We’ve done it! A Global Entrepreneurs hybrid journal for Gen Z/ M using AI.
Jeez this was tough, but it’s paid off. The hardest thing to capture about success today is an author’s doubts and failures. That emotional arc providing a cinematic drama to their journey.
PR has tech in its grip, so messaging is tightly controlled, with stories screaming vanilla-ish success with no blemishes.
That’s not generally how success works. Tech journalists do get through the success mask, often capturing warts n’ all, but for self-authored pieces?
Penning emotional pieces requires a certain confidence in revealing yourself, or confidence in an editor (me) that it’ll be worth it. That’s what we wanted to capture in long feature form.
Every year I run an entrepreneur programme at my university — homage to my time as a dotcomer successfully launching my own award-winning platform, from painstaking days in my study. It’s an entirely different programme from the normative classic degrees at universities.
The days of endless coding, the crashes, the self-doubt about how you’re spending your time has been some of the skills passed on, including that pick-me up meme attached to your wall.
Any successful entrepreneur will, or should honestly fess up to the roller coaster ride they go through. Success too is subjective, even fleeting, but when you crack it, that formula, you believe has legs.
Others do too, that’s why we continue to burrow into the stories of the Zuckerbergs, Page and Brin, and Andreessen.
Well I do. Remembering well where I was when I launched Netscape onto my Compaq PC on a 28k modem, or that a new kid on the innovation block Google, circa 1999 tried to sell itself to Yahoo. The tech industry giggled.
The Story Lab has a twin-fold outcome. Build it and then write about it. At its heart is diverse contributors and inclusive stories. The journey, literally in some cases, our cohorts go through is in creativity akin to the heptathlon. An assortment of hurdles, bookended by a series of eurekas, sometimes. Industry mentors, from tech and the BBC, join them part way, and then they pitch.
Truth! we’re not trying to create products per se, but engender a creative spirit, for the cohorts to let go, for them to recognise a safe environment where fail as many times as you can and then get up.
Yet ever so often, one of the MA students takes the quest into the real-world, and with the chutzpah and that what they’ve learned is something worthy of greater attention.
That’s what we were driven by. Could we have done this several years back? Sure! Alumni programmes and various platforms do this all the while with leanings to guarding their brands and PR.
But the difference now was the additional scope — the wider back story before Uni, and conceiving images via GenAI framed by editorial nouse.
Sometimes using additive prompting acquiring the right visual could take a while. So, a hybrid journal, which speaks to several constituencies. That’s it really! A formula that could have potential year on to capture new talent. We called it Media Hyphenates.
It took several months tooing and froing on copy, and came in at around just over mid four figures. But we can now see how it’s one part of the cog process in production. That’s what’s on my mind next. If it grabs you, do get in touch.
See link to download mag free on my platform Viewmagazine.tv
