Hi Reader,

Welcome to new subscribers from England, Romania, and Egypt!
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The responses to the previous newsletter about the manosphere showed that you can easily recognize bubbles. It's also important to understand how certain bubbles are maintained. Read more below!
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I will attend the International Journalism Festival in Italy from 15-19 April, and will be speaking on the panel: Turning ideas into real progress: practical ways to get sh* done. Ping me for a coffee or gelato if you're around.

On 23 April, the Leading for Transformation course starts, for editorial leaders in journalism, communication, and content creation. A few scholarships are available; sign up here!

Sanne

DEEP DIVE

We all live in bubbles, and some are designed to stay

Last week, a Black journalist in the Netherlands shared in a journalists’ WhatsApp group that many of the panels initiated by Black journalists for this year’s International Journalism Festival in Perugia had been rejected. I replied that many Gaza-related panels had been rejected, too. She then responded, saying that many of the people in that WhatsApp group are recurring speakers themselves, and that they do not make space.
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Both observations exist next to each other: the festival’s selection process and the individual choices of speakers in giving space or not. That second part is what is often skipped.

Giving up your seat on a panel creates an opportunity for someone to be heard beyond their bubble. A bubble is a context where certain perspectives circulate easily, feel like common sense, and rarely get challenged, while others struggle to be taken seriously or even enter.

We talk about bubbles as if they are unfortunate social facts: different people, communities, worlds, social media feeds, views, and perspectives. The separation is real, but it’s not as if nothing can be done about it.

Media institutions have a responsibility to ask who has the power to change a bubble and when doing so, who keeps being heard instead of being cancelled.

Some bubbles are backed by institutions, money, whiteness, and personal networks (repeated invitations), or by fitting into the existing system and being seen as neutral and objective. Others are labeled as too niche, too political, too angry, too single-issue, or too difficult.

The war in Iran in different bubbles

I feel the bubbles even more when I move between countries. I just came from Malaysia and Thailand, and watching the news about the war in Iran hits differently in Southeast Asia and Europe.

The costs of the Iran war on countries in Southeast Asia are immediate. Asian economies are confronted with sliding currencies and surging oil prices. When I went to the airport in Kuala Lumpur, there was a line of cars waiting at petrol stations. In Europe, the same war is still discussed as a risk and its long-term consequences. The same event travels through news channels differently.
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The reality is that people live in different worlds, with a hierarchy within and between these worlds. Which one of these realities is seen as authoritative, reasonable, and central, and which ones are viewed as backward and marginal? Journalists can help us understand how we view the bubbles and how conscious we are of the differences.

The media shape the bubbles every day through ordinary decisions about who gets commissioned, who gets quoted, which panel gets approved, which conflict is framed as urgent, which harm is framed as unfortunate but too complicated, which speaker is called “experienced,” and which one is called “activist," which perspective is considered a contribution, and which one is a disruption.

A decolonial approach is about asking more questions, and often that's uncomfortable.

Listening matters, but not without action

The goal should not be to eliminate bubbles because that's simply impossible. We all carry histories, blind spots, languages, communities, wounds. Different groups see the world differently. What matters is who makes an effort to break through the bubbles.

Some people are forced to understand multiple worlds because their survival depends on it. I’ll never forget someone explaining to me - in a Western context - that as a person of colour, you understand a white person’s reality because you need to to survive. A white person doesn’t have to do the same. The dominant group in a society can remain inside their own assumptions and still lead, publish, decide, host the panel, and organize the festival.

This is why I do not find “everyone should just listen better or listen to each other more” convincing. It sounds fair, but it also still hides the structure, and it turns a problem of power into a problem of individual behavior.

Listening matters, but if it stops there, nothing changes. Good leadership is about better listening and then taking action by changing the space you control.

Visibility through counting

A participant in my leadership course recently sent me a note before an in-person team meeting. They wrote that one of their main learnings from this year had been what we discussed at Splice Beta about leadership responsibility. They had gone back to my slides because it helped them structure their talking points. “Some of these matters are so difficult to articulate,” they wrote.

I recognized that immediately because people are often aware but don’t always have the language to describe what is happening and what change is needed. And therefore don’t act. It’s, for example, how the word “quality” in discussions about inclusivity can become a shield for familiarity, for how you’re used to doing things.

The good thing about diversity, inclusion, representation, and all of that is that you can make it visible simply by counting:

• Who spoke last year?
• Who is back again?
• Who keeps being called at the last minute because they are trusted?
• Who is missing, not once, but repeatedly?
• Who is seen as bringing expertise, and who is only welcome to bring testimony?

Once you start asking these questions, the bubble becomes visible in a pattern instead of just as a feeling.

When white speakers consistently dominate a conference

My colleague and friend Ruona Meyer analyzed in her latest research article the speaker list of the global investigative journalism conference from 2019 to 2023 by ethnicity, gender, speaker duration, and session type.
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The findings show that white speakers consistently dominate the conference, particularly in career-boosting session types. Meanwhile, women, and some other ethnicities, experience contradictory levels of in/visibility.
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She concludes that "speaker lists, speaker durations and session types need to be routinely assessed because they indicate which 'bodies' attain in/visibility within journalism and delimit the priorities of this profession, long after conferences end."

Journalism doesn't operate outside the bubbles

Journalism often likes to position itself outside the bubble problem, as if its main task is to explain polarization happening elsewhere. But media institutions and festivals actively shape the fracture through those who already know the editors, who fit the format, and who can speak without being read as angry.

If you lead a newsroom, a team, a course, a festival, a meeting, or a publication, the work is to be aware and open, but not without taking action. You have to ask yourself a few pressing questions:

• What keeps passing through your space with ease?
• What only enters when there is pressure?
• What have you normalized because it arrives in a form you already trust?
• Who do you call “divisive” when what they are actually doing is naming the structure more directly than the room can tolerate?

These questions may change your planning and slow things down. They most likely also create friction with people who are used to being centered. Good leadership starts with friction, I would say.

COURSE

Leading for Transformation course

Loss shows up in teams affected by war and displacement, in burnout and disengagement, and in how we continue to perform while falling apart from the inside.
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Darshini Kandasamy is the guest speaker in the third session of The Leading for Transformation course, and talks about how to lead through loss. The course invites editorial leaders to explore editorial leadership from various angles. How to build a culture of storytelling that doesn't ignore what people are going through?

See you next week!

Sanne