Welcome to "Survive and Thrive," DW Akademie's dialogue with media managers on innovative and sustainable business models in a challenging global media landscape. We'll talk motivation, lessons learned, funding models, best practices, recipes for success and decisions – both good and bad.

Content warning: This interview discusses torture, sexual assault, and suicide.

Janelle Dumalaon: Hello again, and welcome to Survive and Thrive, your media viability podcast. Most of us in the media are familiar with the obvious challenges involved in running a journalistic operation, from financial to editorial – but not all challenges are created equal. 

Today, we're talking about what it means to survive in a landscape that's hostile to journalism and to democracy in general, and whether it is, in fact, possible under those conditions to thrive. 

Our guest today knows what it's like to run a news organization in the face of systematic oppression. As a journalist, as a citizen and as a woman, I'd like to welcome Zahra Nader, founder and editor-in-chief of the Zan Times – a women-led investigative newsroom covering human rights violations in Afghanistan, with a focus on women and the LGBTQI+ community. Welcome, Zahra. 

Zahra Nader:Hi, Janelle. Thank you for having me. 

Dumalaon: Now in a moment, Zahra, we'll go deep into what it means to run an organization like the Zan Times. But first, we have a short round of introductory questions for you. Your business model in a catchphrase.  

Nader: Resistance. 

Did you ever manage a moment when everything seemed lost? 

Many times. 

What would you need to thrive in the future? 

Funding.

I'm very interested to hear more during this conversation. But first, a little bit on your situation. You run an Afghan newsroom. But I suppose we have to make it clear first that you're not in Afghanistan. Can you tell us a little bit about your circumstances? 

As you said, I'm not in Afghanistan. I left Afghanistan for good in 2017 and by the time the Taliban took over Afghanistan, I was doing my PhD in Women and Gender studies in Toronto, Canada. 

I was a journalist in Afghanistan and when I moved to Canada it didn't seem easy for me to go back to journalism. I went back to school and was just kind of thinking that my future was in in academia – I imagined my future in in Afghanistan, teaching at Kabul University. They had a Gender and Women’s Studies department, a very new department. And I was thinking maybe that's a good place for me to be and train the next generation of women in Afghanistan. 

But unfortunately, with the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, that changed. And from day one, I started just working as a journalist and reporting on what was happening in Afghanistan and particularly to women. 

You did start the Zan Times when the Taliban took power in August 2021. Would you say that was the best time to start a newsroom or the worst time? 

I think in many ways it was the worst time. But also, I didn't really look at creating the Zan Times like normally you would think of creating a startup organization. You have so much planning around it, thinking about it, conceptualizing and conducting research. None of that happened for the Zan Times. 

We were just kind of feeling responsible for what was happening, feeling heartbroken and thinking, ‘What is our responsibility during a time when the Taliban have taken over and stripped women of all their basic human rights? What's our role?’ 

And because we were journalists, the answer was that the only thing right now we can do is to report, to cover those stories and keep the world informed. And that's what we started doing. 

To give you an idea, I had no idea about how to manage a team and how to build an organization. And I didn't have the luxury of time to go and research it, learn and be prepared for the challenges ahead. I just jumped in. It was a passion for journalism, and it was a responsibility that we were feeling. And yeah, then with that came a lot of challenges and problems that we’ve faced over the past two years. 

Definitely not the easiest time, but the time where you felt most called upon to do something. 

Yes, exactly. 

That's very brave of you. I think anyone who has kept up with Afghanistan, even only on the surface levels, knows that the return of the Taliban has represented a setback in every way for women's rights. What's it like as a woman-led newsroom reporting on women's issues there? 

Let me start with the recent clampdown. The Taliban have issued a new law in Afghanistan, which basically banned women's faces and voices in public. What that really means in terms of journalism is that women won't be allowed to work at least for any visual and audio media in Afghanistan. And that is just one aspect of it. 

But if we go back to when the Taliban took over, they immediately but slowly started removing women from society. And that happened with women being banned from most public servant jobs and then women being banned from schools. Girls being banned from schools from grade six on. And then universities were banned. Women were banned from working with the NGOs. Women were banned from travelling alone. And then this law that women must cover their faces in public came out in May 2022. 

By December 2021, which was four months into the into the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, Reporters Without Borders said that only one in five women journalists was still working in Afghanistan – four have lost their job. 

