“My “why” is to cultivate compassion and wisdom in the world”
Nora Hertel is a Journalist with 10 years of experience in the field. She is the founder of Project Optimist, a digital news startup based in solutions journalism. She joins us from St. Michael, MN.
We are so fortunate to have Nora in our community at 100 Rural Women and to have had the opportunity to speak with her for our Spotlight Profile Series
What is your connection to rural?
I grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana. It’s a pretty big city so I didn’t grow up in a rural community, but my extended family is from Batesville, Indiana. It’s a pretty small town in rural Indiana that has a very special place in my heart. The family farmhouse is there where my uncle and aunt still live. Downtown is the Hertel Shoe Store run by a different uncle and aunt. My family also has a hunting cabin down there. I just have a lot of happy memories of visiting there and having a different landscape than the city.
Tell us about your education, previous work, and what led you to be doing this
I went to school at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin as they have a great music program and I thought I was going to be a professional flute player. But, I also studied French! I still love music and French, following those two passions through college and then traveled within those fields.
Right after I graduated college, I went to Haiti to teach music for the summer. Then, I moved to France and taught English. When I came back from France, I joined my (now) husband in Florida where he was getting his master’s degree. I started working for Florida State University in their Modern Languages Department. There was also an institute for French and francophone studies. In addition, I was teaching French classes for little kids and was on the board of directors for a French Association in Florida. A lot of these jobs provided skills that have shown themselves to be really valuable for me as an entrepreneur.
After Florida, we moved back to Wisconsin where we met and have a lot of friends. I worked as a waitress, which I think everybody should do. That kind of customer service experience is very valuable and just important to understand and be compassionate to the people that do that work now. So, I was a full-time server and then I went to graduate school for journalism. I did a lot of soul-searching and knew that was really what I wanted to do. So, I went back to school for it. I got started in hyper-local community journalism and State House reporting. For the next 10 years after that, I was covering politics.
From Wisconsin, I moved to rural Pierre, South Dakota. It’s a pretty small city right in the middle of the state. Very beautiful. I really love the prairie landscape. I covered the State House there for six months, then moved back to Central Wisconsin. We lived there for three years in Wausau, Wisconsin where I worked at the Wausau Daily Herald. I really liked that community.
At that point, my husband and I had the discussion of where we would settle down. We decided on Minnesota because he is from there. We’re in St. Michael, a very small city. We have woods in the backyard which I really love. It’s kind of weird to think about how much I moved around in my 20s. Just following jobs and passion as well as my husband’s jobs and passions. We kind of took turns.
Tell us about Project Optimist!
Project Optimist is a digital news startup with a focus on “solutions journalism”. It’s a practice of journalism that is officially defined as “rigorous evidence-based reporting on responses to social problems” instead of just focusing on problems and having a negativity bias, which a lot of us experience when we read the news. It’s actually a negativity bias in our psychology. We’re very drawn to that. So, solutions journalism kind of pushes against that and helps provide a sense of possibility and hope for people through journalism. We share stories about responses to problems.
I do want to say, solutions journalism is not always happy stories. There might be a story about an attempted solution that failed because those are kind of things that we can learn from. Or we might have a problem here and the story could be about a solution that worked or didn’t work in a different state and what can we learn from that. I love solutions journalism because it keeps that sense of possibility without denying the challenge of the moment.
We have a newsletter and website. We also feature local art. I think art is part of solutions journalism because we need a respite. We need a palette cleanser sometimes. In the last couple months, we’ve had a series called “Artists Joy” where artists have chosen some of their favorite pieces and provided descriptions about what are they showing and the symbolism behind the work. I’ve also commissioned artists to illustrate stories. We did a comic that went along with a story/a series on veteran suicide prevention.
When did you start Project Optimist?
I started working on it in earnest in 2021. I took some entrepreneur training and left my job in November of that year. This first year, 2022, I would consider a “minimum viable product” It’s when you are experimenting all the time and collecting data and feedback on that first product. Which is the newsletter.
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What inspired you to start this project?
