Since that side of the story is well told by now, and we also covered it last year in our 2025 Newsletter Playbook, this year we wanted to look at the other side, and see what large, enterprise publishers do.

These entities have a lot to gain from newsletters and despite having the brand authority, archives, traffic, and an existing relationship with paying readers, they are mostly treating the format as an afterthought.

We analyzed

• 859 newsletter products

• across 32 enterprise publishers

• in 10 European markets: France, Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, Norway, and Romania.

Western, Southern, Northern, and Central Europe, a representative slice of the continent’s biggest news operations. Going in, we expected to find some underutilization, but nothing quite prepared us for the scale of it.

The headline finding is simple: across the sample, newsletters function as supporting infrastructure, for distribution, for retention, sometimes for data capture, but they are rarely developed as autonomous products. And that gap is the opportunity, because newsletters happen to be the cheapest premium product an editorial team can ship: paid audiences self-select into them, they’re easy to surface, they’re cross-platform by default, and they’re significantly easier to execute than a full paywall. The format is sitting right there, and enterprise publishers are leaving most of it on the table.

We built a dedicated website for the report, and we are unusually proud of it. There, you can browse all 859 newsletters, explore the full dataset, compare publishers, see how topics rank, look at the weekly send-pattern heat map, and click through to individual newsletter landing pages.

This piece gives, you are reading right now, should give you the narrative version: the argument, the findings, the “what does this all mean?” part. But the website is where you can really see the analysis. It is built to make the findings understandable at a glance, while also letting you go very deep if you want to inspect the data newsletter by newsletter.

So please do read on here, the prose is nice, we promise. But also check out the website. We put a great deal of work into it and, more importantly, we think it makes the whole report much more useful.

You can’t subscribe to what you can’t find

The first place underutilization shows up is discoverability. We mapped where each publisher puts its newsletter entry points and only 16% of publishers feature a newsletter above the fold on the homepage, visible without scrolling, the way you’d promote anything you actually wanted readers to use. The dominant pattern is the opposite: 78% bury newsletter discovery inside a hamburger menu, and 53% relegate it to the footer. About a third (31%) use inline article promos. Fewer than half maintain a dedicated landing page that’s actually promoted.

This is probably the single most fixable thing on the list. Building a newsletter product is not trivial, but large publishers likely clear the hardest hurdles: they have writers, expertise, voice, and traffic. Solo creators and small teams (👋) flock to Substack despite its trade-offs because of its built-in discovery. Enterprise publishers have built-in discovery, they just don’t use it. If I were running newsletter strategy at any of the 32 publishers in this sample, the very first thing I’d do, is put a newsletter call-to-action in the homepage first view. You drive signups, you start the relationship, you get a direct, disintermediated channel to readers who are more likely to pay and more likely to stay.

Media Finance Monitor is where newsroom leaders, funders, and media entrepreneurs come to understand how money really moves through the information ecosystem. We decode funding, business models, policy, and platform shifts and turn them into strategies you can actually use.

Paid subscribers get premium editions, full access to the archive and all our research reports, for about the cost of a pistachio éclair and a good espresso a month.

For deeper engagement, our Partnership Program offers one-on-one strategic advisory, curated briefings, and access to our internal databases and invite-only events.

Join as a free or paid subscriber.

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Asking for too much data

The second pattern is what happens after a reader decides they want to sign up. 64% of publishers require a full account before you can subscribe to a newsletter. 76% use double opt-in. Only 18% allow email-only signup. And 49% show no content sample at all before asking for that commitment, readers are being asked to register, confirm, and wait, without seeing what they’re waiting for.

For a free newsletter, which is the top of the funnel, the place where you’re trying to start a habit, this is exactly backwards. Double opt-in is a defensible reading of GDPR, fine, but the full-account requirement is a self-inflicted wound. The friction a new reader faces at the door is “should I create an account, give a password, perhaps my full name, etc. just to read something?”

Publishers using email-only signup are almost certainly capturing readers the account-first publishers are losing before the first send. Capture the email, start sending, build the habit, then ask for the rest later.

Mostly free, narrowly paid, and not necessarily where the audience is going

83% of newsletters in the sample are free; 17% sit behind some form of paywall. Within that paid tail of 146 newsletters, 58% are subscriber-only (included in the main site subscription), 27% are vertical subscriptions (a standalone paid product), and 15% are freemium. The standalone paid newsletter, the product Substack normalised, the thing creators are building entire businesses on, is still genuinely rare in European enterprise publishing.

To be fair, unless you have some valuable niche authority (think stuff like crypto), we wouldn’t necessarily build a standalone paid newsletter as the destination product. But a high-quality premium newsletter should be one of your most important conversion vectors into the main subscription. You’re not selling the newsletter per se, you’re using it to sell the whole bundle. Readers are getting used to paying for newsletters faster than at any point since the House of Medici was underwriting hot takes in Florence. Sitting that out feels like and odd choice.

The topic mix inside the paid tail tells its own story.

Business & Finance (26%) and Politics & Geopolitics (22%) together make up nearly half of all paid newsletters. This is the orthodoxy: people will pay for information they can act on financially or professionally, and they will pay for it more readily than for anything else. That is true, but it’s incomplete. Health & Wellness is 3% of paid newsletters, and that may be the most visible blind spot in the sample. Once readers move into their mid-forties (and especially as European populations continues to age) health, longevity, and healthy living become enormous concerns at exactly the moment disposable income peaks and inbox habits are most ingrained. The audience is there, the willingness to pay is there, the format suits it perfectly. It was very surprising to see how the vast majority of enterprise publishers are missing this, especially given the popularity of newsletters such as the Ground Truths.

Weekly, Friday, and a coherent cadence

A few smaller observations worth keeping. Weekly is the industry default by a wide margin, 56% of products. That’s right; monthly is too slow to feel like a coherent content stream, and bi-weekly is about the floor for sustained attention. Friday is the peak send day, with Thursday close behind. Monday inboxes are too busy; weekends are when many readers are with their families and not looking for distraction.

What to do about it

The honest summary of the report is that the enterprise publishers winning at newsletters in Europe are doing fairly basic things well: above-the-fold placement, low-friction signup, visible samples, a paid product worth paying for. Most aren’t doing those things yet. The format is mature, the audience is being trained to value it elsewhere, and the door is still wide open.

The full audit, including the searchable data explorer across all 859 newsletters, is available here.

This week on Media Finance Monitor

• Media development works

• Launching the Newsroom Pivot Program 2026

• The journalism strand might be a demotion

• The EU’s top court just narrowed platforms’ room to challenge news compensation rules in Europe

• Two studies for local media

• 26 active calls (6 new)

Media Finance Monitor is where newsroom leaders, funders, and media entrepreneurs come to understand how money really moves through the information ecosystem. We decode funding, business models, policy, and platform shifts and turn them into strategies you can actually use.

Paid subscribers get premium editions, full access to the archive and all our research reports, for about the cost of a pistachio éclair and a good espresso a month.

For deeper engagement, our Partnership Program offers one-on-one strategic advisory, curated briefings, and access to our internal databases and invite-only events.

Join as a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

Media development works

(by Peter)

A lot of independent publishing in Central and Eastern Europe runs on a mix of media development funding, journalism support and innovation grants, philanthropy, and the occasional public subsidy. It has for two decades, and the money involved is not trivial. There are complicated debates whether this has produced sustainable structures or just elaborate forms of dependency. I’m in no way a neutral arbiter: I’ve led organizations that received this kind of support, and more recently I’ve ended up on the other side of the table, sitting on juries, advising funders, and providing some of the mentoring and technical assistance that follows once the money is allocated.

More specifically, I have worked with the ZYX Publishing Group in Romania, the subject of this story, for over a year. MDIF is also a long-term partner of ours, and we have collaborated on multiple projects. So while I’m going to write about media development, and about a case where I think media development worked, I am not a curious anthropologist discovering a successful intervention in the wild. I am part of this ecosystem, part of this story, and this inevitably colors my analysis. That being said, neither MDIF nor ZYX has asked me to cover them, this is my own editorial production.

On Wednesday, Pluralis, a media investment fund managed by MDIF, announced it had signed an agreement to acquire a 17% stake in ZYX Publishing Group, the Romanian publisher behind HotNews. Pending regulatory approval, this marks Pluralis’s entry into the Romanian market. On Monday, two days before the announcement, HotNews launched a paywall and membership program, the first mainstream digital-only outlet in Romania to do so. These two announcements are really one story.

Pluralis is a blended investment fund with tens of millions of euros to deploy. Blended means it involves some market driven and some philanthropic actors. It’s not a grant program with better hotel placement and nicer stationery, it needs to put meaningful capital into independent media companies that can grow, become more resilient and, ideally, generate returns.

This creates a very practical problem in Central and Eastern Europe: there are not that many independent publishers that can absorb a larger equity investment. A €100,000 ticket and a €1,000,000 ticket do not require the same amount of capital, obviously, but they can require surprisingly similar amounts of legal work, due diligence, structuring and portfolio management. At some point, the economics push you toward larger bets. (Okay, maybe not you or me, but MDIF.)

But larger bets are difficult if the market does not produce enough investment-ready companies.

That is why MDIF created the Amplify Europe program. It was designed to build the missing investment pipeline: to identify publishers with potential, then support them with grant funding, mentoring, expert advice and peer learning so they could become stronger, more disciplined and, ultimately, more investable.

ZYX/HotNews is the cleanest example of that plan working end to end.