Afghanistan had already been one of the worst places in the earth for women. And this made it almost impossible. You don't have access to women's voices. It's very difficult for anybody to understand what was happening. And in this context, no news is not good news. And that is heartbreaking. So what we are trying to do is to help women journalists in Afghanistan to be able to continue their work, to report on the situation of the most vulnerable in Afghanistan and do it – it's very hard for me to say safely because there's no safety in Afghanistan left, especially for journalists and especially for women journalists. But we are trying to find ways how they can do this work and still not be caught by the Taliban. And that has been an ongoing struggle day in and day out for us.  

You've described that there is a certain degree of danger involved for you and your colleagues. I don't want to go into some nightmare building scenario, but can you tell us a little bit about the costs, what can happen when you undertake this work? 

We know that the Taliban are looking for any journalists who are reporting on critical issues about human rights and about the atrocities that the Taliban are committing in Afghanistan today. That was the truth when we started our work. We had no illusion about safety or how the Taliban would treat journalists. 

We started with this idea that we have to ensure that our team in Afghanistan should not know each other because if they know each other, that's a threat to our work and to the safety of our journalists in Afghanistan. Because, God forbid, if one of our colleagues is arrested – we know that the Taliban torture people. And it’s very well documented how the Taliban treat prisoners. 

So, we took some precautions like connecting each journalist in Afghanistan with an editor outside the country. And ensuring that there is no connection between the team members in Afghanistan and that they don't interview the Taliban officials or affiliates in Afghanistan. That work is being done by our colleagues outside the country. 

But the scenario is that the Taliban have arrested so many journalists in Afghanistan and they have arrested women for speaking out. One example is the story of a female YouTuber which we covered recently. She was killed last August, and basically the news of her death was published last year without a lot of context. So, people started talking and saying that she was killed by the Taliban. 

She was a very famous and unconventional Afghan woman who would go to the streets, who'd still portray a social life for women in Afghanistan, something that we would not usually imagine happening under the Taliban. But she was doing it. She was singing, she was socializing with her friends. And the news of her death was shocking, and everybody started talking that she was killed by the Taliban. 

Soon after, the Taliban published a 20-minute video documentary trying to convince the public that she was either killed by suicide, or by ingesting rat poison by her friends. But the statement they were providing was so contradictory. They brought her family, her mother and brother to talk in this video. And again, the story did not match with what we already knew. 

This started our investigation, and we found out that she was indeed killed by the Taliban and her body was left in a public hospital. Her family were ordered to pick up the body and be published. So that is the cost of being an outspoken Afghan woman and trying to be visible in society and to have a public role in Afghanistan. 

Where do you and your colleagues find the courage to continue in the face of the risk of arrest and the risk of death? 

It’s about purpose. For most of my colleagues in Afghanistan, their purpose, who they were, is taken away from them. When I talk with them, they give me so much hope, so much power that I really feel proud to have this opportunity to work with them. 

To give you one example, we had a workshop on trauma informed journalism where we had some space to talk about our fears, like how do we feel about our work, about threats and risks that our colleagues face. And I remember one of my colleagues said: “Every day that I go out, I go with the sense of fear that today is the day that the Taliban is going to arrest me. But I go out anyway and feel that I am doing something that's important, being the voice of the women in my community.” And that gives meaning to my life, that allows me to move forward. Even as the Taliban are shrinking our space, they're trying to make us invisible and remove us from society, we are still here, and we are still raising our voices. And that is what I'm trying to live up to. 

It's a very big mission indeed. I just want to ask you, are the Taliban aware of the Zan Times and do they make that awareness known to you? 

They definitely are aware of our presence and the work that we do. Some of my colleagues have already spoken with the Taliban. We do get their comments on our investigations. So, they definitely know, and they might not have said this to our faces, but we know that the Taliban is actively looking for our colleagues. They are actively looking to prevent our work, to stop what we are doing because we are bringing critical information to the public, which shows who the Taliban are and documents their crimes.   

You've pointed out how important it is, even in the face of danger, to uplift women's voices when they are being repressed. You also focus on the LGBTQI+ community, another repressed community in Afghanistan. How easy is it to find those stories? How easy is it to report on the community? 

I just want to make clear that even before the Taliban, the situation of LGBTQI+ people in Afghanistan was not good. As a public, we were not talking about them, there was not much awareness about their situation, about their rights, and there was literally no protection for them. But still, they were able to exist and continue to live their life at the margin of society, doing whatever precarious job they could do. 