I wanted to share my “why” That’s kind of something I’ve been honing for the last year or so and it really is infused in the work of Project Optimist. So, personally my “why” is to cultivate compassion and wisdom in the world.
I think that Project Optimist does that through sharing information, stories, and inspiration. A lot of times we just start by listing off all the projects and the programs, but these values are what is underlying in a lot of my work. It’s what I really value, try to cultivate in myself, and think really are important in our community. Even before when I was a reporter at newspapers I always kind of kept those two things in mind. Journalism is really good at doing that: cultivating compassion, connection, and wisdom.
What are you working on right now with Project Optimist?
I don’t know if everyone sees it this way, but this is a historic moment when we think about the challenges that we’re facing environmentally and politically. There’s war, there’s illness, there’s a lot of challenges right now. There are people sowing conflict because it’s expedient to them politically or economically. It’s important to face that and sit with the discomfort of it. That is something I’m personally getting better at and trying to bake into Project Optimist. I believe journalism, community conversation, and even media literacy can help all those things because we can encourage people to open their minds, open their heart.
I’m working on a conversation project called “Shades of Purple: Dialogue across difference.” The idea is to bring people together in different communities to talk about really difficult topics like gun rights and reform, immigration, climate change, etc. We want to provide the space for open and vulnerable conversation. People get the opportunity to say, “Here’s why I feel this way about this controversial topic.” I think the discomfort of that and the discomfort of accepting the humanity of someone who is different or disagrees with you is the way to combat polarization. Then we can move forward with a sense of hope for resolution and hope for improvement on all of those challenges. It’s about coming together to combat polarization so that we can solve some of those problems at the local level together.
I am always trying to do those things in my own personal life too and I mean gosh, it’s really hard. Accepting discomfort while maintaining a sense of hope and possibility for the future is what Project Optimist can offer and what I’m hoping all the programs that we’re working on will do.
[row_inner_3] [col_inner_3 span__sm=”12″] [row_inner_4 v_align=”middle”] [col_inner_4 span=”6″ span__sm=”12″]How does your platform work? Do you have a team of journalists or do people from the community submit content?
The first year I had a list of stories and did a bunch of the reporting. Then I recruited some freelance reporters to do other projects. I am currently recruiting a reporter to do some work this year and have been in conversation with four audio reporters. We’re going to have some podcasts this year and I’m really excited about that. So, it is me + freelancers. I’m at the stage in 2023 where I’m hoping to hire people to help on the business side and be able to help on the journalism. This way it can just grow, develop, and expand.
I also started doing some training with a group of students and a community writer on journalism 101 and solutions journalism. I’ve been editing their work and I’ll publish that too. That’s a little bit more column-style editorial writing because a lot of them don’t have a background in journalism, but it’s a way for us to highlight some different voices.
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Can you tell us about a time you were discouraged and how you overcame it?
The biggest, most recent challenge was the end of 2020. It was the first full year of COVID and it was really hard at the paper at that time. I was working at the Saint Cloud Times. Journalism has seen a decline in the number of reporters and that’s because of the business model. That means that there’s more work to do for the people that are still in the newsroom and so I was experiencing burnout even before COVID happened. Then COVID happened.
Everyone has their own challenge of how that looked in their own lives. For me, it was becoming really hard to write about death a lot. I had been going through death records for the state and writing about a lot of the people that had died that year. I was a political reporter and St. Cloud State Senator, Jerry Relph, died from COVID. It was very heartbreaking for me because I knew him. It became this big national story that was so politicized, and it really made me sad to see his story told and taken in that way.
At that time, I knew that I was looking for other work because of the way that the newsroom was shrinking. There was a lot of pressure from the community that wanted more, but we were smaller than ever. I think it was a bad time for everyone because of COVID. In “The Great Resignation” of November 2021, I was one of the people that left my job. Living in a pandemic made us reevaluate what’s important. I thought, What do I actually want to spend my time doing?
I had been looking for other jobs and getting rejected. Additionally, I applied for a fellowship to write a book and got rejected. My therapist at the time was helping me just keep moving forward even though physically and mentally I was not at my healthiest at all. I was having really bad migraines, struggling emotionally, and burnt out.