In the last two years HotNews has migrated CMS, absorbed another newsroom, improved advertising yield, doubled revenues, launched premium products and newsletters, selected a technical partner for membership infrastructure and implemented the solution, designed a tiered subscription product and secured the New York Times as their launch bundle partner.

A decade ago, when these conversations started, the standard CEE refrain was audible in most meetings: “this could never work in our market”, “our audience won’t pay”, “our market is too small”, “the timing is wrong”. Those objections aren’t stupid: limited disposable incomes, market size, language reach, digital development can all be real constraints. But they aren’t verdicts. There are very few CEE markets where a well-designed audience revenue program cannot work for a serious publisher. Success almost always depends on whether the organization is willing/able to do what’s required (which is a lot), not whether the market will permit it.

Ukrainska Pravda, which we covered earlier this year, is the extreme example: Pluralis investment, followed by a paywall launch, in a country under active invasion. If you can do it there, the geography of excuses gets very small.

Amplify Europe was not designed to tick a funder box, improve someone’s annual report, or generate flattering participant satisfaction scores. Its goal was to help publishers become investment-ready, because Pluralis needs investable companies to deploy capital into, and it only succeeds if those companies grow. The outlets want sustainability and growth; MDIF and Pluralis want the same thing, for compatible reasons and on a similar timeline. This does not mean every media development program needs this structure, or that every Amplify participant will become investable. But when the funder, the program, the investor and the publisher are all pulling toward the same definition of success, you get a tailwind: programs select for ambition rather than compliance, publishers use the support rather than game it, and ultimately it becomes an on-ramp toward the market, not another grant cycle to shield publishers from it.

Launching the Newsroom Pivot Program 2026

(by Peter)

A five-year strategy is a strange object in the 2026 information ecosystem.

The world in which information is produced, distributed, consumed, trusted, and monetized is changing faster than most planning cycles can handle. Strategy still matters, but in this environment it mostly means staying close to audiences, testing fast, and being ready to change direction.”

That is the thinking behind the 2026 Newsroom Pivot Program, which we are running with JX Fund and Gazzetta.

The program, simply put, is built around launching useful things in exile information spaces. It is highly practical, with a focus on one-on-one mentoring, peer learning, and getting something live.

It looks something like this:

• You come with an idea.

• We work on it together.

• You build.

• You launch within 8–12 weeks.

• You test, learn, improve, and iterate.

There is modest financial support, up to €3,000, tied to launch and iteration milestones, but the real value is the process: hands-on support from people who have built, launched, and monetized public-interest products before.

The program is open to exiled newsrooms, independent creators, journalists, product teams, platform-based initiatives, civic information projects, and anyone else serving audiences with useful public-interest information.

Don’t worry if you don’t fit neatly into someone’s old institutional category. If you deliver information people need, or you are building something that could make public-interest information work more sustainable, we want to hear from you.

You can find more details about eligibility and timelines, and submit a lightweight expression of interest here.

EU budget: The journalism strand might be a demotion

(By David & Peter)

Let’s try peak EU budget lingo:

“The European Parliament rapporteurs’ AgoraEU draft does something that looks like a win: it gives journalism its own strand.”

If you understand what this sentence means, you no longer need to read this newsletter, please unsubscribe now. On the other hand, if for some weird reason you haven’t followed our minute-by-minute reporting on the EU budget negotiations and its potential effects on journalism funding:

“Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in charge of the AgoraEU program, the envelope that is meant to support culture, journalism and civil society from 2028 to 2034 under the EU’s next seven year budget are proposing a seemingly positive structural change.”

Let’s stick with version two.

So under the European Commission’s original proposal from last summer, most journalism support spending was bundled up with support for the movie industry and video games under a strand called MEDIA+ under said AgoraEU program. The Commission’s logic was that the audiovisual industries and news are facing at least partially similar structural challenges (👋platform dependency, AI disruption, distribution bottlenecks, intellectual property extraction, audience fragmentation, market concentration and weakening revenue models) and therefore support can be managed by overlapping/adjacent administrative structures. While this makes sense, there was also a reasonable argument that journalism needs a dedicated strand so it’s more visible and support for it is politically harder to hijack or dilute.

Now the MEPs keeping an eye on the proposed AgoraEU program are saying: let’s have a dedicated structure for journalism. This could be good news, but we are afraid it’s not.

The MEPs are also suggesting new numbers on funding: they would increase the overall size of the AgoraEU program from the original €8.6 billion to €10.7 billion and propose journalism get 11.7% or around €1.25 billion over the 2028–2034 period.

Under the original scheme, journalism didn’t have a fixed allocation (something we didn’t like), the MEDIA+ strand was supposed to get €3.2 billion and how this would be divided between movies, games and news was anyone’s guess. We were hoping for a 50% split, so around €1.6 billion over seven years, which is about €400 million more than what the MEPs are proposing now.

While at this stage the MEPs report is a sort of suggestion and it doesn’t bind the Commission and the Council, it is not a great sign. The final budgets have a way of shrinking once national governments discover who pays for these programs (hint: they do). If the final AgoraEU envelope moves closer to the Commission/Council baseline of €8.6 billion the 11.7% becomes a much smaller number.

In the meantime, EU news media revenues are running roughly €7 billion lower per year than in 2019, by the Commission’s own estimates.

A separate strand only counts as recognition if it comes with the resources to back the recognition. If Parliament wants to argue journalism is democratic infrastructure, the math has to look like it.

The EU’s top court just narrowed platforms' room to challenge news compensation rules in Europe

(by María)

On 12 May, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled that Italy’s system for regulating negotiations between digital platforms and news publishers is compatible with EU law. The case concerns Article 15 of the EU’s 2019 Copyright Directive, which gives press publishers the right to seek compensation when platforms use their content online.

Italy adopted one of the bloc’s more interventionist implementations of the directive. Its communications regulator, AGCOM, can require platforms to negotiate with publishers, demand the data needed to calculate payments, define criteria for fair compensation, and impose penalties on companies that refuse to comply. Meta challenged the framework before the Lazio Regional Administrative Court, arguing that Article 15 created a private exclusive right for publishers rather than a basis for regulator-supervised negotiations and price-setting. The dispute ultimately reached the CJEU, whose Grand Chamber found that member states have discretion to build enforcement systems around the directive.

The ruling also upheld one of the framework’s most contested features: regulators may require platforms to share the data necessary to determine compensation, addressing an informational imbalance that would otherwise leave publishers negotiating largely in the dark. It further validated Italy’s restriction on platforms reducing the visibility of publishers’ content during negotiations.

At the same time, the ruling imposed limits. Platforms are covered by the framework only if they actually use, or intend to use, press publications. Publishers must remain free to authorise use without payment, refuse authorisation entirely, or negotiate independently. The system cannot function as a mandatory state tariff detached from publishers' consent. The case now returns to the Lazio court for further proceedings.

The question of whether systems like Italy’s are legally permissible is not Italy’s alone. Belgium adopted a similar framework in 2022, and that law is currently subject to an annulment appeal and a separate preliminary reference to the CJEU. The ruling weakens one of the main objections to systems of this kind and, more broadly, gives governments more room to make Article 15 operational rather than merely symbolic.

But a stronger legal footing for these systems does not change a more fundamental problem: platforms can still decide they do not want news. When Canada introduced legislation with a similar objective, Meta blocked news on Facebook and Instagram rather than negotiate, a ban still in place after more than two years. The two systems differ structurally, but Canada demonstrated that platforms may choose withdrawal over negotiation.

Two studies for local media

(by María)

Local news organizations grapple with recurring questions around audience growth, revenue diversification, and long-term sustainability. Two recent publications offer insights into how some independent publishers are navigating those pressures.

• LION data shows centering audience grows publisher revenue: An analysis from LION Publishers looked at nearly 400 Sustainability Audit records to assess how 15 audience engagement indicators relate to revenue growth and audience size among independent local news outlets. It found that organizations investing more heavily in audience engagement, direct reader relationships, and community feedback tended to report stronger revenue performance and more diversified revenue streams. It also suggests that audience work is increasingly functioning as core business infrastructure rather than solely an editorial or marketing function.

• Meeting the revenue challenge: philanthropy’s role in local news growth: A report from the Wyncote Foundation examined the financial evolution of local news organizations by reviewing 17 groups in depth, conducting over 50 interviews, and analyzing tax filings from more than 100 nonprofit media organizations. It identified four recurring patterns among those moving toward sustainability: journalist-founders adopting a stronger business mindset, deliberate diversification of revenue streams, catalytic investments accelerating growth, and the ongoing role of local philanthropy as a stabilizing force.

This piece is part of a series focusing on local and community journalism and is supported by the LimeNet project and the European Union.

Here are the 26 active calls, with the largest at the top:

Read more

The two countries share a train line, a border, several excellent dishes, and media systems in which the state matters enormously. Both struggle with political influence over advertising, the role of the public broadcaster, and the design of government support for journalism.

In Austria, these instruments were used mostly to stabilize. The result is a deeply conservative media market: subsidized incumbents, generous public advertising, weak incentives to innovate, and a striking absence of new digital-native challengers.

In Hungary, especially over the past sixteen years, similar instruments were used to subdue the information ecosystem. State advertising and political pressure on private advertisers were used intentionally to starve independent outlets. Public media became a weapon of mass deception. The regulator mostly served to legalize politically motivated media capture. Independent media were pushed into scarcity and, because of that scarcity, into experimentation.

