With Help from TechSoup and Adobe, Magazine Blazes an Independent Trail in Romania
Romania is a challenging environment for high-quality, independent journalism. Journalists must contend with shrinking newsrooms, poor pay, and a lack of resources such as editing and basic fact checking.
The magazine Decât o Revistă (DoR) was born from the need to create a space for good journalism in Romania. The first issue, published three years ago, was intended as a one-time event. But DoR was so successful that it has now published 10 issues and become the biggest community for narrative journalism in Romania. The magazine has also hosted two international conferences on narrative journalism in Bucharest, featuring guests like Chris Jones and Mike Sager of Esquire magazine and Evan Ratliff of Wired.
DoR and its association document untold stories in Romania and help journalists receive editorial grants. Above all, they create a space for the best narrative journalists in Romania to tell truths and be heard.
Combining graphics inspired by the style of Wired and The New Yorker, DoR is also one of the best designed magazines in Romania and one of the first to illustrate articles with large infographics. The design excellence of the magazine was made possible by the Adobe Creative Suitesoftware and other technologies DoR acquired through TechSoup.
TechSoup provided operating systems and document-processing and design software to help DoR continue the narrative journalism revolution it started three years ago. The Adobe software was also used to create a photo trailer for one of the magazine's features as part of DoR's exploration of a tablet/e-reader publishing model. The feature, "The Clouds Are Your Friends," is a story about dealing with autism from the perspective of both the child and the parents.
