By Marina Savchenko
Interview with Jakub Górnicki, blogger, reporter, technologist, founders of Outriders. He is trainer and speaker of the M100 Young European Journalists Workshop and helps young media makers to develop their own projects and gives some insights on how to found your own media platform.
How can you define journalism in the digital age?
I can’t. I didn’t change it’s meaning nor the mission just because we have digital age. It’s more important than ever though that we think about the roots and why we need good journalism in society. Fact that everybody can speak and be listened in digital era creates different reality to which journalism for many years is trying to adapt. But it will not succeed as long as we will not understand the value it brings to the society by keeping us informed.
Digital tools offer amazing possibilities of creating stories on a totally new level – this is what is really attractive to myself.
What kind of challenges young media makers and journalists face today?
Young media makers arrive to a new landscape where they have to have many skills. Operate with video, audio, take pictures, understand social media. You don’t have to be an expert in all of those things but at least medium level is demanded plus one or two key specialities. For some it may be overwhelming
How was your start as a blogger, reporter, technologist?
As a blogger I started three times and the last time was successful. I simply wanted to share what I see only after couple months of active blogging we switched intro talking about our topic based travels and that became popular. I got a chance to use my journalism skills and blogging opened me to new technologies. All those skills combined with many years of running and NGO in Poland later on combined into Outriders.
How do you see the Outride.rs in 10 years?
Wow. I understand having a vision for couple years is good and necessary but a decade ago I was not using smartphone and still using very low speed Internet. So to imagine next 10 – is pretty hard. I hope I will be using my automated car by then.
As for Outriders I want us to be inform about current situation from 10 major regions around the world, regularly produce interactive stories and come up with two-three groundbreaking ideas who today I have no idea what they will be.
What about your experience with European Youth Press? How useful was it for you as a young media maker?
I started with European Youth Media Days 2016 in Brussels and all I can say is that it was amazing. Bunch of young journalists with no experience yet full of enthusiasm and eager to do something together. After Brussels I became involved in many international projects which gave me a huge network of nowadays well experienced journos. Plus this global thinking which I embody in many projects I did over the years.
About Jakub:
Jakub Górnicki is a blogger, reporter, technologist and combines new technologies with journalism, blogging, government accountability and transparency. Jakub established Outriders to bridge cultures and societies by original reporting and providing global perspective through innovative storytelling. As a COO and board member of ePaństwo Foundation he developed it into leading open data/transpareny NGO globally. During six years he established Code for Poland and took it into Code for All together with Code for America. Open Cities – program helping European cities adopt open data policies as well as Personal Democracy Forum in CEE and TransparenCEE. He remains a strong ambassador of Central Eastern Europe.
@jakubgornicki @outrid3rs