Both countries are now redesigning their information ecosystems.

Austria wants to reform before its soft dependencies harden into something worse. In Hungary, the regime that captured most of the media space has collapsed, and the new government has to decide what to do with the ruins.

We think the two debates would benefit from listening to each other. This is our attempt to start that conversation.

Media Finance Monitor is where newsroom leaders, funders, and media entrepreneurs come to understand how money really moves through the information ecosystem. We decode funding, business models, policy, and platform shifts and turn them into strategies you can actually use.

Paid subscribers get premium editions, full access to the archive and all our research reports, for about the cost of a pistachio éclair and a good espresso a month.

For deeper engagement, our Partnership Program offers one-on-one strategic advisory, curated briefings, and access to our internal databases and invite-only events.

Join as a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

Subsidized stagnation or authoritarian innovation

Austria distributes media support through two channels. The first is direct subsidy: around €80 million per year in formal media funding. The second is public advertising: €418 million in 2024, spent by federal ministries, federal state governments, chambers, and public enterprises. For comparison: Austria spends roughly nine times more on government advertising than Germany does, for a media market a fraction of the size.

Every existing subsidy is tied to a minimum number of years of existence, which means new media organisations cannot access public support at all. The dominant metric is economic size, which means larger outlets receive proportionally more, reinforcing market concentration. Two thirds flow through processes directly exposed to political discretion.

The advertising side drew sustained criticism, both domestically and from the European Commission, which raised concerns about the scale of public spending and the fairness of its distribution. The corruption scandal around former Chancellor Sebastian Kurz showed that it was an instrument of editorial influence rather than public communication.

In Hungary, there is no Austrian-style subsidy architecture to speak of. The Fidesz government had no interest in transferring public money to outlets it did not control, and the outlets it did control did not need a formal subsidy system because they had something better: a completely weaponised advertising market.

Loyal outlets received state advertising on a scale entirely disconnected from their actual audiences; independent outlets, regardless of reach, received nothing. Private advertisers, particularly in regulated sectors, learned quickly that spending money with 444, HVG, Telex or 24.hu created political and regulatory exposure they did not want. Total government advertising spend since 2015 exceeds one billion euros, almost all of it directed by political logic rather than market logic.

The two systems, unsurprisingly, produced very different outcomes.

The last serious wave of new entrants (private radio and tv stations) to the Austrian media market arrived in the mid-1990s with the liberalisation of broadcasting. The incumbents are protected, the print sector is propped up, the public broadcaster is comfortable, and the few attempts at digital-native journalism operate at the margins of a system that was never designed to make room for them. Austria has lost roughly a third of its journalism jobs in two decades, from over 7,000 in 2006 to well under 5000 today, and yet the structure of the market has barely shifted.

In Hungary, the advertising-market interference was followed by media capture and extreme levels of consolidation: according to some estimates up to 80% of the scene got captured with entities like the government aligned Central European Press and Media Foundation controlling 470+ outlets alone.

Those who did not want to become a cog in the government comms machinery had to choose between innovation or going out of business. Lots of people lost their jobs. The outlets that survived did so by becoming digital-only, audience-funded, and structurally lighter than a lot of their peers in the region. Print, with its overheads and its vulnerability to distribution pressure, is essentially gone as a serious business or political force. The major independent outlets and a long tail of regional and vertical players are digital natives with diversified revenue streams: some advertising, audience revenue, paywalls, memberships, events, book publishing and in several cases the 1% income tax redirection mechanism.

The Austrian outcome is a market that does not produce challengers because it does not need to. The Hungarian outcome is a market that produces challengers because it had no other option, but at the cost of losing a lot of great people and newsrooms to intimidation and capture.

Hungary’s three layers of reform

Read more

This week on Media Finance Monitor

• The market for belonging

• One of Substack’s biggest success stories is leaving the platform

• Australia tries to get platforms to pay for news, again

• How El Tímpano is monetizing trust with underserved communities

• 23 active calls (1 new)

Media Finance Monitor is where newsroom leaders, funders, and media entrepreneurs come to understand how money really moves through the information ecosystem. We decode funding, business models, policy, and platform shifts and turn them into strategies you can actually use.

Paid subscribers get premium editions, full access to the archive and all our research reports, for about the cost of a pistachio éclair and a good espresso a month.

For deeper engagement, our Partnership Program offers one-on-one strategic advisory, curated briefings, and access to our internal databases and invite-only events.

Join as a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

The market for belonging

(by Peter)

For years, I subscribed to The New Yorker in print, despite barely ever reading it.

Every week, it would arrive full of elegant prose, careful reporting and cartoons I seldom understood. I would occasionally open it, read three paragraphs of a 9,000-word profile of a theatre director I had never heard of, then place it on the living room table. Especially when guests were coming over.

Obviously, if anyone noticed, I would make a great show of being mildly embarrassed. Oh, how clumsy of me, I seem to have left this serious, tasteful, intellectually respectable magazine right here, where everyone can see it. What an unfortunate accident. Let me put it away so we have room for the plates.

I did not really pay for information, I paid for a costume, an identity. I paid for what I wanted to believe about myself, and what I wanted others to believe about me.

This is why I loved Francesco Marconi’s new thesis, Who Will Monetize Truth?, but also why I think it leaves part of the picture unfinished.

Marconi proposes a very elegant structure. He says the information business is splitting into three species: the Intelligence Business (Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, etc.) , the Attention Aggregator (HuffPost, CNN, most legacy newsrooms), and the Public Good (local accountability, investigations, foreign desks). The first sells reduced uncertainty to people who need to make decisions. The second sells awareness, which AI is making cheaper and often clickless. The third produces socially essential information that probably cannot survive as a normal business.

This is a great and useful way to think about the information ecosystem.

The most valuable information in the world is not “news” in the way normal people use the word. It is structured, timely, decision-useful intelligence. If a hedge fund, pharmaceutical company, law firm or logistics business can make or avoid losing millions because it understands something earlier or better than others, the pricing power is obvious. Bloomberg does not charge terminal prices because traders enjoy the prose. But if you can make $50,000 with access to information that costs $30,000, a lot of organisations will be happy to pay.

But people do not only pay for information because it helps them make money. They also pay for voice, taste, entertainment, belonging, habit, status and, in some cases, surprisingly deep emotional attachment.

This is not a marginal issue, it is one of the central forces reshaping the information ecosystem.

The same fact can be worthless, mildly interesting or worth €10 a month depending on who tells it, in what tone, with what jokes, and with what implied relationship to the audience. This is why people pay for newsletters whose underlying information is technically available elsewhere. It is why they listen to podcasts containing seven minutes of insight distributed across 83 minutes of friendship simulation. It is why creators can build businesses around personality, not just expertise.

“Content is worthless, connection is valuable” was the thesis of the Pornification of human attention piece last year. That was about sexuality, AI and the grimly predictable way every new information technology eventually discovers the monetization power of arousal. But I think the broader point applies here too: attention does not flow only toward what is useful. It flows toward desire, intimacy, identity and relationship.

Marconi’s framework is strongest when explaining where the largest economic surplus will go. And he is almost certainly right that this value will be captured by those who turn information into intelligence. But the broader information ecosystem also contains another market beyond decision-useful facts: the market for relationships with voices, institutions and imagined versions of ourselves.

This market will not produce Bloomberg Terminal margins. Nobody is paying me $30,000 a year because my jokes help them hedge regulatory risks, though I am 100 percent trying to game that out as well. Still, a few hundred people do pay for this newsletter. Some of that is clearly about access to information on grants and funding mechanisms and business strategy, the intelligence layer if you will. But I suspect some of it is also about tone, trust and familiarity.

Last night at the IPI Innovation Festival in Vienna, while moderating a panel with media funders, we ended up in the familiar argument about core grants: are they necessary operating support for independent journalism, or do they insulate newsrooms from the useful discipline of the market? Marconi’s third category, the Public Good, makes the dilemma clearer. If some forms of journalism have no plausible business case, as he argues, then core support is not a temporary bridge to sustainability: it is permanent infrastructure, like funding libraries, courts or public broadcasting. But if parts of that work can be turned into intelligence, or attached to a trusted voice, community or product people value, then grants can be understood differently: not as life support in perpetuity, but as runway to discover whether a market exists.

Look at Hunterbrook, a newsroom funded by a hedge fund that trades on its own reporting. They recently uncovered evidence that a U.S. company was supplying parts for Russian drones. I want that story published, and I am relaxed about who profits along the way. This is Marconi’s thesis in action: when the intelligence layer can be plugged in, the journalism gets funded, when it cannot, we are back to grants or silence.

AI will make many types of information abundant. It may destroy traffic, it will very likely compress the value of awareness toward zero. But it will not eliminate the human desire to belong, to attach ourselves to people, groups, styles and identities.

So yes, truth will be monetized, some of it spectacularly.

But not all payment is a bet on utility. Sometimes people pay because information helps them act, sometimes they pay because it also helps them belong. Sometimes they pay because it helps them feel clever, tasteful or morally aligned. And sometimes, embarrassingly, they pay so a magazine can sit on a coffee table and tell visitors a small, flattering lie.

One of Substack’s biggest success stories is leaving the platform

(by María)

After years of expansion, The Ankler is moving its subscription business off Substack and onto its own platform, powered by Passport, a joint product between Automattic (WordPress owner) and Ben Thompson (Stratechery founder). What began as a single Hollywood newsletter written by Richard Rushfield has grown into a media company spanning 15 newsletters, podcasts, video and live events, with an 18-person staff.

