The journey continues — The Circle Naples
In October 2023, the Circle team travelled to Naples, where themedia scene suffers from a lack of infrastructure and network, poor opportunities and precarious working conditions.
The Circle Naples participants and team.
Yet the city, which has a thriving arts and cultural scene, has huge potential: “it’s a great place to create a hub,” says The Circle Naples participant Dario Oropallo, “focusing on stories from the city and the surrounding area, as well as acting as a doorway to southern Italy and theMediterranean region.”
Dario was one of 9 media professionals and creatives who took part in The Circle Naples’ design sprint, which focused on mapping thelocal media landscape and ideating a new project that addresses its needs. They were joined by a host of partners: young digital media Will, podcaster and author Sabrina Efionay, il manifesto director Andrea Fabozzi, and author and publisher Carmine Conelli. Each brought new inputs to the discussion and food for thought for theparticipants.
Since then, the Naples team have been working together on building a hub that works across community journalism, media literacy education, and network-building. At its core is a shared desire to “flip the storytelling”: challenging the stereotyped, simplistic narratives of the south. “To the best of our knowledge,” says hub member Alessia Melchiorre, “there is no comprehensive media network focusing on changing the current narratives on the Mediterranean. Naples is thebest spot to do this due to its rich culture and history.”
The Circle Naples event.
Still in the early stages, the Naples hub has already had some successes: an event held during the design sprint in Naples attracted over 60 guests, showing the community’s interest in a new media project. Arts and culture organisations in the city are also keen to collaborate, providing a space for the team to work from and meet. But “the biggest success,” says Alessia, “was finding each other. Having a group of like-minded professionals with the same level of motivation is a giant leap ahead.”
Collectif Estafette’s podcasting workshop in Lyon.
And the Naples hub isn’t the only one with good news to share. A few weeks ago, Collectif Estafette, which grew out of The Circle Lyon, held their first introduction to podcasting workshop. The team shared and built sound creations with a group of around 25 people from all over Europe (Portugal, Italy, and Greece). Both theparticipants and the team were thrilled to learn, discuss, share, and create podcasts together!
At the end of September, two members of the Vilnius Circle team — sound designer Pavel Kirpikau and audio journalist Karolis Vyšniauskas — ran a podcast training for Belarusian journalists. The 4-day programme went over the stages of audio production and helped to prepare the first audio story drafts. Pavel and Karolis’ collaboration is a great example of the important projects that can be born of The Circle’s growing network!
Meanwhile, the teams in Cluj and Gothenburg are steadily building their projects, and the Circle’s final design sprint in Belgrade came to an end last week.
We’ll have many more updates to share soon, so don’t miss the next blog post — ciao for now!
This post was adapted from The Circle’s November newsletter. To receive updates and opportunities from The Circle’s network straight in your inbox, sign up to our monthly newsletter here.