But for the Taliban, their existence is illegal. Their existence is something against Sharia, they should not exist. You know, women in Afghanistan are oppressed. The Taliban have declared a war on women. But women in Afghanistan can still stand up and say I'm a woman. It's not a crime to admit like you're a woman. But for the LGBTQI+ community, that's not possible. 

The level of persecution is so high that they constantly should be hiding not only from the Taliban, but also from their own families, from their own communities. And there is no support for them. Their very existence is at risk. The Taliban systematically is arresting them, is picking them up. And we are hearing about a lot them being sexually harassed, attacked and brutally raped in the Taliban prisons.  

So, the way we access their stories is through a network of activists and people who are working with the LGBTQI+ community. We reach out to them and with their help, we are trying to cover part of their stories. But I admit that I feel we still fail to be able to do a good job in covering this most oppressed group of people in Afghanistan. And that's because we don't have a lot of resources, and we don't have journalists who are specialized in covering the LGBTQI+ community, or even journalists from the community to be able to tell their own stories. These are some of the challenges that we're hoping to be able to address in the future. 

I think that you're covering them at all is a giant step towards trying to promote their rights. And obviously, their potential to exist, to flourish in society, even though that does seem a long way off. 

Now, we've talked a little bit about this already in terms of guaranteeing the safety of your colleagues. There's no guarantee, but there are steps that you can take to reduce the chance of harm to them. What about for the people that you talk to, like the LGBTQI+ community that we just spoke about? 

For some newsrooms, their concern might be about how to keep their sources safe. But ours is a multi-layered challenge: we’re thinking about how to keep our colleagues safe, how to keep our sources safe, and about how to establish trust in a way that allows us to tell these stories. 

We approach our sources from a point of informed consent. We tell them about the risk that is associated with them talking to us and that we promise anonymity. We tell them that we'll not be using their real name and try to remove any information that we think might lead to their identification. We have used this measure since we started our work. And thankfully, we have not faced a loss where anybody has been identified through our reporting. But that is a concern. 

And then that's also an ongoing daily conversation that we have every day with the editorial team. There were times that we decided not to run a story because we felt that if this story is published, the source might be identifiable.  

You are, of course, the people delivering these stories, but they are also received by an audience. Can you tell me a little bit about your readers? Who are the Zan Times readers? Is the Zan Times easily accessible to them? Can you tell us a little bit about for whom your work is targeted? 

We’re publishing in Farsi and Dari, and also in English. We have two different audiences in mind.  

For the Farsi and Dari website, our audience is of course Afghans inside the country and Afghans who left the country more recently and can read and communicate in Farsi or Dari. That is the audience that we hope to target. We hope that our work can be starting a conversation about the issues that matter to us, to Afghans, and having a conversation about how we should go about creating the future of Afghanistan and what is our responsibility as a citizen and how we can resist the Taliban. 

With the English website, we are trying to reach decision makers, the people who are making the decisions about the relationship of their country with Afghanistan. We are hoping to reach NGOs who are working in Afghanistan. We are hoping to reach journalists and media outlets who are covering Afghanistan – even if just once a year.  

We want to reach them and inform their way of looking at Afghanistan and their decision making. And we also want to represent the diversity of Afghan people and the situation of women and LGBTQI+ community and what they are going through. We’re also hoping to reach a general public who are interested in Afghanistan, who want to know more, and women's rights organization who are concerned, who are trying to do something. 

We believe that action starts with awareness. If you know something, you can do something about it. But if you don't know anything, it's very unlikely that you would take any steps. Our hope is to be able to inspire action. 

That's a nice lead into what I wanted to ask you next, which is about impact. How do you ensure that your work is making a difference? The work in itself is already so, so difficult and so fraught as we've established. How do you ensure that that call to action is being taken seriously by your audiences? 

We run stories that we feel matter in Afghanistan, like the stories of the women who are being killed. And there is no accountability for it.  

We bring the stories to our audience, and we let them do something with this knowledge, with this information. And for us so far, some of our stories have made it to the places that we want this to go to. For example, I've been to some of the NGOs to read our stories. The Special Rapporteur on Afghanistan is reading our work. And sometimes they get in touch with us and talk about the details of these stories. And human rights organization that are documenting the situation in Afghanistan sometimes contact us and tell us that they're interested to have a conversation about the story or possibly be able to contact the sources that we spoke to. 