In a note to readers, CEO Janice Min framed the transition largely in product and operational terms: greater control over design, subscriptions and audience data, along with a more integrated experience across Ankler Media’s growing portfolio.

Economic factors likely played a role as well. For smaller publications still building their audience, Substack’s 10% cut can be a reasonable tradeoff in exchange for payments infrastructure, recommendation systems and discovery tools. But as a business grows larger and more complex, the costs of that arrangement rise while some of its benefits become less important.

Even so, The Ankler is not leaving entirely: a weekly newsletter and live video will remain on Substack, alongside The Rushfield Jamboree, Rushfield’s newest publication.

This hybrid strategy probably reflects overlapping tensions. A complete break would have mattered to each side. Substack was not just where The Ankler distributed its work, but part of the infrastructure through which the company expanded into a larger media business. The Ankler, meanwhile, became one of the publications most closely associated with Substack’s own rise, making the relationship valuable to both commercially and reputationally.

The move also fits a broader dynamic analyzed by media expert Simon Owens, in which publishers continue benefiting from Substack’s recommendation and discovery systems while shifting paid subscriptions onto infrastructure they control themselves.

Australia tries to get platforms to pay for news, again

(by María)

Last week, Australia’s Labor government published draft legislation for a News Media Bargaining Incentive. If enacted, Meta, Google and TikTok would be subject to a charge of 2.25% on their Australian revenues. Platforms that sign commercial agreements with local news publishers would be able to offset more than the value of those deals against their liability, at rates ranging from 150% to 170% depending on the size of the publisher.

This is not Australia’s first attempt to redirect revenue from platforms toward journalism. The 2021 News Media Bargaining Code required platforms that carried news to negotiate deals with publishers or risk binding arbitration. According to government documentation, within its first year of implementation, it produced more than 30 commercial agreements, with their combined value reported at around AU$200–250 million annually. However, in 2024, when Meta’s deals expired, the company chose not to renew them and reduced the availability of news on its platforms, thereby limiting its obligations under the code.

The 2026 proposal addresses that gap: the charge applies whether or not a platform carries news. Yet it creates new points of tension. For example, it would exempt professional networking services such as LinkedIn, as well as AI-powered information tools (including some operated by Microsoft and OpenAI), even though both can surface or distribute news content. At the same time, platforms would only need to secure agreements with at least four publisher groups to fully offset their liability, a threshold that Rod Sims, former head of Australia’s competition watchdog, warned could concentrate benefits among larger publishers.

But the deeper issue may lie in the logic of the mechanism itself. The government has already outlined how funds would be redistributed if platforms chose to pay the charge instead of negotiating deals: eligible newsrooms would receive funding based on journalist headcount, under clear, publicly defined criteria. If such a transparent redistribution system has already been set out, why insist on private negotiation as the preferred route? As Rasmus Kleis Nielsen noted: “A straight levy, introduced by politicians who take responsibility both for who should pay and who should receive, seems a much clearer, more transparent, and predictable model”.

How El Tímpano is monetizing trust with underserved communities

(by María)

In 2019, the Alameda County Census office (in California) needed to connect with a segment of residents ahead of the 2020 count but could not do so through its usual methods. It turned to El Tímpano, a San Francisco Bay Area newsroom serving low-income immigrants since 2017, built primarily around a Spanish-language SMS service. At the time, the text list had roughly 400 people (about 6,000 today). It was a modest audience, but a highly targeted one. The $6,000 contract that followed marked the beginning of a revenue model the outlet now calls civic partnerships.

El Tímpano defines these as paid collaborations with public agencies, nonprofits, and other mission-aligned organizations to “distribute vital information to hard-to-reach communities”. Some are fee-for-service arrangements tied to specific deliverables, such as Mam-language videos or sponsored SMS messages in Spanish. Others take the form of longer-term grants supporting broader outreach campaigns, from public health alerts to school enrollment drives.

The model generated $12,000 in its first year and by 2025 had brought in approximately $350,000, making it the second-largest source of income. Founder Madeleine Bair puts it plainly: “The asset El Tímpano is monetizing isn’t eyeballs. It’s credibility. And credibility can only be built one way: by earning it, over time, through journalism that genuinely serves the community.”

Drawing on years of experience connecting underserved communities with public resources and information, El Tímpano published a free playbook on civic partnerships. Written by Ariel Zirulnick in collaboration with the team and funded by the Knight Foundation, the guide is aimed at local newsrooms exploring alternative revenue strategies, particularly those serving immigrant, low-income, and other marginalized groups. It explains how the approach works, how to assess whether it fits, how to develop a strategy, find and secure partners, and evaluate results.

This piece is part of a series focusing on local and community journalism and is supported by the LimeNet project and the European Union.

Here are the 23 active calls, with the largest at the top:

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Hasan Piker is a prominent political streamer in the US. He broadcasts on Twitch, talks for hours about politics, capitalism, war, media, and whatever else is currently making people angry on the internet. He is extremely online, and very good at generating attention. He is also, depending on your politics, either an unusually effective communicator to young audiences, an outrage merchant with a webcam, or some combination of the two. The precise mix is not our main concern today, which is nice, because adjudicating Hasan Piker discourse is not what I hoped to do with my one wild and precious life.

The recent controversy came after Piker appeared on a New York Times Opinion podcast in an episode about “microlooting”: the idea that small-scale theft from large retailers such as Whole Foods can be understood or at least discussed, as a form of political protest.

You will be shocked to learn that this did not produce a calm and context-rich debate about property, capitalism, public order or moral philosophy.

Noah Smith wrote one of the more useful responses, making the fairly obvious but still necessary point that if you steal from a store owned by Jeff Bezos, Jeff Bezos is unlikely to be the person meaningfully harmed by your act of revolutionary lemon acquisition. The costs are more likely to be borne by workers, customers, and local communities. So if your plan for confronting extractive capitalism is shoplifting from the self-checkout area, you may want to workshop the theory of change a little more.

Piker is a known quantity, his politics and style are not unpredictable. He has built a large and extremely engaged audience precisely because he is not a cautious, polished, institution-trained commentator who says “on the one hand” often enough to be safely invited to donor dinners. So why does the New York Times want him in the room?

Media Finance Monitor is where newsroom leaders, funders, and media entrepreneurs come to understand how money really moves through the information ecosystem. We decode funding, business models, policy, and platform shifts and turn them into strategies you can actually use.

Paid subscribers get premium editions, full access to the archive and all our research reports, for about the cost of a pistachio éclair and a good espresso a month.

For deeper engagement, our Partnership Program offers one-on-one strategic advisory, curated briefings, and access to our internal databases and invite-only events.

Join as a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

I think the Times wants him for his energy, youth relevance, cultural proximity, the sense that the conversation is happening somewhere alive rather than on a panel with the word “epistemology” in its title. Piker, meanwhile, gets institutional legitimacy, a place inside the symbolic architecture of respectable public debate.

This is not necessarily a scandal, the important thing is that both sides understand the transaction. And for today’s edition, I think it’s important to acknowledge that this transaction is becoming one of the defining features of the modern information ecosystem.

Let’s look at someone radically different from Piker: Dwarkesh Patel.

Patel is a young, very plugged-in interviewer whose podcast has become an important venue for conversations about AI, technology, science, economics, and power. He is a solo-ish creator with a podcast, yet some of the most influential people in technology, industry and politics now sit down with him for long, detailed conversations. His recent conversation with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang turned, productively, into a debate about US export controls on advanced AI chips, the kind of exchange most legacy outlets would struggle to produce at the same level.

Hasan Piker’s creator influence is emotional, combative, parasocial, and ideological. Dwarkesh Patel represents creator influence as specialist institution: prepared, technically fluent, trusted by a hugely powerful audience.

Neither is a newsroom, and neither fits comfortably into the institutional categories through which public policy understands the media sector. And yet both are important parts of the information ecosystem: they shape what people know, argue about, what elites respond to, what ideas become legitimate, and what millions of people encounter as political or technical reality.

So when we think about the future of the information ecosystem, it’s worth keeping these new kinds of information entrepreneurs in mind. Which brings us, more directly than you might expect, to the latest leaked text of the AgoraEU proposal.

What is EU funding actually for?

The text, obtained by Contexte, contains some very good news.

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This week on Media Finance Monitor

• The toxic story journalism tells its funders

• Repression is an effective product manager

• Second-hand fashion CEO invests in public-interest journalism

• What the numbers say about local news sustainability

• 26 active calls (7 new)

Media Finance Monitor is where newsroom leaders, funders, and media entrepreneurs come to understand how money really moves through the information ecosystem. We decode funding, business models, policy, and platform shifts and turn them into strategies you can actually use.

Paid subscribers get premium editions, full access to the archive and all our research reports, for about the cost of a pistachio éclair and a good espresso a month.

For deeper engagement, our Partnership Program offers one-on-one strategic advisory, curated briefings, and access to our internal databases and invite-only events.

Join as a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

The toxic story journalism tells its funders

(by Peter)

Wednesday evening in Perugia, I found myself sitting across from a Russian editor whose work I admire. At some point bottles appeared, glasses were filled, and someone asked the standard question: red or white? There was chatter, people were distracted, and before he really noticed, someone had poured him white wine.

He looked at the glass, paused, and muttered something. I asked whether he had wanted red. He smiled, said it was fine, and then, half-jokingly, added that one of the first things you learn in exile is to drink only from bottles opened in front of you. I was enjoying my pasta with gorgonzola, beets and poppy seeds while he was doing an involuntary security check on a bottle of Orvieto.

