Launched in 2017, the Outriders outlet started as a weekly newsletter covering international news from a Polish perspective. Five years later, it has thousands of subscribers, a well-working membership programme, a podcast, a knowledge-sharing platform for media, a wealth of experience organising events, a stable income, and plans to open a physical space for journalists later this year.

How it started

Journalists Jakub Górnicki and Anna Górnicka started the project in 2017 with the idea that world affairs affect everyone, and it is crucial to understand them in a constructive, non-partisan way. They began fundraising and gathered 85,000 PLN (about 20,000 EUR) from around 650 contributors. In January 2018, Outriders’ Brief newsletter was launched.

It quickly gained 7,000 subscribers that year and reached 30,000 subscribers by February 2020. Throughout that time, journalists worked on numerous ways to improve the product. They worked with an e-commerce designer to maximise conversions of website visitors to subscribers and developed three onboarding messages for them. Additionally, the journalists decided to focus on 1:1 interactions through replies to the newsletter rather than creating a debating platform, which helped them get to know subscribers better and avoid confrontation.

*Outriders team. Photo: https://outride.rs/en/about-us/*

Outriders used data to make decisions: journalists tracked how people subscribed to the newsletter and their engagement, and conducted audience surveys. For example, they found out that Facebook was way less effective in bringing in new subscribers in comparison to Instagram, so they doubled down on the latter.

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How Outriders launched membership after two years of postponing

The initial plan was to start a membership programme in 2018, but journalists didn’t feel ready. So they first postponed it until February 2020, when the pandemic started, thus causing another postponement. Finally, they launched membership in November 2020.

Jakub Górnicki told The Fix they faced two main problems with this project. Firstly, the word “membership” itself is not common in Poland, so they fixed it by naming the programme Outriders Club, which is much more understandable for the audience.

Secondly, journalists had a hard time coming with benefits for members because they had only been publishing one podcast, one newsletter, and, occasionally, special projects. Finally, they decided to give members access to the archive of their events and the Discord channel, newsletter in audio format, and different gifts.

Today membership brings about 21% of income to the outlet, says Górnicki. He explains that members do not have a big impact on the content because they are not experts on global affairs (and they do not have to be). However, journalists ask members about issues or questions they are interested in. “Maybe you are afraid of migration, don’t understand certain things in the climate crisis, or want solutions. We take this to when we start seeking story ideas,” the outlet’s co-founder says.

Asked for advice for media managers planning to launch membership, Jakub Górnicki says to “really think” about it. Subscriptions and donations are also working models, and donations are easier for the publisher to launch than membership, which requires more work and capacity. If you have just 50 members, you should take care of them just as well as if you had 5,000 members, despite the difference in the money they are bringing.

“Be very cautious about making a decision. It’s easier to start with donations or a subscription and then add the membership or change it to membership. It’s much harder to start with membership and then take it back to a different model,” advises Górnicki.

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What “Mixer” knowledge-sharing platform would bring to the journalistic community in Central Europe

This part of Outriders’ project started in the first years of the outlet’s existence, with journalists organising workshops for other media workers on topics like maps, verification, data journalism, and others. The team had planned to create a separate entity for years, but the pandemic and the war postponed these plans. Finally, they launched Mixer in the Autumn of 2022.

Górnicki calls Mixer “a baby of Outriders in terms of continuing all of those activities,” but with its own brand and legal status. This business consists of two main activities. First, the Mixer team provides workshops to individuals or media teams interested in one of the 11 topics. Usually, they charge for workshops, but the ones organised in partnership with Google News Initiative are free.

Second, they organise events and develop a network of professionals. So far, they have organised a two-day “Media and War” festival under the Mixer brand in the Polish city of Rzeszów. The team plans at least three more physical events next year: in Kyiv, Riga, and Warsaw. Górnicki also mentions that members have a bigger impact on the events than on Outrider’s content. They can tell what topics they wish to discuss and who could be invited as speakers, and organisers consider it.

The team also created a Telegram chat for media professionals to engage journalists and provide a platform for mutual help because “Mixer or any other organisation can’t provide a 100% solution to all the journalistic problems,” says Outriders co-founder. He believes that many issues can be solved through exchanging experiences, and his project would help journalists to stay in contact after physical events: “We [central Europeans] could be better at networking.”

Additionally, the Mixer team helps newsrooms to build custom projects: for example, to help journalists cover elections in their country more effectively.

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Jakub Górnicki tells The Fix that the team is focused on events and networking to understand the different needs of various journalistic communities in Europe and develop their products accordingly. They monetise Mixer through partnerships, events, workshops, and special project consultancy fees. It provides Outriders with about 20-30% of its income. With 20% more revenue from membership, the remaining 50% is filled by grants.

Outriders’ co-founder says that launching additional projects as they did with Mixer would benefit newsrooms with some unique propositions, like a technique for producing content. Another example is a media specialising in investigative journalism, which could offer research for commercial companies.

“If you are very good at organising events and have a team for it, maybe they could be a spin-off agency. Sometimes organisations that built great software for their newsrooms can be licensing it to other organisations or simply selling it,” suggests Górnicki.

For the second half of 2023, Outriders plans to open a physical space in Warsaw to organise events more regularly and provide networking opportunities for journalists.

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How Outriders grew from one newsletter to having thousands of members and a knowledge-sharing platform