This is the kind of impact that we are hoping to make: to be part of the conversation in Afghanistan and being the voice of the most marginalized in Afghanistan, giving their voices a platform with decision makers and the people involved in Afghanistan. 

So significant players are reading the Zan Times and using it to inform themselves. Now I have a question about how you were able to keep your ear to the ground from afar. You have your network of journalists on the ground because it must also be hard. What is it like to have to verify from a distance? How do you check that what is happening is indeed what is happening? 

Thankfully, we have a very big network of contacts in Afghanistan in different provinces, different places. And we are trying to very much fact-check the information that we publish. We confirm with different sources.  

To give you a feeling about reporting from exile: Some of these stories are being done by our colleague on the ground. They go to the people, to the sources, do the interviews, collect information and send a story to us. And then we have questions, and we want them to provide more information or possibly any evidence or photo that would add to their story. And sometimes there are stories that are very risky to cover from inside Afghanistan, like the story of this female YouTuber.   

What we do in those cases is that the journalists on the ground provide us with the information and the contact of the sources. Reaching out to them themselves is impossible, because if they do, both of their lives might be at risk. In those cases, we cover from outside Afghanistan. And sometimes it’s even easier for the people to talk to journalists outside of Afghanistan then a journalist who is living under the Taliban rule because they're scared that if this journalist is arrested, their identity could be known. And that risk can be mitigated when a journalist they trust from outside the country calls. We find that to be helpful. 

And for me personally, that's not a new thing that I started doing since the Taliban takeover. When I was in Afghanistan working even for The New York Times, for some of the stories that I've worked on, I was never in the field in provinces that, you know, were very hostile to journalists – there was war and conflict, and it was not possible for us to reach those areas. We would always do remote reporting. And that was something that assured us that we could do this work.  

It's come up a few times now: The female YouTuber who had quite an audience and how you reported on that story. Are there other examples of stories that you're particularly proud of? 

We did launch an archive in April this year where we're trying to document the violence against public women. By that we mean any woman who had a public role in society, whether they were students, teachers, policewomen, lawyers, politicians, activists.  

When the Taliban took power, what we started seeing was the news of women being turned up dead. And for most, there was no information. Just saying a woman's body was found here, a woman's body was found there with little context and information who this woman was, what she had done and who might have killed her. And of course, there's total impunity for femicide. There is no follow-up, in most cases we never hear that anybody is being arrested in relation to their death. 

So, we started compiling an archive and looking at why these women were killed. And in most cases, we found that those women had a public role. Documenting their cases is ongoing work for us. We look at women who’ve been killed, women who disappeared and women who’ve been arrested.  

One example is the story of a teacher in northern Afghanistan when the Taliban banned the school. She was a high school teacher and lost her job. She had a family to feed, her husband's disabled, he cannot work and it’s up to her to feed her family. So, she started working as a private teacher, teaching some of her former students at home. The Taliban learned about this and summoned her family, her husband and brother in different instances and told them that we have information that she is a prostitute. They said, ‘We want you to stop her from doing sex work.’ 

Of course, the family said no, that’s wrong information. She's teaching in people's houses because she has a family to feed. If you don't want her to go to other people's home, give her something that she can do at her home or elsewhere, whatever you say. She just needs to feed her family in any way possible.  

They were summoned, I think, once or twice and then she ended up being killed near her home when she was returning from one of her teaching jobs. What was announced was that she was a prostitute. She’s dead, there’s no accountability for her. 

Her children are young, and her husband has a vision impairment. The sources told us that he tried to commit suicide several times, but because he has two young daughters, he said that it's better to have a disabled father than no father under the Taliban – which makes women very vulnerable. 

So, no accountability for her death. The family was stigmatized, it was said that she was a prostitute. That is what’s happening to some of the women who are working, who must feed their family. We see this as systematic violence that is happening with total impunity. 

There’s another story we published a few months ago about how the Taliban have raped some of the women they have arrested in their prison. They had been arrested in relation to violation of their dress code, a too small headscarf, too tight pants, things like that. They were arrested and some of these women were sexually harassed and raped in the Taliban prison. 

One of those girls was a teenager, a 16-year-old. She spent two weeks in the Taliban prison. And the night she was released, she committed suicide in her own home. She only cried and told her mother that she was dishonored and now she's dead. And again, no accountability for her death. 