Perugia is full of conversations about how hard journalism has become, and many of those conversations are justified. In some places, difficulty means broken business models, shrinking margins, exhausted teams and endless fundraising. In others, it means intimidation, surveillance, exile, and the need to think twice about something as ordinary as a glass of wine. Journalism operates across a very wide spectrum of hardship, and it helps to keep that spectrum in view.

We tell stories about what is broken in the world, often because that is the job. But living so close to crisis, fragility and failure means we also become very fluent in telling stories about our own challenges, whether objective or subjective, systemic or personal. And while many of those stories are true, I increasingly wonder what happens when they become the dominant way the sector describes itself.

Spend enough time around fundraising conversations and you start to hear a familiar narrative. Platforms extracted our advertising revenue, Big Tech swallowed our audiences, governments harassed us, underfunded us, or actively tried to destroy us. We deliver a public service that markets consistently fail to support. We are in trouble, again, still, send help!

To be clear, this is not a fabricated story, in many places, it is simply a description of reality. It can also be an effective one. Philanthropic funders often respond to the language of public value, democratic need and institutional fragility. Public sector funders frequently do too. Audiences, especially in places where independent journalism is visibly under pressure, can also rally around it.

But the same story that can unlock solidarity is often deeply unattractive to capital markets.

Risk capital does not flow toward sectors that have internalized their own decline. Investors - including impact investors, who care about more than pure returns - need a credible theory of how they get their money back. “We are a public good that markets consistently fail to support“ is not that theory.

Some publishers tell a different kind of fundraising narrative. They may still acknowledge the difficulty of the market, but they lead with momentum rather than precarity: they talk about the audience they serve, the product they are building, the niche they understand, the loyalty they have earned, the demand they can see. Their invitation is not to “rescue us”, it is to “come along for the ride”.

For capital markets, this is almost certainly the better fit. If journalism wants access to more of that capital, it cannot speak only in the language of crisis, it also has to learn to describe opportunity. This is a large part of why we launched the Capital Stacks of Journalism project in Perugia in collaboration with Milo Tesselaar.

The project looks at digital publishers founded over roughly the last 15 years, especially audience-revenue-first businesses that have actually made it to profitability. We want to understand who backed these companies, how much they raised, on what terms, how long it took to break even, whether anyone exited, whether anyone paid dividends, and what all this tells us about journalism as a business rather than a sector defined only by rescue narratives. We’re only at the beginning of this work, but already finding reasons for cautious optimism. Watch this space for updates.

Repression is an effective product manager

(by Peter)

On Tuesday I was in Vienna for an event called “Acht Tische für die Vierte Gewalt” (Eight tables for the Fourth Estate) an attempt by Gabriela Bacher, Sebastian Loudon and a large part of the Austrian media ecosystem to redesign the country’s journalism subsidy scheme. Between talking about the EU’s media funding mechanisms and eating Central Europe’s weirdest sandwich topped by something that felt like leberkäse in soft pâté form, I kept thinking about the contrast between the Hungarian and Austrian media environments.

Austria has a very generous subsidy regime for media and probably not unrelated to this, one of the most conservative media markets in Europe dominated by legacy players, with very few digital-native challengers. In 2026, the system still meaningfully rewards print production, which means people who want to do journalism sometimes end up launching print quarterlies they don’t actually want to publish, just to qualify for support. It’s not quite anti-innovation by design, but it gets there in practice.

Hungary is the opposite picture. For sixteen years, the Orbán government distorted the market not through a formal subsidy scheme, we don’t really have one, but through state advertising and coordinated pressure on private advertisers, allocated on political grounds. Almost all print was captured or compromised. Anyone who wanted to do quality journalism went digital and had more than a decade to figure out what worked. You now find local newsletters on Ghost and digital paywalls in small Hungarian towns. Repression, it turns out, is an effective product manager.

Brian Morrissey made a version of this point to me in Perugia: public sector subsidies can dampen innovation because they shield publishers from the market signals that force them to change.

The Austrian initiative proposes a new subsidy system that tries to avoid these traps. Less rewarding of incumbency, more oriented toward journalism rather than media formats, technology-neutral, with an independent commission in charge of allocations. It is an attempt at a genuinely hard problem: how do you underwrite independent journalism without insulating it from market pressures that keep it moving forward?

Vinted CEO invests in public-interest journalism

(by María)

At a founders’ summit in Palanga last summer, Thomas Plantenga, the Dutch CEO who took Vinted from a near-bankrupt Vilnius startup to one of Europe’s leading second-hand fashion platforms, stood up and pitched an idea: a charity endowment fund to finance a €200,000 annual prize for the best investigative journalism in Lithuania. He would put in €2.2 million personally, but needed others to make it large enough to last. The crowd of entrepreneurs did not hesitate. In fifteen minutes, they committed over €1 million in donations, a response he later described as unambiguous: “Lithuanians wanted to strengthen their democracy by celebrating their finest and bravest journalists.”

A team of volunteers was assembled afterwards to build the fund and an independent selection process. Six months later, Pamatai was operational, and by his account, the largest cash prize for investigative journalism in the world. It is now accepting nominations for works published in 2025. The selection committee includes Pulitzer winners Marina Walker Guevara and Bastian Obermayer, alongside other renowned international journalists and Lithuanian experts.

The award is only part of what the fund is designed to do. Its statutes also commit it to consulting for journalists and media organizations, public education on media literacy and corruption, mentoring programs for young people, and partnerships with international human rights and democracy organizations. Running all of that indefinitely, requires a financial structure to match the ambition. It is set up as a long-term investment vehicle rather than a spend-down pool: the capital is preserved and invested, with returns used to finance all the activities and the operating costs. The mandate is to generate stable, periodic income.

Plantenga has said he will continue working to grow the endowment.

What the numbers say about the sustainability of local news

(by María)

Pew Research Center published its most recent Local News Fact Sheet earlier this month, tracking Americans’ experiences with and preferences around local news since 2016. For sustainability, three categories are telling.

• Attention: down by half. In 2016, 37% of Americans followed local news very closely. By the end of 2025, that share had fallen to 21%. This indicator has moved steadily downward for nearly a decade, mirroring a broader retreat from news generally. A less attentive audience is a harder monetize, regardless of how the ask is framed.

  

• Perceived importance: eroding at the top. Eight in ten Americans still say local news is at least somewhat important to their community, but that broad agreement conceals a sharper shift: the share who say it is extremely or very important dropped from 44% to 34% in a single year.

  

• Paying: remains the exception, and it is not growing. Only 12% of U.S. adults paid or donated to a local news source in the past year, a three-year low and roughly the same as in 2018. Among those who haven’t paid, half say they can find enough for free, and a growing share (29%, up from 26% in 2018) say they are simply not interested enough. Price is the least-cited barrier. The willingness-to-pay problem is not a pricing problem.

  

While the data only covers the US market, the patterns emerging are likely not unique to it.

This piece is part of a series focusing on local and community journalism and is supported by the LimeNet project and the European Union.

Here are the active calls, with the largest at the top:

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I know some of you might find it a little too meta to read a newsletter about a journalism conference while at that journalism conference, but bear with me. I want to tell you two stories that I think describe what Perugia is actually for. One is straightforwardly good news, the other is more complicated. Don’t worry, both are about money.

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Tisza had the broadest electoral victory in the brief history of Hungarian democracy. There are many reasons why that happened: economic mismanagement, corruption, arrogance, the moral collapse after the clemency scandal, the general decay that sets in when a political system stops receiving honest feedback, and a broader international dynamic in which voters seem increasingly willing to punish incumbents. But most of you are not here for my comprehensive theory of Hungarian electoral behavior.

I do think part of the story has to do with the structure of the information ecosystem and how that structure changes the value of media capture. That seems worth exploring here because it is, at heart, a media-and-money question, which is the only kind we pretend to have authority over.

It is about how political actors convert resources into attention, attention into influence and power. It is about what happens when a governing party spends 15 years building an enormous captured media system, only to discover that the information environment underneath it is shifting in ways that make that investment less effective than it used to be.

So I want to spend this edition on that narrower point: not on every reason Orbán lost, and not on what Tisza’s victory will mean for the Hungarian media landscape, which we already touched on last week, but on why structural changes in the information ecosystem may have made media capture a weaker political technology than it once was.

Media Finance Monitor is where newsroom leaders, funders, and media entrepreneurs come to understand how money really moves through the information ecosystem. We decode funding, business models, policy, and platform shifts and turn them into strategies you can actually use.

Paid subscribers get premium editions, full access to the archive and all our research reports, for about the cost of a pistachio éclair and a good espresso a month.

For deeper engagement, our Partnership Program offers one-on-one strategic advisory, curated briefings, and access to our internal databases and invite-only events.

Join as a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

Viktor Orban’s empire of attention

Over the past sixteen years, Fidesz built a remarkably sophisticated machine for dominating the information ecosystem, and it did so in roughly three layers.

The first layer was interference on the advertising market. This is the part we have covered before, with extensive evidence for both the scale of it and the damage it caused. The Hungarian state remained one of the largest advertisers in the country and consistently directed spending toward loyal outlets while starving independent or merely insufficiently obedient ones. Most private advertisers, especially those operating in heavily regulated sectors, drew the obvious conclusion and followed suit. The result was a media market in which it became extremely difficult to run a non-aligned business sustainably. Weakening outlets economically made them easier to intimidate, marginalize, and, eventually, to acquire by government-friendly businessmen.

