English Club (Batali), North Macedonia, is an online media outlet reporting on local, regional and national issues focused on social issues and development policies. Their team explains what they achieved as participants in IPI’s first Transition Accelerator:
How to build a new media product which simultaneously meets the audience’s needs and addresses the global green trends in society? Answering this question was the main challenge of the Batali.net and Tulip pro team when we joined the IPI Accelerator.
We were expecting some new information, know-how and skills in building online media products. We received much more than that.
The new skills built during the training and the Vienna Bootcamp, especially in product thinking, designing a product field canvas and building audience relationships motivated us to change our perspective and use a bottom-up approach, starting with identifying the needs of our community.
Additionally, we enhanced our capacities to produce podcasts and debates during the training. We have learned how to approach our audience, how to attract their direct participation in our project, and how to build something new and useful for the community – together.
The level of interest shown by different stakeholders in participating in our video stories surprised us. People are eager to show and explain the global green transformation to others. This applies especially to people working in industry and public facilities, but also to ordinary citizens. These days we are working on the street with the public, hearing their thoughts and ideas on green solutions.
As we are preparing the final project phase with a podcast and debates, with each step forward, we are more and more confident that our product, GREEN LIFE, will attract public attention on a local, regional, and national level. With the equipment provided by the Transition Accelerator and the project funders, we can create high quality products suitable for digital and social media broadcast.
The project support is a real wind at our back in the effort to build the first integrated online media product fully dedicated to green solutions in our country.
What’s more, the project network and our new friends from various countries are an inestimable added value to the project. For us, it is an excellent opportunity to exchange ideas, practices, and skills, and to follow media development trends in other countries.
We are hoping that the lessons learned, together with the project deliverables, will motivate more and more online media to participate in IPI’s innovation programmes and create their own solutions to community problems. That’s how our network will grow together, harnessing its power to contribute to solving the challenges in communities around the world.
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, 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.
