I recently encountered some opinions at SIPA that I found somewhat troubling for someone in my field of international media development. When I said that the International Media and Communications concentration should become more of a development concentration, a professor and a student both said that the problem with international media development is that, in their experience, it isn’t really sustainable.

I’d first like to say something about this whole notion of sustainability. In principle, I agree with it as a goal for development. Of course we want to think about the future of a project, where it will be once we are no longer directly involved, what it will produce, and that it necessarily has an end, as far as our involvement is concerned. We don’t want to start projects that will forever depend on us, or that won’t provide long-term benefits for recipient countries. And, we also don’t want to promote short-term thinking in recipient countries, since that is very often a major obstacle to their development. To this extent, I champion sustainable thinking.

However, I also think sustainable thinking can cause harm to projects. First, because like all prevailing ideas, it can become too entrenched and difficult to openly question or examine. We might not see other benefits of projects that are not directly related to our dominant views on sustainability, and thus might never begin important projects for fear that they might not produce something that stands on its own forever and ever. Second, we might get too caught up in what we think of as sustainable and not see other outcomes that are sustainable in other important, and perhaps unpredictable, ways.

To get inside of these issues, I will use the example of a media development project I ran in Ukraine. Without going to deeply into it, the gist is that I started a community newspaper in a village of 7000 people, with the local high school as my headquarters, and students and teachers as my primary contributors. The idea was to create a local form of media, and to teach local people how to utilize media and journalism for the betterment of their community.

The “problem”:  I started this project in Dobrotvir, Ukraine, a town founded in the 1950s by the Soviet Union around the construction of a power station. Dobrotvir was still trying to coffee and aspirin its way out of its Soviet hangover. That means that democracy is still often a misunderstood idea, and considered something the government is supposed to just give you. Media, particularly local, are still largely controlled by government, and thus viewed skeptically as propaganda. Unless you are a local power person, you don’t want to express yourself in public. Students are much more likely to be humiliated publicly for acting out of line than they are for being praised for their achievement. Moreover, students are heavily discouraged from thinking for themselves, or expressing opinions at all. Teachers, particularly ones that remember life under the Soviet Union, are afraid of trying new ways of teaching and new technologies for fear of public failure and humiliation. In fact, people generally would rather avoid any reason for being judged in public or creating any sort of public change.

There’s the context. You can start to see what democracy and progressive thinking are up against.

This project ended up being the perfect way to chip away at some of the Soviet barriers to change in Dobrotvir. My first and most important move was to put the students in charge of what stories they would write (which of course shocked many of the teachers when they heard this) in order to empower them to be heard publicly. I focused the issues on positive stories, including community projects, local activities by students, and commentaries on popular culture, in order to keep things safe early on. By the end, as we gained the trust and credibility of the community, we moved into edgier material like “positive thinking” and “democracy.” Thus, a public forum for expression was born.

This project had many other important benefits. First, it gave us a vehicle for staging fundraising events to encourage the local organizations and businesses to support the newspaper, and to teach business and entrepreneurship in a former centrally-planned economy. Second, everyone on the newspaper gained very useful computer skills that will benefit them even if they never become journalists. You have to understand that a number of these people had never even turned a computer on before, and by the end, they could use programs like Word, Photoshop, and Pagemaker. Third, we created the first ever non-government controlled media outlet in the district (imagine trying to transition to democracy growing up in a place where the only media you have ever known were really just rags of government propaganda). Fourth, at least one of the students on the staff is now studying journalism in university, citing the newspaper as her source of inspiration. Fifth, I was invited to help found similar newspapers in two other communities as a result of the success of this project. Benefits four and five, and many others, were never part of the original plan.

Even if the newspaper shrivels up and dies in the next few years, its indirect benefits continue. They happened. They set a precedent that sticks in people’s minds. They become another event in a culture. People remember. Examples are set. Important skills are transferred.

The point of the newspaper was never to found an immortal newspaper. It was to bring about the benefits of the newspaper. This, at least in part, is what I think media development should be, and why I think the concept of sustainability in reference to media and the developing world is easy to mistake.

In places where the hopes of democracy, rights, freedom, and change have long been crushed by dictators, tyrants, and murderers, you often have to crack the existing foundation before you can build a new one. Otherwise, anything you build is not likely to stand for very long. In my experience, media development is a great way to crack the foundation and plant some seeds.

Had I placed too much emphasis on the question “Is this sustainable?” I might never have started the project in the first place. I’d never started a newspaper before, certainly not in a language I barely understood. I didn’t know the ins and outs of running, funding, or keeping a newspaper afloat. But that didn’t stop me. Why? Because I knew that even if the newspaper lasted only a year, it would have passed on important skills and experiences that would outlive the newspaper and sustain some form of crack in the crumbling totalitarian foundation.

And the best part? I’m back in America, and the newspaper is now three years old, run strictly by Ukrainians. All that goes away if I’d worried too much about guaranteeing the sustainability of the newspaper rather than the sustainability of ideas.

A note about the pictures: Look, Life, and The Saturday Evening Post weren’t sustainable. Should they never have been created? Or, did they have some kind of lasting effect?