Media
The life and death of dbrom, Romania’s alternative online voice
By: Cristian Lupsa
The life and death of dbrom, Romania’s alternative online voice
Posted: December 2005
The decision to kill off my teenage angst took a few minutes of a Brooklyn night. I was lying on the bed of my sublet apartment, covered by a rumpled sheet and serenaded by a heat-stricken air-conditioner. It had been five years since my fairytale began, and the end was in sight.
Like most good stories, this one starts in Transylvania. In 2000, at the end of my freshman year of college, I designed and launched a website to dump my writing into. My friend Adi and I believed the Internet - those days still a capitalist toddler - was great for blurting unfinished thoughts and frustrations, definitely superior to scraps of paper exchanged during journalism lectures at the University of Bucharest.
Romania, ten years out of communism, had lost most of its enthusiasm for change. Politicians still talked about a transition period, but none of the parties in power during the 1990s had much success of sorting out this democracy deal. The rich got richer and sleazy businessmen owned entire regions of the country. The state abandoned industry giants, making their sale price plummet and slowing down privatisation. Illegal adoptions were still common (and relatively cheap). Bribes were the best alternative to overcome bureaucracy. There was no freedom of information act in place. Gangster capitalism, that’s what it was. Most of the media sat back and did nothing, too focused on its newly discovered taste for disaster and celebrity gossip. Newspaper circulation was on a downward spiral. Television newscasts became dedicated exclusively to murders and rapes.
We started Romanian Fairytales, or dbrom as we shortened it, as comic relief from a depressing real world, which we wanted to ignore. dbrom, at www.dbrom.ro, started as a journal, a fake fan-club for an awful Brazilian race car driver, and a repository of botched soccer commentary. We soon realised what we wrote was a scathing critique of Romania’s state of affairs. We dropped the side attractions, and focused on social and political satire and commentary. At its best, dbrom was a cross between Slate and the Huffington Post. At its worst, it was a 1990s pre-blogs “personal web page”, minus the sound affects and butterfly background.
The first articles were masterpieces of over-stylised mockery – everything could be mocked: friends, parents, death, happiness, work, love and especially Romania. Like blogs today, we covered our lives as much as we did our surroundings, creating more personal journalism than any “mainstream media.”
Though discontinued, the homepage of dbrom is still online, at www.dbrom.ro
dbrom was much as much a print Daily Show, as a nomad theatre group staging tear-jerking European drama. At one point we split dbrom into grey and black sections to cover all relevant moods. We rarely leaned white – too much like the status quo.
We rode on buses cursing the dirt and the rudeness, joined vigils for the anti-communist revolution, chronicled six hours spent in line for a passport, and made sure the country’s most popular alternative rock band wore a dbrom T-shirt on stage. Plus we had my grandmother send us jam cookies every month – that’s how you feed a movement.
dbrom did not expose government corruption, choosing to focus on the annoying minutiae of daily Eastern European life, moments which drain the spirit and leave a nation passive and open to abuse. You could call our work, “Romanian gonzo,” fighting against our country, but always for it.
Over the years, dbrom published the writings of dozens of Romanians young and old, and developed a devout readership that came back every Monday morning following the weekly update. Not only was content free, we made no money from this; dbrom was a volunteer effort. All I have left from the dbrom days are four lousy t-shirts, which I printed myself.
By its closing date this August, dbrom had printed more than 1,500 articles, essays and reviews – putting every other Romanian online-only media to shame. It was the longest standing and most productive publication, and, why not say it, it was better than most newspapers. I like to think it began and died as an experiment in edited citizen journalism.
We killed dbrom because the anger faded.
I came to the United States two years ago for graduate school. In Romania, the anger of dbrom fueled my idealism for a better country and better journalism. Now there’s no country to be angry at any more. I lost the strength to mock everything, and I won’t be coming home soon. No matter how much I pretend, I am losing country, language, turns of phrase, arrogance, and irony – everything that made dbrom shine.
We began by standing in for people who lacked energy to write their own book of fairytales. Now I’m too far away for my voice to carry, and my friends back home are too tired and broke to take over. It was time to go offline and admit the Romanian fairytale was over.
Cristian Lupsa was the editor of dbrom. He lives in Washington, D.C.
Be one of the first to comment on this article