Why we Beta
This is our fourth Splice Beta.
This festival exists to help you build a viable media business, wherever you work in the media ecosystem — regardless of whether you're a journalist, creator, publisher, grantor, funder, NGO, CSO, big tech, little tech, data wiz, teacher, trainer, researcher, designer, or program manager. If you’re at Beta, you have a part to play in the transformation of media, and this is your community.
We believe that the most enduring transformation of this industry can only come through the work of media startups and creators. Our job is to find them, champion them, coach them, and connect them with the wider global media ecosystem. That’s the promise of this community.
But that work is meaningless if it isn’t useful, or relevant, or valuable for the people who go largely unmentioned in so many rooms around the world that produce content — so many rooms with so many ignored elephants. It’s time to name the elephant in the room, and to obsess about making our work about the user.
The future of media is not news-centred, ad-driven, and content-based. It’s user-centred, demand-driven, and interest-based.
This aligns with the work of so many little startups and creators at Splice Beta who are resolutely trying to serve niche communities that they understand — and respect.
And because they understand their communities, they’re figuring out solutions to their community’s problems. The jobs to be done, the product-market fit, the monumentally rewarding job of building for your community: something useful, something relevant, and something that’s valuable enough to pay for.
That kind of stuff.
You’re not meant to do this alone, and that’s why you’re at Beta. This community is made up of just the fearless journalists who put their lives on the line, but also product designers, business strategists, data analysts, fund managers, media entrepreneurs, students, researchers, academics, and media program managers.
Reach out, learn from each other, collaborate, and support each other. Build great things for your communities. We all have an Ellie.
Welcome home. You have a place here.