Fiction for Social Change
September's Tertulia was an inspiring display of ideas, traditional blended with new. Our discussion explored how storytelling—a profoundly human activity—can have powerful social and cultural consequences.
Our conversation was guided by Marianne Díaz Hernández, an exceptional writer, researcher, and internet human rights activist.
By Laura Vidal
Research & Project Specialist,
Latin America
IRIS
September's Tertulia was an inspiring display of ideas, traditional blended with new. Our discussion explored how storytelling—a profoundly human activity—can have powerful social and cultural consequences.
Our conversation was guided by Marianne Díaz Hernández, an exceptional writer, researcher, and internet human rights activist.
September's Tertulia was an inspiring display of ideas, traditional blended with new. Our discussion explored how storytelling—a profoundly human activity—can have powerful social and cultural consequences.
Our conversation was guided by Marianne Díaz Hernández, an exceptional writer, researcher, and internet human rights activist. It has been a pleasure to share Marianne's knowledge with the Tertulia participants, especially since we have worked on many projects combining fiction with awareness of privacy and data policies in several countries over the past few years. Regardless of what she’s working on or involved in, Marianne's greatest passion is finding a way to help people tell their own stories.
We gained a lot from the conversation. We went deep. Our discussions touched on the power of stories, their many forms, and how they are being told now in a hyper-connected age.
Even though the time was short, and this conversation was just the beginning of a much deeper exploration, we came away with notes that will serve as the spark for more. Some of the main ideas were:
The truth lies beyond reality
While many stories are based on real events, the core of a powerful narrative lies in the truth it conveys. Stories can be fueled by accurate facts and lived experiences, but they don't have to stick to one reality or testimony. To tell an impactful story, we need to tell it more from truth than from reality.
Many fictional works express complex realities in this way. Let's take the HBO series Chernobyl as an example. One character—Ulana Khomyuk, a Belarusian nuclear scientist who readily recognizes the danger—represents a combination of several people who lived near the plant and denounced the misinformation surrounding it.
Stories that offer emotional authenticity and universal truths enable listeners to identify with them. Diverse experiences can be woven into a cohesive story, forming an emotional tapestry for the audience.
Fiction as protection
The use of fiction can provide truthtellers and whistleblowers with anonymity that helps them stay safe. It is especially important to consider this when stories are trying to expose and denounce human rights violations. The simple act of changing names or altering details is not always sufficient in such cases. A fictional story can be as shocking as true facts and help them travel beyond where the facts originally occur.
Marianne described an example of a research presentation where this strategy was useful. The research describes the precarious journey of those who cannot count on identification and, like millions worldwide, move and cross borders to escape violence or poverty. As part of the effort to make the data and the realities of the sources more understandable, the findings follow a narrative thread through “Liliana,” a character conceived to humanize a reality experienced by millions of migrants.
This brings us to another important element:
If you have data, you have stories
The conversation led us to consider how we set the wheels in motion. As individuals, communicators, and professionals working in civil society circles, we have access to a wealth of data, realities, and testimonies. We are all connected to communities, journalists, filmmakers, communicators and artists.
Those committed to social change and advocacy often find the answer in the most obvious places: in the people they work with, the everyday reality they live with, and the data they collect. The information and people around us allow us to weave a story.
The most important thing: tell a good story
Sharing stories, especially if they aim to promote social change, should not obscure their essential purpose. We still need a central character, intrigue, climax, and denouement, just as we did in the oldest stories. Those who listen make an unspoken compact with the storytellers: we know your story is fictional, but if you tell it well, we'll believe it as if it really happened.
Rather than just conveying a message, stories should be told for their intrinsic value.
We often encounter stories in civil society and its work where the intent is too evident, and we don't connect with them. The same happens when fiction has an obvious message that eats away at the storyline.
The conversation led us to think deeply and respectfully about the stories and the people we tell them to: the platforms, the tones, the languages, the interests, the tastes. The most important thing is not to forget that these people are not passive. This is an act of humility and trust. Those who read us, hear us, or play our game can fill in the blanks and follow the thread. In short, let's take care of the story first. Everything else will fall into place on its own.
Let's talk about measuring impact (even if it’s hard)
If measuring impact and evaluating success is already complex in any project, in the world of narrative change, there’s an extra layer. The idea of measuring what changes because of the work of a specific organization or group is as fascinating as it is difficult.
That's why we gathered last July: to talk impact and MEL (monitoring, evaluation and learning) with our friends from La Sobremesa Anca Matioc, Laura Lehman e Tania Altamirano.
By Laura Vidal
Research & Project Specialist,
Latin America
IRIS
If measuring impact and evaluating success is already complex in any project, in the world of narrative change, there’s an extra layer. The idea of measuring what changes because of the work of a specific organization or group is as fascinating as it is difficult.