The second layer was capture and consolidation. Once enough of the market had been distorted, ownership could be consolidated into an enormous pro-government portfolio of newspapers, radio stations, television channels, online outlets and local titles. By the late 2010s, the government and its allies had reached critical institutional mass through the Central European Press and Media Foundation and other properties. This mattered especially outside Budapest, where old consumption patterns held longer and where the offline dominance of aligned media remained particularly strong.

The third layer was adaptation to the platform age. And here, in a coldly technical sense, one has to acknowledge the innovation. Fidesz understood earlier than many of its critics that owning newspapers, radio stations and television studios, while still useful, was no longer enough in a platform-mediated information environment. Attention was moving elsewhere, into platforms that were too big and too unruly to capture with the same methods they had used so effectively against Hungarian media. The governing camp did not abandon its captured institutional empire; it built a second system on top of it. This newer system crystallized mostly around the Megafon Incubator Center that relied on platform-native voices, pro-government influencers and heavily amplified low-grade political content designed less to persuade than to saturate. Censorship by noise, if you will.

The point of this model was not primarily to win elegant intellectual arguments. Much of the content was too crude, too aggressive and too transparently instrumental for that. Its function was to flood newsfeeds, reward loyal messengers, smear opponents, intimidate critics and make participation in public discourse feel exhausting, ugly and sometimes personally risky. If this was the discourse on offer, many sane people would simply decide they wanted less of it.

They spent enormous sums of money amplifying these voices. In the first nine months of 2025 alone, government-affiliated actors accounted for 87 percent of the HUF 4.1 billion (EUR 10.6 million) spent on Google and Meta ads in Hungary. That is an extraordinary resource advantage, and it helps explain why this strategy worked for as long as it did. The ruling camp was able to turn money into platform reach at a scale no opponents could even begin to match.

Fidesz built a system that could shape institutional distribution, dominate offline visibility, and carpet-bomb platform feeds with aligned messages. It promoted government narratives, distorted public discourse and raised the cost of dissent. For a while, this machine worked exceptionally well.

An advertising ban jamming up the information autocracy

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This week on Media Finance Monitor

• What the sector actually wants from the next EU budget

• Let’s meet in Perugia!

• Trustfnd may be a sign we’ve reached peak newsletter fragmentation

• Cameo tried celebrities. Now it’s betting on TikTok creators

• Mediacités: the French investigative outlet where readers can be shareholders

• 26 active calls (3 new)

Media Finance Monitor is where newsroom leaders, funders, and media entrepreneurs come to understand how money really moves through the information ecosystem. We decode funding, business models, policy, and platform shifts and turn them into strategies you can actually use.

Paid subscribers get premium editions, full access to the archive and all our research reports, for about the cost of a pistachio éclair and a good espresso a month.

For deeper engagement, our Partnership Program offers one-on-one strategic advisory, curated briefings, and access to our internal databases and invite-only events.

Join as a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

What the sector actually wants from the next EU budget

(by Peter)

The reason I think our Brussels event went well is that after six hours of discussing EU media funding policy, we still couldn’t kick people out, and by 8:30 p.m. the venue was threatening us with an extra day’s charge if we didn’t leave. More than fifty organizations attended, including publishers, intermediaries, funders, policymakers and others from across the information ecosystem, to think through what kind of policy architecture the sector needs as the next EU budget negotiations move forward.

The first year or so of the advocacy effort has been relatively straightforward: it is not terribly hard to build a broad coalition around the proposition that the sector needs more money. The tricky part begins when you move to actual mechanisms, programmes and policy design. Different organizations have different vantage points on the ecosystem and different ideas about what it needs. Because of this, our goal was not to force consensus, but to surface as many reasonable ideas as possible.

We organized the lab around a simple three-step logic. First, each table was asked to describe the status quo: what is and is not working in the EU’s current support for journalism and the wider information ecosystem. Then we asked people to imagine it was 2034, the MFF had ended, and things had gone remarkably well: what does a healthier ecosystem look like? The last, and longest, part was about getting from one to the other, identifying the mechanisms, reforms and practical solutions that could move the sector from the present system to that desired future. (This was a slightly bastardized version of a format the excellent Gabriela Bacher and Sebastian Loudon pioneered in Austria when trying to rethink their national subsidy system.)

We published a longer document collecting the roughly 17 pages of ideas and recommendations that surfaced during the lab, covering everything from intra-EU and extra-EU funding to programme design, priorities and support mechanisms: a sort of everything-bagel of media funding. You can read it here. Still, this is our newsletter, not a multistakeholder communiqué, so I’m going to be a little selfish and spend more time on the proposals that feel closest to us at CSM.

We would like to see three separate funds for the information ecosystem.

The first is a matching fund under AgoraEU: public money that matches revenue organizations raise directly from readers, members, subscribers or small donors. Conceptually, it is similar to NewsMatch in the United States. It rewards demonstrated public support, strengthens direct audience relationships and crowds in private contributions. The second is a dedicated information integrity fund, also under AgoraEU, to support work addressing digital deception, foreign information manipulation and interference, coordinated inauthentic behaviour, and media and information literacy. The third is an innovation fund, ideally under the European Competitiveness Fund, where media organizations and technology companies could apply jointly to build shared sovereign infrastructure for digital publishing: CMS and CRM tools, payment systems, audience and identity infrastructure, and distribution pipelines. The goal is reducing dependency on non-European platforms.

Beyond these, we think the horizontal design of EU support matters as much as the envelopes. Applications should move to a two-stage process: a lightweight first round, with full proposals only for shortlisted applicants. The mandatory cross-border consortium requirement should end; strong national or local actors are currently excluded not because their work is weak, but because they do not fit the consortium model. Funding intensity should also be as high as possible in most instruments, or the EU risks designing programmes that only organizations with reserves and co-financing capacity can actually access. And while grants will remain essential, the EU should make serious room for impact investment, investment subsidies, and other financial instruments such as loan guarantees, especially when the goal is to help viable public-interest organizations invest in growth, technology, long-term resilience, and competitiveness.

Two further issues matter a lot to us. Pre-financing needs to be addressed seriously: even generous grant rates are functionally limited if organizations cannot carry costs while waiting for reimbursement. And the no-profit rule needs revision. The Commission cannot simultaneously call for sustainability and penalize organizations for generating revenue during or alongside a funded project. Safeguards against misuse are legitimate, punishing earned income is not.

You can read our more carefully argued policy version here. This is not an exhaustive blueprint for EU media funding, nor a claim that every existing programme should be discontinued and replaced by my hobby horses. Some current mechanisms work well, others work badly, and many land in the large European category of functioning, but not quite as intended. We are simply highlighting the gaps, missing instruments and design flaws that we think matter most.

All of these are the product of a genuinely collective effort. I’m very grateful to Deutsche Welle Akademie and EFCSN, who helped make the lab possible, to Civitates for supporting our broader work, and to the many organizations and individuals who showed up, shared ideas and stayed in the room long enough for the venue to consider charging us extra. We may have facilitated the process, but these ideas do not belong to us alone; they belong, in the broadest sense, to the sector. That is exactly why we are publishing them openly and encouraging others to use them however they see fit: circulate them, build on them, disagree with them, wave them in front of your national government, your permanent representation, the Parliament, the Commission, or anyone else involved in shaping the next MFF. The negotiations are still underway, which means the advocacy is still underway too.

Let’s meet in Perugia!

(by Peter)

Like lemmings, salmon, or caribou following some ancient migratory instinct they can neither explain nor resist, we are heading to Perugia. A few things to know if you’re also making the journey:

On the 16th, half past noon, Brian Morrissey and I are recording an episode of The Rebooting live on stage. We’ll be talking somewhere in the vicinity of the attention economy, creators, and funding models. I’m excited about this to the point of low-grade anxiety, which is usually how I know I care about something. I’m aware we are competing with the powerful counter-programming force of bruschetta and April sunshine, but if you feel like joining us instead, we would be delighted.

Later that afternoon, Catarina Carvalho from Mensagem de Lisboa, Laura Moore from Deutsche Welle Akademie, and Diego Agúndez from the European Commission will be discussing - and I hope you are sitting down - the next EU budget and what it means for media funding. If you are reading this newsletter, you care about this, so come.

And on 17 April, we’re also launching a new project with our Vienna based co-conspirator Milo Tesselaar called Capital Stacks of Journalism, looking at digital media ventures founded in roughly the past 15 years that managed to build real sustainability or profitability, how they launched, what kind of capital they used, and how their businesses evolved. The basic premise is that investing in journalism is not, in fact, always identical to setting money on fire. If that sounds interesting, drop us a note. It’s a side event, so space is limited, but we’ll do our best.

And more broadly: my co-founder Miklós, our Director of Advocacy David, and our senior associate Marton will all be in town. If you want to talk media business strategy, EU funding, audience revenue, or commercial partnerships, find us or drop a note to hello@funds4media.org and we will sort something out.

Trustfnd may be a sign we’ve reached peak newsletter fragmentation

(by María)

For $8.50, readers can get 30 days of access to the newsletters of journalists Marisa Kabas, Katelyn Burns and Kat Tenbarge at roughly half the combined individual price. The offer, reported by Nieman Lab, is sold through Trustfnd, a startup that lets creators on Ghost and Beehiiv run joint subscription trials. Michaël Jarjour, who co-founded the company, claims two of the three creators gained more paying subscribers during the test period than they had in the entire previous year, though conversion data has not been disclosed.

