catching fire on social media. In the past year, we have also developed a content licensing model. When we find a particularly compelling video that we think has the capacity to attract millions of views, we work in partnership with the uploader to make as much money as possible. We do that by revenue share on platforms such as Yahoo, AOL and MSN. We also do it by selling content though our partners and getting as many views as possible. And finally YouTube themselves have helped us build a business through managing the most compelling videos on their platform.

“Take your time in hiring the right people,” Little says

What kind of mistakes did you make when you first started?

One of the key mistakes you will make is picking the wrong people who don’t necessarily share your vision. People who don’t share your vision should not be on the journey with you and that is something that you don’t realize sometimes until it is too late. I think the other thing I realized was to be true to yourself. I would take decisions because I felt someone with more experience of business was advising me to do it even it didn’t feel right in my gut. All of the mistakes I have made are the things that didn’t feel true to me.

You say it’s important to employ people who share your vision. What kind of people are working for you?

We have 30 people working for us in Dublin, Atlanta (in New York State) and in Hong Kong. The vast majority are journalists. We have some old broadcasters like myself but we tend to find those who are the most adept when they come into Storyful are younger sub-editors who have worked in production, the kind of people who have worked catching mistakes for news organizations or newspapers. They are social media natives, who pay attention to detail and can tell you where the punctuation should go but are also good storytellers. They are the new breed of journalists who are going to thrive –  people who are not afraid of change, who are slightly pedantic, who are innovative but also ambitious and aggressive.

What are you personally getting out of Storyful?

To be honest, the biggest sense of achievement I have right now is not building Storyful but is building the team that built Storyful and inspiring people. I was 41 when I started Storyful. It wasn’t like I was a 15 year old in the basement inventing this technology. I have a wife, I have kids. I mortgaged my house and we lived on nothing. I didn’t get paid for a while and I had been very well paid. I think essentially asking them to come on the journey with me was really difficult. Other people have made sacrifices because they believed in what I told them and at times, they have suffered as well. So on a personal level, now we are three years in, I want to reward the people who believed in me. In addition, I am very proud to be part of a movement that I think will emerge, not from Silicon Valley or New York, but probably from Nairobi or Singapore. And if one person in Kenya or Burma or Brazil sees the example of Storyful and goes and founds a company, that is a better tribute than anything I could have got as a journalist.

Interview: Kate Hairsine

However, there are exceptions to the rule. The kublog.ru project in Krasnodar in southern Russia was developed around the idea to build communities interested in the local events. Some three months after its launch, kublog.ru has reached around 1000 unique daily users and has sparked a lot of controversy over its independent critique of the local media, restaurants and art events.

DW Akademie’s Natalia Karbasova talked to editor-in-chief Anna Chervyakova about kublog’s development and locally focused internet communities in Russia.

How did Kublog come to life?

Boris Maltsev, local online entrepreneur, decided it was high time to develop a new online project. He understood that regional internet has a big future and saw that such a project hadn’t existed before. That’s when we sat together and discussed it.

What’s so different about Kublog?

Kublog is not a medium or a blog. We are a website which contains blogs and articles – and they are treated on par. We keep people updated on the latest events in the city.

We post announcements of upcoming events, reports from the events which already took place and we publish blogs and comments of people who were at those events. We concentrate on events and people around them, such as event organizers, creative class and locations. That is, we are talking about the unofficial side of the city life. We don’t write about the governor and where he spends his time. We report equally on big professional and small private events. An event itself is important, not how big or small it is.

Also, we have a database on all the locations in the city and offer critique and reviews of the local events, restaurants, websites, blogs and other local activities. What we did was to create a platform with a lot of professional critique on a regular basis.

Are you happy with the project?

Yes! Three months after the launch, we have reached the mark of 1000 unique daily users, social media virtually exploded following the launch of our review series. We notice that people know us, we are invited to almost every event in the city. Moreover, reporters and photographers want to work for us, not because we pay much (we don’t really pay much), but because Kublog means something interesting, fresh and unusual.

After two months we started to sell ads, which is a real success for a local online project in Russia. Every month, we publish a report on our expenses and income, so that everyone can follow the development of the project.

How many people are working for Kublog?

We have three staffers and 20 freelance photographers and reporters. Each month, we publish 170 photo reports. I guess there’re no precedents in this regard.

Which is the main lesson learned?

We discovered that Kublog is a real cash cow. The regional internet communities niche in Russia is almost empty.

What’s your advice for journalists who want to launch an innovative project?

I guess they should try and find very specific and concrete information about every event and then make universal summaries. It’s also important to know that users are uniting around social networks where they can follow their specific local interests. That’s a great chance.

About Anna Chervyakova:

Before launching Kublog, Anna worked as a correspondent for the local business newspaper Delovaja Gazeta. Yug   Business Newspaper. South and for the regional website Zhivaja Kuban. She has also authored a book about the Krasnodar Region. Before that, she’d worked in the police press service, in an NGO, in the local administration and in sales and advertising. She’s also worked as cinema projectionist.