That's why we gathered last July: to talk impact and MEL (monitoring, evaluation and learning) with our friends from La Sobremesa Anca Matioc, Laura Lehman e Tania Altamirano.
If measuring impact and evaluating success is already complex in any project, in the world of narrative change, there’s an extra layer.
The idea of measuring what changes because of the work of a specific organization or group is as fascinating as it is difficult. That's why we gathered last July: to talk impact and MEL—monitoring, evaluation and learning.
Can the impact of a change in narrative be measured in numbers? What do clicks, views, retweets, comments tell us? In this world where we seek to change representations, sow ideas about our communities or make excluded people more visible, concrete changes often happen slowly, over time, only visible through subjective, personal, and collective experiences. If we throw ourselves into bean counting, dance to the rhythm of corporate tech algorithms, target virality or nothing: aren’t the numbers just the tree hiding the forest?
To reflect together on this, we called on our friends from La Sobremesa—Anca, Laura, and Tania—to kick us off. Our goal is for this conversation about impact—and how to evaluate it—to be the first of many. Through them, we’ll learn how to keep evaluation strategies central from the inception of the project.
Growing inward
La Sobremesa invited us to think not only about the impact of our work on the communities we work with but also to think about the impact that work has on us and the ways it can strengthen our own ecosystem.
La Sobremesa highlighted that an important element in the process is aiming to understand the problem we are aiming to tackle; and that’s something that can be done best when working together with—and not only for—those who are facing those challenges every day. In all of this, the keyword is exchange.
It's about creating a project design that invites us to ask ourselves questions about those involved; and also, paying attention to who is not present or represented in this particular context and ask ourselves why.
Fewer answers and more questions
It would seem that even our own ideas around “impact” are in need of their own narrative change. We were excited – though not necessarily surprised – at the range of ideas that came out of this first conversation. The experiences of those who participated in the gathering gave us an important clue to understanding the key elements in the design and development of narrative change projects. We could say these are projects that aim to change perceptions and even imaginings: measuring such changes is quite the complex task.
Nearly every project present in this Tertulia benefited from a special kind of intuition, something that proved essential in the development of their methodology...but this intuition would have been impossible without an extensive and well-connected experience with the communities themselves.
We were left in the end with a question, one that often swings on a pendulum between the quantitative and the qualitative: how do wepresent impact that isn’t primarily numeric. The importance of learning to understand that in social change, numbers do not always answer the questions we have, or at least not necessarily. Indicators, by their nature, are imperfect and uncomfortable, and we have to learn to integrate them into more flexible, more fluid observations.
It's about learning where to shine the light and what to do with the sources we have. To make visible the data we can learn from and determine which elements truly give us a full portrait, with all of its light and shadow.
So far, we have no fixed schemes or ready-made answers. Which means that it is possible we may have to create them by ourselves. It is our hope that these conversations become a first step towards that goal, and that this new learning cycle will show us the way.
Journalism, public interest & democracy
Journalism, public interest & democracy. CEO and Co-Founder at Nexo Jornal.
CEO and Co-Founder at Nexo Jornal
As in many countries around the world, misinformation has played an extremely relevant role in shaping the Brazilian political debate. The 2022 presidential elections—the most important electoral race in Brazil’s recent democratic history—were no different. New means of disseminating information, systematic attacks on journalism and distrust of the media by large portions of society are just some of the challenges we face as a part of the Brazilian media ecosystem.
Nexo Jornal’s Instagram account from October 2022 highlights elections-related fake news, featuring its “Free Access” status
This same context, though, has reinforced the essential character of professional, independent journalism as one of democracy’s safeguards.
Nexo is a digital-native newspaper launched in 2015. Since its founding, our main motivation has been to produce journalism that contributes to a high-quality and plural public debate that can strengthen Brazilian democracy. Our editorial principles are balance, clarity and transparency, with a business model intended to ensure our sustainability and independence. We were one of the first Brazilian news organizations to be acknowledged by global journalistic transparency standard the Trust Project and hold the quality of our journalism and the relationship of trust with our audience are at the core of our editorial project.
International audiences will recall that the 2022 Brazilian elections were set against the backdrop of a divided country, where public debate was often based on groundless information. Important players, both public and private, made use of misinformation in a deliberate and strategic way.
Meanwhile, digital platforms had done little to prevent misinformation from ruling just as it did in the preceding election of 2018. Though this limited accountability is not a recent phenomenon, platforms increasingly hold the power to define how information is distributed and accessed by the public, which lends their hands-off approach extra weight.
In the face of this particularly challenging scenario for communication vehicles, we decided to respond with what we do best: our journalism.
