Introducing Fathm’s Eight Core Principles for Sustainable Newsrooms
Over the last year at Fathm we’ve been working to determine how we can best continue supporting the news industry in a time of uncertain but rapid change (again). During this time industry colleagues have quite often asked us to concisely define what we do as a company; a request that comes with it’s own challenges. This is because as a company, we are flexible and adaptable, and take pride in being able to provide our clients with support across a broad range of news and journalism activities and challenges. Additionally, with innovation at the heart of what we do, there’s always the risk that what we define could be out of date faster than we can come up with the copy.
And so we have done something else instead.
We’ve defined what we believe are the core principles for ensuring news and media businesses chart a path to sustainability. And when we say “sustainability” we mean in every sense of the word; from environment, to finances to equity.
These core principles define the areas of our work as much as they define how we approach it. Through publishing and sharing these core principles we hope they will resonate with others who share our values, mission, and processes, and that they might also adopt them. Hopefully they will be as useful to you as they are to us.
We’ve made a video that sets it all out here.
Fathm’s Eight Core Principles for Sustainability in Your Newsroom
Ultimately sustainability starts with serving your audience. Understanding your current – and future – audiences means knowing who they are, what they need, and how you can better serve them.
Optimising for Trust is our second principle. Your audiences need to feel able to turn to journalism for clarity and transparency in an information ecosystem awash with noise and misinformation. Trust is the fundamental currency of news.
Recognising the role of climate in every decision is essential if we want to achieve meaningful sustainability. Collectively we all have a responsibility to ensure our workplaces operate in a way that minimises environmental impact.
Creating space for innovation is the only way of effectively future-proofing your strategy. This means understanding and embracing new products and business models in order to adapt and thrive in an ever-changing environment.
The people who make your organisation successful are your strongest asset which means investing in future leaders needs to be a top priority. Retaining top talent increases efficiency and means you and your team are prepared for whatever comes next.
Whatever the work, we have seen that a strong workflow is key to enable you to operating efficiently, not to mention achieving team productivity and satisfaction.
Realising the opportunities in new technologies and identifying the skills you need means keeping up with the latest trends but also realising the benefits of technology at the right moment for you.
Measuring your impact will help you determine the viability of your work, product and ideas. With philanthropy a growing source of revenue for global journalism, impact measurement means you can both make stronger pitches to funders and increase audience revenue.
We’re upholding these principles in our work every day, for example:
By helping newsrooms figure out technological advances in AI and helping them future-proof their strategy accordingly.
Through our work with organisations who are ready to build out fact checking teams or develop an election product that is optimised for trust. By enabling organisations to be more environmentally accountable, through understanding and reducing their impact withr carbon footprint mapping, and implementing low-carbon workflows as part of an efficient, tailor-made climate strategy.
Through helping newsrooms define what impact means for their organisation, creating the impact strategy they need to measure, communicate and achieve their goals.
We’d love for you to join us on this journey so please do get in touch.
Fergus & Tom