Creating Community and Building Bridges in Lithuanian Media
How to foster a culture of collaboration across Vilnius’ diverse, and often isolated, media communities? This question drove much of the conversation during The Circle’s Design Sprint in the Lithuanian capital in March 2023.
The Circle Vilnius participants. Photo by Rimma Samir.
In Vilnius, the Circle team worked together with a group of media makers with different backgrounds, from community radio to long-form, online journalism, in the cultural and arts centre SODAS2123. Local partners including Media4Change and the Lithuanian Journalism Center brought valuable inputs to the table, with presentations on engaged journalism and diversity in media. Now, a team of 5 is working on the development of the Vilnius hub’s first activity: an event format that brings together professionals from different media bubbles, to promote interdisciplinary and intercommunity exchange and collaboration.
Hub members Karolis Vyšniauskas, editor at NARA and freelance writer, and Samantha Lippett, content producer at Palanga Street Radio and coordinator of the ICRN, spoke to n-ost’s Mila Corlateanu, who has been mentoring the team, about their city and project.
Lithuania’s media scene is very active, says Karolis. “We are doing very well in terms of freedom of speech. Last year, for the first time, Lithuania got into the top 10 of World Press Freedom Index. I see that as a huge achievement, having in mind that the development of independent media was put on hold during the five decades of Soviet rule,” he explains.
Yet the main problem of the Vilnius media landscape, both Samantha and Karolis agree, lies in a lack of funds. Achieving sustainability and self-sufficiency is a real struggle for independent media in Lithuania. On top of that, “collaboration-wise, most people tend to stay in their bubble,” explains Samantha. This translates into a lack of exchange and constructive discussion between different types of media—written, radio, video, etc., particularly in the English language. Since the pandemic and the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Vilnius has become a safe haven for people from different parts of Europe, expanding the demand for information beyond the Lithuanian language.
Enjoying conversation during the Design Sprint. Photo by Rimma Samir.
Creating a feeling of community and building bridges between isolated “bubbles” is one of the main challenges The Circle Vilnius members have chosen to address. By organising local meet-ups in English, they want to become the bonding element of the city’s fragmented media scene. “To support the process of building a less polarised community of media makers, to break the trend of working with the same partners and to build a stronger cross-disciplinary network”: these are the project’s main objectives, Samantha explains.
The meet-ups will also provide opportunities to reconnect media makers in a more human way, in person and away from social media interactions. Karolis describes these as “locking people inside personal media bubbles”. The Vilnius hub will be all about “breaking [those] barriers” and building on Vilnius’s “creative energy,” he adds.
Though still in the early stages, Vilnius hub members have divided roles and responsibilities and started testing their assumptions and possibilities. Their first project is slowly taking form: the first event is planned to be held this spring, and team members are currently looking into potential speakers whilst analysing the results of the survey they launched on their website.
“I believe that the only way for Lithuanian media to grow is by reaching out beyond geographical and language barriers,” muses Karolis, explaining his motivation for joining The Circle’s Design Sprint in Vilnius. As for Samantha, she was keen to make connections outside the Vilnius radio scene. She adds: “Anything cross-border screams great potential to me and the project description really spoke my language.”