Our approach to electoral coverage is described in our manifesto: “opinions do not change facts, but facts change opinions.” By guaranteeing free unrestricted access to our content, we wanted to expand the scope and impact of journalism that seeks excellence, sparks investigations, uncovers facts and promotes balanced interpretations of events.
Ten days before the first round of voting, Nexo dropped the paywall for all election-related content. This meant anyone—not just paid subscribers—now had access to special content, visual news and critical articles covering electoral processes and campaigns for president, governors, senators and representatives.
As an advertising-free newspaper, with nearly half of Nexo’s revenue from subscriptions, this is not a decision we took lightly. We prioritize this business model, which is hardly common in the industry, to ensure the sustainability and independence of the newspaper. While removing the paywall answers our mission, it also means giving up potential subscribers and revenue. The tipping point for the paywall decision—and the extra-monetary value it would provide—lay first and foremost in recognizing our need to experiment: to test out new partnerships and new monetization models; to invent creative ways to remind society of the importance of journalism; and to meaningfully deepen our relationship with our subscribers.
Our manifesto for electoral coverage featured the following claim: “opinions don’t change facts, but facts change opinions.” By guaranteeing free access to our content, we aimed to broaden the reach and impact of journalism that checks and exposes facts with transparency and provides balanced interpretations of events. “The decision was prompted by Nexo’s commitment to democracy at a time when professional journalism is crucial to redeeming the quality of public debate,” we explained at the time. And it was possible thanks to the support of Luminate and IRIS—the International Resource for Impact and Storytelling.
Infographic featured on Nexo Jornal’s free coverage of the Google daily advertising expenditures by leading candidates Bolsonaro and Lula during the two rounds of voting during Brazil’s 2022 presidential election
This was not the first time we removed our paywall. During the 2018 election, we offered all election-related content also for a specific period of time. In 2020, in the face of the severity of the health crisis and the role of misinformation, we freed up access to all pandemic-related materials we produced. This content remains free to this day.
Brazil has an extremely traditional and centralized media ecosystem, which has an impact on how the national public debate is shaped.
Events like the pandemic and the elections are good reminders of the true vocation and the raison d’être of the media: to serve society. In other words, they shine a spotlight on journalism, newscasting and the production of information as activities that require public interest as their guiding principle.
When we first lowered our paywall, there was concern about how our paying subscribers would react. After all, these materials accounted for more than 75% of Nexo’s daily production and we were giving away for free something they were being charged for. The reactions, however, were overwhelmingly positive, with subscribers not only supporting but also commending our decision.
This kind of mobilization, from subscribers and funders, signals a consensus on the importance of accountable journalism’s presence in crucial moments for democracy and for the history of our nation. This was certainly the case for the 2022 elections.
Financial fragility has been an issue for large, small, young and traditional media outlets around the world. We are all searching for a formula to fund our journalism. We have too many questions, and in many cases, construct the answers anew each day.
If we intend to find answers to the crisis of sustainability in journalism, they will lie in valuing the quality of what we produce, in our commitment to ethics and transparency, and, most certainly, in experimentation.
And in this particular aspect, philanthropy’s interest and investment in journalism can make a major difference.
High-quality, reliable information is essential for well-informed and discerning citizens and, therefore, to ensure the quality of democracies. A strong media ecosystem that is plural, ethical and immune to vested interests must be part of any social development agenda. The growing willingness of the philanthropic world to support media projects brings optimism to this field.
This kind of funding allows vehicles to take risks, something that is essential to innovation, but hard to embrace in a time of crises. If properly done, it can also stimulate learning experiences that can be shared across the ecosystem. It can create opportunities to address themes that don’t necessarily have adequate space in the industry—such as gender and race equality—and are key to delivering better and more accountable journalism.
These are some examples among many others. The important point is that, when we talk about philanthropic support for the media, we are talking about strengthening the civic space.
Sustainability is no trivial matter. This is an industry that took a long time to understand the pivotal nature of the digital world and renew itself accordingly. There are countless challenges, chief among them relevant ethical questions raised by business models that, unfortunately, are still considered acceptable. At Nexo, we regard sustainability as something essential to the business model because it assures our political, religious, and business financial independence, to name a few of the interests that have infiltrated a significant part of the media in the country and in the world.
We have a policy of absolute transparency concerning the support we receive. We leave money on the table when we come across proposals not fully aligned with our ethical principles. We do not use clickbait-style advertising features such as Taboola or Outbrain, which are common on many other sites, as they deliberately confuse the reader, or worse, by mixing editorial content with misleading ads.
These choices impose limits on our revenue potential, but we are rewarded with a unique relationship of trust with our readers. The value of this trust is essential to the long-term sustainability of any media organization and, more broadly, to the health of any democracy.