RADAR Magazine focuses on telling compelling stories about the climate crisis, the environment and social justice. As part of the accelerator cohort, they were seeking to build a sustainable reader revenue model to continue delivering their essential reporting on climate change.
Here, they explain what the experience meant to their newsroom.
RADAR Magazine was born in September in the fall of 2020. We started the Transition Accelerator in the fall of 2022. IPI’s initiative has therefore been with us for a significant part of RADAR Magazine’s journey.
RADAR’s adventure began almost out of pure editorial necessity: the coverage of climate change and environmental issues was just too superficial, too limited. All the members have long experience in legacy media but their desires and ambitions clashed with the Italianjournalistic landscape. We wanted to do more and we wanted to do better; something that would really make an impact on Italy’s environmental and social awareness. \We won several grants for cross-border journalism projects, the most important of which allowed RADAR to work as a peer to Le Monde, The Guardian and Süddeutsche Zeitung. RADAR members, month after month, became globetrotters: we began to show our presence everywhere, at conferences and during key events for European journalism.
During the summer of 2022, we decided to send the application for the IPI’s Transition Accelerator. Once we had been selected, we began a journey that allowed us to structure ourselves even more and to focus on what our real goals to achieve sustainability should be . That is how, over six months, we developed new editorial products while conducting editorial experiments.
First, we carried out a survey and interviews; at the same time, we developed a new, more immediate and intuitive donation system. This was joined by initiatives such as a series of articles that intercepted some specific local communities, who were made participants in the whole process of gathering information and writing. Last, we started a new newsletter, called “Solar”, which is focused on solutions to the climate crisis. This is yet another experiment we are conducting to express our identity.
Today RADAR is at a crossroads, having moved beyond the usual project with lots of good intentions but no direction, and working towards becoming a serious, solid, healthy, structured, impactful publishing enterprise. Without the Transition Accelerator, we would still be stuck in an immature conception of creating a publishing project.
The future is unwritten. We keep moving forward on this journey.
The Transition Accelerator is part of the Media Innovation Europe (MIE) project, co-funded by the European Commission. The programme is led by the International Press Institute, and implemented in collaboration with Thomson Media, the Media Development Foundation and BIRN and is intended to empower media outlets as they navigate the digital transition, giving them journalistic tools and skills in diverse products and business structures in order to reach audiences and bring sustainability.