I saw an advertisement for an entrepreneur class with ILT Academy, which has been doing a lot of training across the state. So, I applied. It was free to participants and the first time I had written on paper my idea of launching a news organization. I really had thought “I can’t. How could I do that?”? I was having a hard time. I just didn’t get this grant that I thought would be my next big thing. But then I got into the program. I just showed up at this class once a week learning about how to develop a business that was needed. It was a 20-week course. Honestly, it was a lot of work and I don’t know how I did it. I pushed through by knowing that I needed to go to the next thing because everything else I had tried was not working.
It was kind of a blessing that I was pushed to pursue this idea. I had the idea for two years and had talked about it with some of my advisors. Not everyone was encouraging. I just knew it was not only a lot of work but a lot of work I had never done before. Then the class showed up and I was accepted into the program, which was really a huge turning point for me. It showed me how to talk about it, how to develop the idea, how to move to the next step of finding more financial support, and finally make a plan to leave my job and pursue this and build it into something bigger than myself.In retrospect, I’m impressed with myself because I know it was a really bad time. I’m very fortunate that I had that support to just push through it.
[/col_inner_3] [/row_inner_3] [row_inner_3] [col_inner_3 span__sm=”12″]How you lead and create change in your community?
I’m involved in a few things. I’m a Girl Scout volunteer. I’m also a Fellow with the Initiative Foundation and I’m a fellow with the Reynolds Journalism Institute which is at the University of Missouri. I’m a member of the Tiny News Collective, who I just love because they’re trying to diversify and expand news ownership across the country. Which is really important right now because of the decline that I alluded to. Traditional newsrooms are getting smaller. They’re not serving communities as they once did. I’m learning so much from them and it’s really inspiring. Those Fellowship programs that I’m in are like the wind beneath my wings. They really have just made it possible for me to grow professionally and to do the work.
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How do you feel rural women could use more support?
I think moral support is very important. It really can’t be understated. I mean, that’s one of the things that I like about 100 Rural Women. I’m a girl scout volunteer and I grew up as a Girl Scout. Supporting women and supporting each other is really important. We need people willing to say “I love your idea. How can I help you?” or “Do you need funds? Do you need mentoring?” Those kinds of things really make a huge difference. I have felt quite supported in my project. It’s hitting a nerve with a lot of the challenges of the moment and the solution is really appealing to people.
I’m trying to build a community in the way that news organizations build community among their readers. I want it to be an inclusive community that includes rural people of all backgrounds, races, ages. There’s a lot of work at each stage and being inclusive requires kind of constant work and constant openness. I will need, want, and seek feedback at every stage of the development of the organization. As well as moral and financial support.
If you could give one piece of advice to your former self what would it be and why?
I would say that the path is not linear. You could see that when I was describing my professional history and my education background. I think each time I made a pivot I thought like oh this is the big thing that I’m doing with my life and it’s just been a journey where one thing leads to the next. I’m so grateful to be where I am. I mean, I love what I’m doing and I feel even though the path was meandering, it all is helping me now. All of those experiences as a server are helping me. All of those experiences managing books, managing conferences, being a journalist for 10 years. That is all helping me do the work now.
Who or what has been your biggest inspiration?
At the top are my parents. They are very involved people and always have been. Both are really good examples of servant leaders. They give a lot of their time and resources; always helping and doing work behind the scenes to support organizations that they love and support. Usually churches, but also other community organizations. They’re also very creative in their own way. They used to both write poetry– and when they were in college where they met, they published a literary magazine called “Grub Street” They have that balance of being givers and being creative, but also just getting things done. The older I get, the more I appreciate all of that.
How can people get involved with Project Optimist?
The most helpful thing right now would be subscribing to the newsletter. Go to join.theoptimist.mn and that will take you to a signup page for the newsletter. It will also allow you to look at the archives of the newsletter and see the website. Like us on Facebook.
If you want to get involved as a sponsor, writer, artist, anything like that, send me an email directly. My email address is Nora@theoptimist.mn
