News Deeply

» see newsdeeply.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The premise was almost aggressively simple. A war or an epidemic gets three weeks of front-page attention and then falls off the news cycle while the thing itself continues for years. So instead of covering Syria as one story among many, you build an entire publication called Syria Deeply, staff it, and keep it running for as long as the war runs. Then you do it again for the next crisis.

Lara Setrakian launched the first one in December 2012 with co-founder Azeo Fables, after years as a Middle East correspondent for ABC News and Bloomberg Television. The company was set up in New York as a benefit corporation, which is a legal structure that lets a business commit to a mission alongside profit, and it raised around $2.5 million in venture capital on top of foundation grants and syndication deals.

It worked, in the sense that the journalism was good and won awards and got cited. Nine verticals eventually existed. Every one of them was funded a year or two at a time by somebody who had to decide again at the end of it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ nine newsrooms ~

Syria Deeply came first, then Ebola Deeply in the middle of the 2014 outbreak, then Water Deeply, Arctic Deeply in 2015, Oceans Deeply, Refugees Deeply, Malnutrition Deeply, Women's Advancement Deeply and Peacebuilding Deeply. Each one had its own editor and its own stakeholder database, and the database was the part of the product the company thought it might eventually sell.

The first to go was Ebola Deeply in December 2015, which is defensible: the outbreak it existed for had ended. The rest went for the ordinary reason. Grant cycles are one to three years and a newsroom is a permanent cost, and the gap between those two facts is where a lot of the 2010s nonprofit journalism boom eventually died.

~ what the funding was ~

Reading the coverage now, the thing that stands out is how many revenue lines News Deeply had and how none of them added up. Venture money wants growth that a single-issue crisis site structurally cannot produce. Foundation money wants impact and renews at somebody else's discretion. Syndication and sponsorship pay real amounts but not newsroom-scale amounts.

This is the part I watched entirely from outside. Turkey shares a border with Syria and the war was not a distant story here, but the audience Syria Deeply was written for was the English-language policy reader, and the Turkish coverage of the same war came from Turkish outlets in Turkish. I read the site occasionally in the way you read a well-made thing about a subject you already get from somewhere closer.

~ where the archive went ~

Syria Deeply paused on 15 May 2018. Women's Advancement Deeply paused that November. Fast Company reported the layoffs and the cuts in October 2018. Refugees Deeply published the last article in the whole network on 1 April 2019, and after that News Deeply produced events and one-off projects while saying it was working out where on-site journalism would go next.

The real ending is quieter and came later. On 18 September 2020 The New Humanitarian announced it had taken the whole archive, roughly 5,000 articles, and put it online in a section called Deeply Humanitarian. Within weeks newsdeeply.com stopped serving its own front page, which it had kept up for eighteen months after publishing nothing. Type the domain today and you land at deeply.thenewhumanitarian.org, where every article is still readable under somebody else's masthead.

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