There was another woman who was arrested for the same accusation of violation of their dress code. And 22 days after she was killed her dead body was found. When her parents went to ask the Taliban for justice for why their daughter’s been killed, the parents disappeared. There's no information about what happened to them. They were arrested by the Taliban with their children. The children were released after five days. But the parents were not. We talked with the sources, there’s no information on what happened to the parents. 

These are very, very difficult, harrowing stories. And I think I'm starting to understand why you said in the beginning that your business model was resistance. What do you mean by resistance? 

When we started our work, it was not about creating another newsroom and trying to do business in the normal ways that you're supposed to be thinking about creating an organization. 

For us, it was about a responsibility to our people. We as journalists feel kind of responsible for being the voices of our community and report on critical issues at a difficult time like this. And especially in the face of the Taliban’s war on women, as women journalists we have a role to play. And that role turned out to be reporting critical issues, focusing on human rights in Afghanistan and looking on the issues that the Taliban don't want to be covered. And we see this as a way of resisting the Taliban while they're trying to remove us from society, to make us invisible in society. 

We are here resisting and reporting on the stories that the Taliban wants nobody to know about.

Where would you situate yourself within the Afghan media landscape? I can imagine that you're not alone as journalists – you must be a part of the resistance. Surely there are other parts of society that are trying to stand against this oppression as well. Or do you feel that you have a specific niche that you occupy? 

There are other Afghan media also in exile that are doing this work, but they might not be specifically focusing on human rights in Afghanistan. They might be covering many more topics.  

I think what differentiates us from other newsrooms is that we are trying to have a more investigative look at the issues and spend time with the stories. We are not doing daily news while most of the media in Afghanistan focus on news. We focus on feature and investigative work. Initially, we also did news, but we later understood that we must focus and that's where we can make the most impact. We spend time with a story, with the sources and try to look at places where no other people can. That’s the space that we want to work in. 

You've outlined how difficult it is to tell these stories; how difficult it is also to hear those stories. I want to go back to something you said in the beginning about how you felt that many times things seemed lost. What were those moments and how did you overcome them? 

Oh, thanks for that question. I started this work as a journalist and when I started, my idea was that I'm going to go and do the reporting. I'm going to interview people; I'm going to be writing stories. Then I started Zan Times and learned that that's not what I will be doing. I will be thinking about hiring people, keeping people safe, being able to pay them at the end of the month, also about how long Zan Times can do this work. 

When I started Zan Times with a group of other Afghan women journalists, I used my own savings as a seed funding. And I had no idea where the next money was going to come from. I think five or six months into the work, we were almost giving up. I remember one of my colleagues saying ‘we cannot go on just all volunteering. There is no hope and it's not wise to continue going. We tried but it didn't work. Let's stop here and say goodbye.’  

But for me personally, giving up was not an option. If something matters to me, I feel that I must be the last person standing there and fighting for it. Understandably, some of my colleagues left at that time and I get it. But a small group of us stayed and said no matter what, we're going to continue doing it because this is our mission. This is what we should be doing. And again, without any experience. I didn't know about people management, or finance. And then sitting there and having to write the proposal – which I didn’t know how to write – all of that seemed like an impossible task. 

Every day, you must manage everything while you don't know how. So, should I go Google it? Should I watch a YouTube video about it? Like how should I deal with this? And most of the time you don't have that luxury of time to be able to sit and read or watch something about it. You have to make the decision and soon you will find out whether that decision was correct or wrong. 

The way I approach this is experimenting and learning what works. And I think I have learned a lot in the past two years. I have learned from my colleagues, I have learned from what didn't work, what worked. A remaining challenge for us is keeping the team safe and paying them at the end of the month. 

And not being able to fundraise is a challenge that we are facing. One of the reasons for that is that I had no connection coming to this work with funders, with people who are supporting the media. I am establishing those connections. I have been lucky to be able to get to know many organizations in the past two years. We have worked with many organizations, but our survival is still a challenge. But possibly in the future, we are hoping to be able to create a platform supported by its readers, especially the readers who can afford to pay and keep Zan Times going. 

You have said that it takes more than the will to produce, the will to operate a newsroom and the purity of motivation and intent to keep it running. You've talked about how difficult it is to fundraise. I also noticed, however, that one of your sources of funding is partnerships with other organizations. How does that work exactly? How's that different from fundraising? 

