THREAD: Here’s a story from Romania about how our newsroom at DoR ( @decatorevista) is navigating the pandemic thus far, what decisions we took with our journalism, and what the road ahead looks like. (TL;DR - great time for mission; tough time for revenue.) 1/15

March 11, the day the new coronavirus was declared a global pandemic, was our last day working in the newsroom. Romania at that point had 29 confirmed cases, and 0 deaths. We started working remotely, and channeled all our editorial efforts into covering the crisis. 2/15

For those new to DoR, we started as a quarterly mag of narrative journalism in '09. We're now digital-first. Our history is one of ups & downs, innovation & resilience both in our storytelling, and our biz model. Connection, community, and complexity have always been core. 3/15

Once we decided to work remote, we also started a daily pop-up newsletter. We called it Pandemic Journal, and it was conceived, sketched, designed, and published in two days. We kicked off Saturday, March 14, and we’ll cross the 4.000 subscriber mark by Sunday. 4/15

We conceived it as a daily magazine: an intuitive and repetitive format, but with plenty of room for serendipity. Each day readers know they'll get curated news from Romania and the world, plus the Good News of the Day, but the rest is supposed to a surprise. 5/15

There are recurring features: what's new in schools, in rural Romania, in our readers' lives, but also advice for keeping mentally and physically fit, visual essays, short “pandemic fictions” (commissioned prose or poems from local authors), an occasional “postcard from…" 6/15

The tone mixes the informative and serious, the somber and the hopeful. Our mission is to bring people together, and help them connect, create a path for action, and see solutions to the problems we're living through. News-speak is not apt at many of these. 7/15

The newsletter has tremendous feedback, mostly along these lines: "this is how I start my day”, “it’s my main digest”, "I'm not afraid to start my day with it, even though it tells me things I don't like hearing”, and “it doesn’t focus on the negative or rob us of agency. 8/15

We rotate the writer and curator every week, along with a couple of other colleagues that help with proofing, MailChimp uploads and the like. It’s increased collaboration and autonomy in our team, and by now we’re running like clockwork. 9/15

It's a tremendous way to fulfill our mission. It’s also showing signs that it can generate some revenue from the readers we’re converting into members. Our traffic and our social media numbers have also spiked. But is it enough to keep us sustainable? No. 10/15

We have money in the bank till June. But we had to scrap events scheduled for March, April, and most likely May. We don’t know whether we’ll be able to print our summer issue or organize our yearly DoR Live show in July, or the 10th anniversary of the @pofstorytelling . 11/15

We halted a bunch of our other products, and newsletters. We directed our members to our daily journal. We also opened a Slack workspace for them, to have more intimate and meaningful conversations. The team is ironing out a moderation/hosting strategy. 12/15

So it's definitely a moment of opportunity to deliver on our mission. But it's also a moment of worry, because without print sales, events, and new grants (the other spokes of our revenue wheel), the summer and fall will be rough. We're taking it bird by bird. 13/15

Today, more than ever, I hope our stories - which always had people and their obstacles and hopes at the center - can be part of the cure, and a way for our readers to keep being connected with what's going on in the world, without feeling hopeless. 14/15

More on how we’re thinking about this is the piece below. I wish today we could have been drinking wine and laughing over our usual struggles at @journalismfest, but here we are. Hope to share survival stories at #ijf21. #staysafe 15/15 https://medium.com/@decatorevista/making-sense-of-the-pandemic-together-one-newsletter-at-a-time-bde932ad261d