Draft Four: We are live

I am writing this in between two Oamenii Dreptății shows, one performed (with great success!) in Brașov, one about to be performed this Tuesday in Sibiu (tickets still available). As I mentioned in previous letters, OD (which stands for People for Justice) is a project of Leaders for Justice, a leadership program that trains early career judges, prosecutors, attorneys, and police to become both better professionals, and better citizens. (Sorely needed in a country where 75% of people believe the justice system doesn’t deliver).

My job on the OD team is to commission and edit some of the stories coming from journalists, activists, artists. It reminds me a lot of the work I did when we were staging live journalism shows with DoR. The OD outcome is a two-hour rollercoaster of true stories about what it means to have your rights denied, and what it takes to fight for them. (A show that ends with Eyedrops dropping three great tunes).

Since that’s where my head is at, events is what I’ll write about today. It’s a tad messy, but I hope it’ll be helpful. I’ll spend most of the time on live journalism events but will bring in some insights from organizing The Power of Storytelling conference, too.

Why make them?

I have a personal affinity for putting essays on stage – mostly because the immediate connection it creates with the audience. It’s also a collective experience of sharing stories, all of us sitting there in the dark, going through something. When done right, an editor can try and build a ride that takes the audience to unexpected places, both informationally and emotionally.

In the OD shows we’re doing this fall we’ve packed moments of levity – such as the witty and brilliant duo behind Politică la Minut making a pitch for politics –, but also moments of confronting your own prejudices and complicity to the suffering of women, which Andrada Cilibiu delivers with great force and care. (In Brașov you could hear a pin drop in the room, that’s how quiet it got).

Shows like these exist around the world, but it’d venture to say that most of us producing them in the past decade have been inspired or motivated by what used to be Pop-Up Magazine. (I got to see their very last show in the US last May). Several research studies have also been done on the effect journalism live shows have on the public. A paper on the Finnish show, Musta laatikko (Black Box), concluded that it creates a “shared reality” that:

“[Can] support audiences to comprehend the news by contextualizing them as part of history and anticipated futures. (...) The stories can also transcend everyday existence by being a reminder of how finite and precious human life is. Similarly, democratic and public participation can be portrayed as a meaningful moral and universalist pursuit, rather than a citizen responsibility to be fulfilled. (...) Moreover, journalists can envelop themselves and their audience within a shared 'us' and thereby invite them to reflect on shared meanings, collective truths, and the social and ecological challenges faced by society.”

The energy in a room of a few hundred people experiencing a show is hard to match and convey – that’s why we never taped DoR Live. (OD is different). It was a unique, once in a lifetime experience. I’ll never forget a summer show called Training for tomorrow, where we told a bunch of solution-oriented stories about NGOs tackling some of the city’s and country’s problems. Every person in the 900+ hall at the National Theater got a card on which they could write their name and contacts. On their way out, they found a few boxes, one for each NGO, where they could drop their cards into. Afterwards, each NGO could reach out to solicit help or donations. More than half the room did this – they stood in line for it actually.

It’s the energy of possibility that was created in that room that did this. Early feedback from Brașov confirmed this impact – people wrote in to say they were inspired to keep building projects that could be useful to their communities.

Remember: it’s about care for the audience’s experience. I’ll be frank: what I dislike most about events in Romania is how poorly most of them plan for the audience’s experience. Not just the quality of the performance, but mostly everything around it. How you communicate with me after I buy my ticket, how you host me when I’m there, the guidance and care I get in order to be the participant you want me to be etc.

I recently attended the celebration of an important Romanian foundation – I couldn’t see the screen from my seat, the stage itself was dark, I could barely make out the faces of the panelists, and the microphones kept dying. Whatever they wanted to tell me was impaired by poor organization.

I went to events where there was no water, where trash was stacked by the door as you went in, that started 30-60-90 minutes after the time announced (beware of panels at bars and terraces). I left a screening at a documentary movie festival this spring because more than one hour after the announced start-time they were still giving speeches and handing out awards – without any guidance of long it’ll take.

We don’t devote enough time to putting ourselves in the shoes of our audience and using that projection as the standard of required care for execution. An easy example – at OD we want to do a few things when you reach the venue: signal that you’re in the right place, welcome you and scan your ticket, give you a water and a program. But we don’t want to do everything at once, so they have to happen sequentially. That means we need our people at various checkpoints in space. If the team is small enough, that means recruiting volunteers, which means having someone instruct and oversee them. And so on.

This might sound obvious to people in the events business, but especially for newsrooms that look at events as an audience development tool or a business model add-on, remember that it’s a shitload of work to actually deliver a quality experience. Among the apparently silly questions we ask ourselves as we enter the last phases of OD planning:

• Did we check the on-site restrooms? (For DoR Lives we bought soap and toilet paper more than once).
• Can we sell last-minute tickets on site? Is this communicated in the event page?
• What time do we need to start pouring wine, so glasses are out when people exit?
• Who is bringing scissors?

Yes, whatever is on stage or on the screen is what people are there for – but if the experience around it sucks, you risk making everything you built seem forgettable. Or, look at it another way: put people in the best possible position to experience what you created for them, not worry about how to find the restroom.

Money.

First of all, getting funding for these shows is harrowing. OD is lucky to have both some commercial sponsors, but also backing from embassies and foundations. But it did not happen easily. And without the backing, there is no way we could have done a three-city tour in a month. The average cost of one show is 15,000-20,000 Euros (Bucharest is pushing this average up), and this includes the venue, technicians, production, paying the team and the performers, covering their transportation and lodging when necessary, printing posters, stickers etc.

