How Pioneer Post’s Anna Patton supports journalism with a social twist
Anna Patton is managing editor of Pioneer’s Post, a British print and online magazine that covers social entrepreneurship, responsible business leaders and impact investors around the globe and is a social enterprise itself. Learn how our August Member-Of-The-Month makes sure to add rigor to the Post’s reporting by looking at the big picture and investigating sustainable business models.
Every month, the Solutions Journalism Network highlights a Member of the Month — a journalist doing, or supporting, excellent solutions-focused reporting. This month, we’re featuring Anna Patton, who is enthusiastic about social entrepreneurship and global development. Before starting a position as managing editor of Pioneer’s Post, a London-based social enterprise magazine, she freelanced for outlets such as Devex, The Guardian, and Vice. We spoke about how to finance covering global issues as a freelancer, the challenges of adding rigor when reporting on “good businesses” and what it takes to transition into journalism.
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Lisa Urlbauer: As managing editor, you talk about social aims and profits going back to your “community of social changemakers” on your website. What does that look like in practice?
Anna Patton: We write for social enterprises, we write about social enterprises, and we are actually a social enterprise ourselves, as well. We are what is called a community interest company, a particular legal form in the UK. This legal structure means that there is an asset lock and any profit we generate is reinvested in our social mission. It’s not something that’s being designed to create big profit for shareholders. The whole reason for setting it up is that it has a social purpose. Our social purpose is to help other social business to do their job better. Practically that means that we’ll consider doing things we know we’re not going to generate a lot of profit with, but we see it as really valuable to our community and to serve our social purpose. The profit will be reinvested into that social mission.
Everything we’re doing is contributing to that social mission. The coverage that we’re doing, but also things we do like the Wise100 — where we just launched the nominations — an award celebration for the top 100 women in social enterprise. We do that because we recognize that it can be a really tough job leading a social enterprise. This extra recognition can be really valuable and also the community that can be created because these women often feel quite isolated. Another thing we’ve started this year is the Young Storymakers Programme where we, in partnership with the British Council, are supporting 14 young, early-career journalists in six countries to really encourage them to do more reporting on social and creative enterprise. The reason we do that is both that it’s useful to their careers but also to encourage reporting on these topics from countries where it’s not happening or is not as developed as here in the UK.
LU: Your journalistic work focuses on international development and social enterprises and you’ve got several solutions stories in the Solutions Story Tracker™. How do you make sure to add enough rigor to your stories to avoid championing the “good business” that you’re covering?
AP: It’s a really good question, it is something I think about a lot. It can be easy to get a bit carried away, especially when you visit someone and meet the person face to face. You want it to be a solution because that’s your mindset. We are there because we want these things to work out. I suppose I am by nature a more skeptical person and I do tend to hang back a little bit. It’s very easy to write a story that’s championing something […] but the longer you speak to someone, the more questions you ask and you will actually quite quickly learn about some of the challenges they’re having in running a business. That’s because the social issues that people are addressing are so massive and complex that it’s almost impossible or very unlikely that someone will come along and solve it. Even if they’ve figured out their chunk of it, there’s always going to be other factors that need to be in place for it to be a success. So you can always take a step back and look at the broader picture of what needs to happen.
You quite often come across great things that are happening and they look like brilliant solutions. For our readers, we always ask about the business model. We might find a brilliant solution but then asking a bit further we find that people running it are doing it in their free time and are not actually taking any salary from it. That’s totally fine but then you have to ask the question of how sustainable that is and what it means long term. Then you can maybe search for other business models that are tackling the issue from a different angle but manage to do it in a sustainable way.
LU: The stories that you’re covering are taking place all over the world and I can imagine that it’s difficult to get funding to pay for the travel costs. How do you approach your reporting with this in mind?
AP: As a freelancer, it was a mix of being in a lucky financial situation to be able to go on some trips that I funded myself or going to visit people or even volunteering and then I would tack some reporting onto those trips. A lot of times I have done that. And then it’s also grabbing opportunities as they come up and applying for things. There’s a great scheme in the UK, the One World Media Fellowship (previously The Production Fund), which I got two years ago and which is encouraging journalists to report from developing countries. [You can read the solutions story on refugee entrepreneurship in Uganda that Anna produced with the grant here.] Pioneer’s Post is based in London and we don’t tend to travel very much. That’s partly why the Young Storymakers Network is so great for us, now we’ve got people on the ground in Brazil, Pakistan, Indonesia, and South Africa.
LU: Your stories have appeared in outlets such as Devex, Vice, and The Guardian but your background is largely in charity communications and youth work. Now you’re managing editor of a print and online magazine. What advice would you give others who want to transition into journalism?
AP: It’s interesting, isn’t it, because the trend probably is to transition out of journalism at the moment. I’m not sure how many people would be going in the same direction as me. What really helped me get into it in the first place was working in international development. I met one of the editors at Devex, an international development publication, while I’ve been living in Tanzania and I suppose they were keen on having people that knew the sector quite well.
Now being on the side of an editor, we do find it hard to find people when we’re in need of freelancers who really understand our sector. Like every sector, there are things you know from working inside it, you know who to speak to about certain things, you know what bigger picture issues are. If you already know your sector really well then that’s a huge advantage. I think people will give you a try if you’re keen to switch your mind into that journalistic mindset. They really value that experience and expertise, and that network that you’ve probably built up. I did journalism along with other things, as a lot of freelancers do, and I have a lot of respect for freelancers who manage to do journalism full-time, given that it’s usually not that well paid.
LU: What’s the most challenging part of your work?
AP: Challenging at the moment is that we’re a very small team and a lot of stuff is coming through to us, a lot of press releases and contacts from social enterprises who are doing great things and we just don’t have the capacity to explore all of them. That’s, unfortunately, the way it is and it’s quite frustrating at times. The challenge is organizing and prioritizing things. Another challenge we have is — like all media business — the payment model. Because our social mission is to help social enterprises, we need to find a level at which we get paid for our work that is reasonable for the people that we’re trying to help. We need to find a business model that works for them. We’re constantly thinking about what we need to change and if we need to change it.
LU: And what do you like best about your work?
AP: Generally, I really enjoy every aspect of my job, which is really nice. I get quite a kick out of the days when I find myself interviewing someone who I would have never come across without being in this job. Someone in another country doing something I would have never heard of otherwise. I’m getting to ask a lot of questions about this and just having this deep conversation about something. I enjoy that. We do a quarterly magazine as well and it’s the first time I work on a publication in this job. It’s challenging but also really fun working with our designers, seeing everything come together combining the visuals and the text. Creating something tangible, something that’s a physical product at the end of it is really cool.