No major newsletter platform currently supports this kind of cross-platform bundling natively. Both Ghost and Beehiiv told Nieman Lab they are watching the space; though, as Beehiiv CEO Tyler Denk put it, bundling can get “messy and complicated”, especially when participants are not part of the same company. The challenge is less technical than structural: how to split revenue, who owns the subscriber relationship, what happens when one contributor outgrows the arrangement.

Trustfnd sidesteps those questions with a time-bound format (30, 60, or 90 days), turning bundles into acquisition tools rather than long-term products. That lowers the stakes, but it also means the hardest frictions remain untested. However, the startup’s bet fits a broader pattern. After a period of extreme unbundling, where individual creators built their own paid audiences and readers accumulated subscriptions, the market is beginning to swing back toward aggregation. When individual subscriptions pile up and solo creators struggle to expand, aggregation starts to reassert itself.

The question is whether bundling can remain lightweight or has to eventually become something more structured. The Every started in 2020 as a simple bundle between two Substack writers. As it grew, it built its own CMS, editorial process, and revenue-sharing system. Five years later, it operates as an organisation combining editorial output with its own tools and infrastructure, including software products. It suggests that bundling may be a starting point, but rarely stays that way.

Cameo tried celebrities. Now it’s betting on TikTok creators

(by María)

Cameo is a platform where people pay creators and celebrities to record short personalized videos: birthday shout-outs, pep talks, that kind of thing. It blew up during COVID, doing ~$100 million in gross revenue in 2020 with a team of nearly 400. A year later it hit a $1 billion valuation. Then it fell hard: multiple rounds of layoffs, a team that shrank to a few dozen, and a valuation down more than 90%. The company has been rebuilding since.

Last week, Cameo and TikTok announced a partnership to let U.S. creators sell personalized videos directly inside the app. TikTok creators have been one of Cameo’s fastest-growing segments, and according to CEO Steven Galanis, they drove the platform’s strongest year yet in 2025.

TikTok users already spend money within the app. Live gifting, series subscriptions, and TikTok Shop (estimated at ~$19 billion in global GMV in Q3 2025, roughly on par with eBay) have made in-feed purchases routine. But those are either tips, access, or products. Cameo adds a different category: a creator making something because you asked for it.

OnlyFans shows that this model can scale. Some top creators there earn more from custom content and paid direct messages than from subscriptions. The platform works in large part because the, ahem, closeness is the product. People pay for direct, personal attention from the creator, and that is a big part of what brings them back.

TikTok produces a similar dynamic, but most of it happens without a transaction. Creators talk into their phone cameras, respond to individual comments, address their audience as if they know them. Viewers develop a sense of familiarity that feels more immediate than what a YouTube video or a podcast generates. Whether that is enough to build a paying habit without the “intimacy” that OnlyFans has going for it, is what this partnership will test.

Mediacités: the French investigative outlet where readers can be shareholders

(by María)

In most of France’s major regional cities, local media is typically dominated by a single legacy newspaper. Mediacités was founded in 2016 on the premise that these regions had strong political and economic powers but not enough independent reporting to hold them accountable. It operates small newsrooms in four cities: Lille, Lyon, Nantes, Toulouse.

It carries no advertising. Their view is that ad revenue can represent a conflict of interest when the pool of potential advertisers and the subjects of your investigations can overlap. Subscriptions account for nearly 80% of revenue instead, supplemented by donations (which nearly doubled in 2024, from around €34,000 to €61,000), public subsidies, occasional grants, and some income from article resale and editorial services.

The outlet also lets its audience become shareholders. Through a programme called the Société des Amis (SDA), people can buy actual shares in the publishing company at €1.56 each, with a minimum investment of around €201 and a cap of €5,000. Because Mediacités qualifies as an “entreprise de presse solidaire d’information”, France gives investors a 50% tax deduction, cutting the real cost roughly in half.

The programme had 208 members holding 6.34% of the capital at the end of 2024. It has since grown to 238, with over €168,000 invested collectively. The co-founders and newsroom journalists collectively hold 43%, and no individual shareholder owns more than 7%, meaning the SDA is the single largest.

The programme has its own governance, with an elected president and annual assembly. Those who want to can get more involved: attending the weekly team meeting, joining working groups on strategy, and testing new features early. But editorial independence is non-negotiable: shareholders have no say in what gets published.

Mediacités posted its first positive operating result last year. Public subsidies played a role in it, but so did readers. A frequent argument against paid local journalism is that people won’t pay. This outlet has them subscribing, donating, and even buying equity in the company.

This piece is part of a series focusing on local and community journalism and is supported by the LimeNet project and the European Union.

Here are the active calls, with the largest at the top:

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Yet, despite at least ten years of growing research into how publishers could stop “building their houses on someone else’s land”, it remains unclear if publishers are actually willing to disentangle from platforms. On the contrary, some have argued convincingly that publishers may want to disentangle in principle, but in practice, they still value too much certain platform benefits: audience reach and the revenue expectations tied to it, above all. And, in fact, while the ‘disentangle-from-platforms’ discourse grows popular, many news media are already “working out how to navigate distribution through AI platforms”. First it was SEO - trying …

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Recent data by Median, historically the most reliable pollster in Hungary, put Péter Magyar’s Tisza party 23 points ahead of Fidesz among decided voters, and other, non-government aligned research institutions also show the opposition party ahead. Prediction markets have also moved in that direction: Polymarket’s Hungary page currently gives Tisza a big lead. (The platform is VPN-only in Hungary; the regulator blocked it in January, citing unlicensed gambling, shortly after the opposition’s lead started making the rounds in mainstream news.)

I’ve been asked a lot recently whether the government will simply “steal” the election, or whether Russia, the United States, or some combination of foreign and domestic actors will do it for them: I really don’t think so.

Hungary has had, for a long time, what I’d describe as free but unfair elections. People went to the voting booth and were allowed to cast actual ballots, the interference happened elsewhere: in gerrymandering, in media capture, in the systematic suffocation of opposition resources. Last year there was a genuine push within the governing party to escalate further. The proposed Foreign Agents Law would have criminalized organizations critical of the government, effectively turning free-and-unfair into something much darker, but they walked back from the edge. If they wanted to dial up autocracy in any serious way, they had their chance and didn’t take it. With less than two weeks until election day, it is probably too late to change the calculus.

That does not mean the government will behave beautifully, especially if the result is close. In a very narrow Tisza win, I can absolutely imagine procedural contestation, institutional grumbling, and a lot of noise about foreign interference, Brussels, Facebook, and dark forces from the planet Soros. But in the event of a clear Tisza victory, I suspect Fidesz would eventually accept defeat. Orbán, for all his ideology, has always been a pragmatist. Losing power is bad, but triggering an uncontrollable crisis can be worse. And there is a scenario in which they decide, as others in the region have before them (👋 Poland), that letting the other side govern under dreadful fiscal and institutional conditions may be the best mid-term investment available.

But this is not, after all, a politics newsletter, and the more interesting question for me is what all this means for media funding, so in this piece, we’ll discuss

• What a Fidesz win would mean for Hungarian media (short answer: very bad, very fast);

• Why a Tisza win is more complicated than it looks across advertising, audience, and institutional revenue;

• The civic substitution problem: what happens to outlets built on political urgency when the urgency fades;

• What Poland, the Washington Post, and the New York Times can tell us about post-regime-change media economics;

• The labor market shock that concerns many media executives in Budapest;

Media Finance Monitor is where newsroom leaders, funders, and media entrepreneurs come to understand how money really moves through the information ecosystem. We decode funding, business models, policy, and platform shifts and turn them into strategies you can actually use.

Paid subscribers get premium editions, full access to the archive and all our research reports, for about the cost of a pistachio éclair and a good espresso a month.

For deeper engagement, our Partnership Program offers one-on-one strategic advisory, curated briefings, and access to our internal databases and invite-only events.

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If Fidesz wins

I’ll keep this short because I think it’s the less likely scenario and because the implications are unfortunately straightforward.

A Fidesz victory, whether through polling error or something more deliberate, would mean the gloves come off. They’ve signaled, implicitly, that the Foreign Agents Law returns. We should expect a significant escalation of pressure across all revenue streams: more interference in advertising markets (which are already badly distorted), new legislative barriers to collecting individual donations (declaration requirements, chilling effect by design) and an aggressive push to cut off institutional funding from abroad. That is, after all, exactly what the Foreign Agents Law was designed to do. A renewed Fidesz mandate, especially after such an existential campaign, would likely be read internally as permission to escalate. The position of independent media (and the wider civil society) in Hungary would become very difficult, very quickly.

If Tisza wins

This is more interesting and, I think, more complicated than most coverage suggests. Let me take the revenue streams one at a time.

The pressure on private advertising markets that has built over 16 years, the fear that spending money with 444/HVG/24hu/Telex might put you on the wrong side of a regulatory decision, will ease. Not overnight or uniformly, but it will ease. Private advertisers who have been cautious will gradually become less so. Depending on the scope of Tisza’s victory and their ability to restructure the institutions that control state advertising budgets (some of which were locked in by supermajority legislation), even state and quasi-state advertising could eventually flow to a wider range of outlets. Overall, I expect a gradual and meaningful increase in advertising revenue for independent media operators. This is probably the clearest net positive.