Take Brașov for example – we had more than 250 people in the theater, some of whom were the performers and other guests. Let’s say 200 people paid 60 lei (12 Euros) for a ticket – that’s still less than one fifth of the total cost. Is this is a 12 Euro show? I would argue it’s worth twice or three times that price, but that would make it completely unaffordable – especially to the people we mostly want in the room: community organizers, artists, activists, journalists, educators, students etc.

With The Power of Storytelling it’s even more complicated – this is an event that barely broke even in its first few years. So, eventually, we increased the price to around 180 Euros, which included both Saturday and Sunday’s talks, plus the lunches and coffee breaks. The whole event last time we did it, in 2019, cost a little over100.000 Euros – the venue and its associated costs ate up half the budget. (Important to note: we covered all the costs of our speakers, and a per diem, but couldn’t pay a fee). One pandemic, several wars, and massive Romanian inflation later, our cost estimate for 2025 is 250.000 Euros.

And it’s not because we decided to significantly tweak our format – it’s because costs have gone up. One reason we won’t return to our former venue is because the price has more than doubled.

But we also decided to not pass that cost onto the attendees, as most other two-day conferences do (charging from 200 Euros up to four figures for VIP experiences). We’re actually going to bring the price down to 150 Euros. But this means we’re relying on sponsors for more than half the cost – and with the exception of our long-term partner UniCredit Bank that immediately said “yes” to backing our return, it’s been a struggle. (It’s a whole different conversation on what they want in return, and what they are used to getting in Romania. The short story: too much and in ways that are too invasive.).

What I’m trying to say is that well-run events are not cheap. By all means, make them if they are part of your mission, and if that’s how you connect to your community. But to make money from them for other projects, you need to make them big and make them often. Events for 50-100-200 people rarely do more than break even.

The local realities.

I know you can have bad event experiences everywhere, but what we’ve found to be most annoying in Romania is the impossibility to find partners for long term planning. Especially venues. We wanted to host part of the next year’s PoS at the National Theater in Bucharest, so we asked about 10 months before – they said they don’t talk about renting the halls until three months before. Which means you don’t have guaranteed dates, or a quote, so you can’t invite speakers or make too many plans with this much unknown. We also tried a few other private venues – more than one said something along the lines of “2025? That’s far. Come back later.” (There is another whole different conversation about how people with contacts get public spaces – museum halls, universities, building owned by publicly-funded entities etc. – for events that others can’t access, sometimes even for a fee.)

Truth be told, I’m still waiting for a series of stories about how public institutions rent space – suffice to say it’s an incoherent mess, from contracting, to getting tech specs, to communicating with them. In 2017 we had to cancel a DoR Live the day of the event because the politically-appointed director of the theater was notified there’d be “politics in the content” – actually a critique of the party that put him in power. He said we should remove it. We said “no” and elected to cancel – we did eventually stage the show a month later, protest piece included.

In Brașov we got to the Opera only to find out we can’t do projection and lights from the same room (as we were initially told), and had to do them from different floors, which meant more people that had to sit with technicians. Then we realized the sound cable linking the projection to the mixer was broken; they shrugged. So we went out and spent 200 Euros on 30 meter XLR cables and a DI box. Did I mention the director argued with a colleague over the color of the tablecloths we were using? They were black. He said we are ruining the brand of his institution and said we have to use his – they were shiny purple.

The reason we were able to pull such changes off and not get completely sidetracked is because we tried to account for everything we could beforehand, so that when crises happen – and they do – we have the bandwidth to handle them.

I know some colleagues and collaborators have rolled their eyes at our incessant questioning about things being in place and predictable before we get there, but I still believe you try to control everything you can before you arrive, so you can then improvise with the unexpected things that arise. And do bring your own spare batteries for microphones and Tesa tape for cables. Trust me.

Tools.

For OD we’re not doing anything too complicated, because we’re not a professional events company. We have a bunch of Excel spreadsheets for our different needs: from keeping the budget, to organizing social media and outreach, to sketching out the show (see below).

On site, the whole show is backed-up by a Keynote presentation that includes photographs, audio and video that play on the screen, either to enhance a story or act as a mood changer. But yes, that presentation is built on a template from an art director (in OD’s case, the brilliant Emilian Mocanu), because we want to be mindful of how things are presented.

We also worked with a recurring Friday morning meeting for the past couple of months, plus a WhatsApp group. I’m not a big fan of WhatsApp groups, but we established some ground rules, and it more or less did the job at OD. For PoS we moved to Slack the moment our team grew to five people, because that will be more complex and intensive, and separate channels will come in handy.

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I hope this peek behind the scenes is useful – both to understand the mechanics, but also to make you think about the economics and the reasoning for why you would do events. My take? Please do them because you have something to offer to people, and then do your damn hardest to offer it at the best possible quality. Because I believe you should want to hear people praise or criticize the content (so you know what to do more of and less of next time), and not grumble about the way it was organized.

SIDE DISHES:

1. A useful post on event templating, especially for news organizations. It also includes a template of questions you should ask yourself before putting together an event.
2. Another great tool is this Live Journalism Workbook from the American Press Institute with step by step guidance on how to get it done.
3. Remember that our OD fall tour ends on November 12, with a show in Bucharest. Hope to see you there! And the next PoS comes around March 22-23, 2025 – we’ll announce a first batch of speakers and open registration within the next few weeks.
4. We made an OD’24 playlist with some of the Romanian artists signed to the BandBook booking agency – it’s pretty neat actually.

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