Partnerships are when we work with some organization on a story, and they help us with the cost of producing this story. Then we publish the story as a shared work. The organization will publish on their website, we’ll publish on our website saying, ‘produced in partnership with this particular organization.’  

That’s the kind of work that we are hoping to be able to do more because we are seeing that it's becoming almost impossible for international media to cover Afghanistan and have journalists on the ground. We can cover that, we can provide that access, but we need their support to be able to do this work – and their trust. 

Because to be honest, most often the international media look down on the local journalists like they might not be delivering the standard work and the quality of work. But I think they should be judging our work based on what they see. 

They should give us a chance to be in their byline – and to inform and bring stories that they might not necessarily get if they are working with an international correspondent who just spends a week or so and comes back with a story to tell. We have been living that story for a long time. And can probably tell the story with its nuances and context of what it means to the people of Afghanistan – and possibly beyond. By that I mean that the crisis of women's rights in Afghanistan is most often being seen as the problem of Afghanistan. But I think that has consequences for the world because the Taliban have brought the bar so low for what could be denied to women. And there's no response, no action internationally that could prevent anybody from denying women's rights. I hope that that will be seen as a global problem: not only the problem of Afghanistan, but as a crisis of women's rights in our time and for the world. 

As the founder of the Zan Times, what is it that you want to see from the international community? 

I want them to treat the people of Afghanistan equally with how they treat human rights issues in their own country. And I want them to be accountable because most countries are involved with Afghanistan, were part of our story and the crisis that Afghanistan is going through. They have a responsibility in that term. 

Also, I want to see more stories of Afghanistan in the international media and especially stories that Afghan woman journalists are telling it and reporting. I think we can tell a fuller story than a journalist who doesn't know a lot about the situation. Our colleagues in Afghanistan are living the stories that they're telling. So just give us a chance to inform your audiences, to bring our stories from Afghanistan. 

Towards the top of this conversation that we had, there was this question posed about whether it is possible for an outlet like the Zan Times to thrive under these very, very challenging conditions. What do you think the answer is? Because you do have a vision for your outlet, you do have a vision for the Zan Times?

I definitely do. But again, the challenges don’t always allow us to be ambitious to think beyond the next six months, or beyond the next year. I really hope for Zan Times to grow to be an of impactful newsroom, showcasing the power of women journalists, showcasing investigative journalism in Afghanistan and journalism from those poor countries can actually bring to the table and inform audiences. 

There’s a lot at stake, especially with the fact that in Afghanistan, we as women journalists have been always kind of overlooked. And we want to challenge that assumption. And sometimes it's kind of our way of challenging many, many assumptions about what women in Afghanistan can do and cannot do. And we want Zan Times to be the platform people come to for thoughtful, impactful journalism. 

The work that you are doing in itself is a statement against oppression. Now, my time with you is coming to a close. Before we let you go, however, we need to hear your three best practice tips. I can imagine how much you've learned in running Zan Times. What are the three that you would like to impart to our listeners? 

There are so many people who might be trying to think of establishing a newsroom, or a product that they think is able to tell a story that hasn’t been told before. And I think sometimes we get caught up in the idea of like, oh, it takes so much to build an organization, and you need a lot of resources. 

But I would say to them, based on my experience with Zan Times and literally no funding to begin with: Start where you are, start with whatever you have. 

Be ready not to give up because there's going to be days when you will be crushed and regret starting this work. I promise that if you pass that threshold, good days will come. You will feel proud of what you have achieved. 

And the third tip is that most of the time doing this work is not only about the impact that we are making outside in the world, but it's also about the impact that we are able to make with ourselves. The feeling of having stepped out of the comfort zone and having done something very unlikely or scary. I think there's a growth in that and that growth by itself matters so much and helps us to do great things in the world. And I really hope that you take that risk and do something that you feel is important and matters so much to you. 

Let's see if I got this. The three best practice tips from Zahra Nader of the Zan Times: Start where you are and start with what you have. Be ready not to give up because there are good days. And thirdly, recognize the growth that this work fosters in you and the potential you have to achieve great things. 

We'll have to leave it there. Thank you so much to our guest today, Zahra Nader of the Zan Times. And thank you, dear listeners, for accompanying us today.  

This transcript of "Survive and Thrive: The Media Viability Podcast" has been lightly edited for clarity.    

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