Swiss media talk about people with migration experience far more often than those people get to make media themselves. A new hub is built on a simple inversion: change who produces — and the coverage changes itself
Text: Svitlana Prokopchuk
Every newsroom in Switzerland has covered migration. Very few have a colleague who arrived as a refugee sitting at the editorial table. That gap — between being a recurring topic and being an ongoing editorial voice — is the structural problem the USB Media Hub is designed to close.
The premise is not new to USB’s practice; the architecture is. Over the past years, separate projects proved the same point from different angles: young people producing short-form video journalism (Reel Integration), contributors making explanatory media about how Swiss systems actually work (Decode Switzerland), long-form journalism and radio (Stimmen zwischen den Welten), broadcasts with the community radio RaBe, editorial cooperation with Journal B. Each worked. Each also ended when its funding did — taking trained people, editorial routines and audience trust with it.
The wasteful part of project logic is not the money — it is the people. Someone learns to research, to interview, to hold a deadline — and then the project closes and that competence has nowhere to live. The hub is the place where it lives.
What is actually new
The innovation is deliberately unglamorous: infrastructure. The hub connects the existing formats into one editorial ecosystem with three things none of them could sustain alone.
First, a shared editorial backbone — common standards, quality assurance, mentoring, and a defined pathway from first-time contributor to co-editor. Participation here is not a workshop certificate; it is a route into responsibility.
Second, embedding instead of parallel media. The hub does not build a separate “migrant outlet” speaking to its own community. Contributions are edited to professional standards and published where Swiss public discourse already happens — through partners such as Journal B and Radio RaBe. Independent local media gain editorial capacity and thematic range; contributors gain a real audience.
Third, a layered budget logic. Coordination, production, learning and public engagement are financed as distinct layers by different funders — so no single rejection can collapse the whole, and no funder is asked to subsidise what lies outside its mandate. Sustainability, in this model, means continuity of contribution, not permanence of any single format.
For us the question was never whether our authors are good enough for Swiss media — they are. The question was who does the unspectacular work in between: editing, translating, coordinating, staying. That is what the hub does.
Why it matters beyond one organisation
Swiss local media are consolidating; editorial voices are becoming fewer, not more. In that landscape, plurality is no longer only a question of what gets reported, but of who is structurally able to report at all. The hub’s answer — stable editorial pathways for people currently outside media production — treats diversity as a property of the media system, not of individual stories.
A society can commission a hundred articles about people like me, and nothing changes. Give ten of us a desk in the newsroom — and you will not need to commission anything. We are not the subject of the story. We are its authors.