Audience revenue is complicated, and I want to spend some time on this because I think the dynamics play out similarly in other places we’ve watched closely.

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This week on Media Finance Monitor

• We gave up on advertising too soon

• Two initiatives to get AI companies to pay publishers

• Meta tries to court creators, again

• How to run a media fundraiser without a tote bag

• 22 active calls (1 new)

Media Finance Monitor is where newsroom leaders, funders, and media entrepreneurs come to understand how money really moves through the information ecosystem. We decode funding, business models, policy, and platform shifts and turn them into strategies you can actually use.

Paid subscribers get premium editions, full access to the archive and all our research reports, for about the cost of a pistachio éclair and a good espresso a month.

For deeper engagement, our Partnership Program offers one-on-one strategic advisory, curated briefings, and access to our internal databases and invite-only events.

Join as a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

We gave up on advertising too soon

(by Peter)

Somewhere in the last two decades, a lot of independent media stopped thinking of advertising as a revenue stream and started treating it as a character flaw.

Programmatic advertising and platform intermediaries gutted the model that had underpinned public interest journalism for decades. New technology enabled increasingly grotesque brand safety obsessions, blocking words like "conflict" and "protest", making advertising nearly impossible for hard news. Money flowed to fraud farms, made-for-advertising slop sites, and Google's and Meta's own exchanges, while publishers were left with a pittance and a growing sense of moral contamination.

So, understandably, much of the sector decided that advertising was broken, perhaps irreparably, and urgently needed to pivot to subscriptions, philanthropy, grants, basically anything cleaner. We internalized the defeat completely and built anti-commercial identities around it.

A new policy brief from the Forum on Information and Democracy (FID) pushes back on that consensus. Without being nostalgic for the banner ad era, it argues that the $1.17 trillion digital advertising market is actively misallocating value: toward fraud, slop, and Big Tech’s own exchange systems, while penalizing journalism. It also tries to define policy levers to reshape the market for better outcomes for public interest information.

Before getting to the specifics: it is entirely reasonable to decline certain advertisers on principle, to worry about editorial capture, to draw lines. What is less reasonable is treating all commercial revenue as equally contaminating while insisting that reader revenue, philanthropy, or foundation grants arrive somehow free of power dynamics or dependency. They don't. (See also: The elaborate hierarchy of “cleanliness” in media funding)

FID describes a digital advertising space heavily shaped by Google and Meta, noting that Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon together account for more than 55% of ad market share outside China. It cites estimates suggesting that of every dollar spent on programmatic advertising, only 36 cents reaches the publisher, and that a single campaign is served across an average of 44,000 websites.

Brand safety mechanisms have compounded the problem. A 2024 study found that 45% of Reach's coverage of the Euro final was flagged as unsafe, blocked over words like "shoot" and "attack". A recent French study estimates that 30-40% of news content is excluded from advertising altogether.

One of the brief’s most valuable contributions is the inventory of what already exists. The authors catalogue advertiser coalitions trying to redirect spend toward quality news, civil-society groups building commercial capacity, publisher alliances pooling inventory, alternative adtech experiments, certification schemes, and contextual targeting tools. The picture is not of a sector waiting to be saved, but of one throwing everything it has at the problem even if without much coordination.

The recommendations span four audiences: governments, advertisers, publishers, and intermediaries.

Some fall into the “why isn’t this already standard?” category: supply-chain transparency, measurement standards, basic due diligence for adtech actors. Helping smaller publishers build sales capacity or aggregate inventory (the Ethical Media Alliance is doing interesting work on this in CEE) is similarly uncontroversial. These require no particular love of journalism to support, just a belief that fraud and monopoly are bad.

A second group is promising but messy. Tax incentives for ads placed with public-interest media, government ad set-asides, and verification systems that let news outlets identify themselves in programmatic pipelines could redirect real money. They also invite favoritism, eligibility fights, bureaucracy, and, in some contexts, the long shadow of state advertising as a tool of control. (See also: Media funding, weaponized)

The final group functions more as horizon markers than near-term plans. Mandating a “democratic responsibility” for platforms to support journalism, building public-interest ad infrastructure, or structurally curbing platform dominance would require political alignment that most contexts currently lack.

For years, parts of independent media could afford a certain purity on this question. Commercial money is messy, let’s prioritize other models. That position made more sense when institutional funding was reliable and traffic was growing. Now, with foundation money wobbling and AI making referral traffic increasingly fragile, abandoning commercial revenue looks less like principle and more like a luxury belief.

Independent media was right to distrust the system. It was probably wrong to mistake the system’s failures for a verdict on commercial revenue itself.

Two initiatives to get AI companies to pay publishers

(by María)

The argument that AI companies should compensate the publishers and creators whose work trains their models is now also coming from an AI company. Arthur Mensch, CEO of French startup Mistral AI, recently made the case for revenue sharing in the Financial Times.

His proposal: a revenue-based levy on all commercial AI providers operating in Europe, proportional in theory to their use of publicly available online content, though in practice, usage is hard to measure. The proceeds would flow into a central fund supporting new content creation and cultural sectors. In exchange, AI developers would receive protection from liability when training on publicly accessible material.

Whether that reads as a genuine concession or a strategic move depends on how cynical you are about European AI companies trying to differentiate themselves from American competitors.

Mensch isn’t conceding that Mistral did anything wrong. The current opt-out framework is “unworkable,” he argues, because copyrighted works spread uncontrollably online and the legal mechanisms to stop them are too fragmented to be effective. The levy would replace legal uncertainty with a predictable cost. That’s a reasonable offer for AI companies, but not necessarily for rights holders who may want a say in how their works are used, not just a share of the proceeds.

A month earlier, five of the UK’s largest media organizations announced a different approach to the same problem. SPUR (Standards for Publisher Usage Rights), launched in February by the BBC, Financial Times, Guardian, Sky News, and Telegraph, proposes technical standards, licensing frameworks, and a push for AI developers to access journalistic content through rights-cleared channels. The goal is to reduce licensing friction while publishers retain control and get paid. The obvious catch: it only works if AI developers choose to use it, despite already being able to access most of that content without permission.

The trade-offs are clear enough. The levy makes access easier but reduces control; SPUR preserves control but is harder to scale. Both approaches ultimately rest on the same recognition: that the current situation is neither fair nor stable, even if one requires political will and the other industry alignment.

Meta tries to court creators, again

(by María)

In 2021, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook’s next chapter would be the metaverse and renamed the company to signal how seriously he meant it. He envisioned replacing the social media feed with a digital world accessed through a headset, populated by avatars, experienced in real time. Five years and tens of billions of dollars later, it hasn’t paid off. Focus and resources are shifting from VR to AI.

While Meta went looking for the next internet, Facebook kept losing relevance. Growth slowed in key markets, and creators, particularly those building video-first audiences, gravitated elsewhere. Zuckerberg acknowledged as much last year: “I just don’t think that a lot of creators today think about Facebook as the primary place they can go.” More than two billion daily users, and the platform still can’t make itself matter to the people who shape where audiences spend their time.

Meta’s answer is the Creator Fast Track: a program designed to lure established voices from TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram into posting Reels on Facebook. For three months, participants receive between $100 and $3,000 a month, depending on audience size. The content doesn’t need to be new, just original and not previously posted on Facebook. Back catalogs qualify. “If you have a great back catalog of best hits, that qualifies,” said Yair Livne, VP of Creator Product at Facebook. After the three months, participants move into Facebook’s Content Monetization program, which is normally invite-only.

This is not the first time Meta has made this kind of offer. In 2018, the Gaming Creator Program attracted streamers away from Twitch and YouTube with financial incentives; by 2021, it had surpassed YouTube Gaming in hours watched. Three years later, those numbers had collapsed as payments declined and audiences consolidated elsewhere. The program was wound down in stages, with full retirement scheduled for 2026. Then came the Reels Play Bonus Program, launched in 2021 to compete with TikTok, shut down abruptly in March 2023. Zuckerberg explained why with unusual candor: “The monetization efficiency of Reels is much less than Feed. So the more that Reels grows…we actually lose money.”

The pattern has not gone unnoticed. “How many times do we have to go through this?” wrote Simon Owens, who covers the media business. His point: until Meta commits to sharing a defined, published portion of revenue with creators, no incentive program will build lasting loyalty. YouTube’s Partner Program offers exactly that, 55% of ad revenue for long-form video, 45% for Shorts. A creator weighing where to invest their time can work with a fixed number. Facebook’s Content Monetization program offers no equivalent figure.

How to run a media fundraiser without a tote bag

(by María)

Journal B is an online magazine that has covered Bern’s city politics, culture, and local life since 2012. Its reporting ranges from the future of the Schützenmatte square to council debates and the local hip-hop scene. The newsroom has five people and publishes more than 200 articles a year, all free to read.

The outlet is financed in equal thirds by membership fees, donations, and institutional grants. Some of these were intended to bridge the gap until cantonal media funding came through, but several expired at the end of 2025, leaving the publication short of 25,000 francs a year.

Faced with that shortfall, the team went to remake it, on one of Switzerland’s largest crowdfunding platforms, asking for CHF 50,000 to secure the next two years. The drive launched on March 10, and 15 days in, 156 backers had pledged more than half of the goal. While most efforts of this kind default to perks like mugs, tote bags or names in the credits, Journal B built a catalogue that reads more like a map of the city.

• The coverage becomes the product. Photographer David Fürst has documented Bern for Journal B for years. The team turned his images into postcard sets (CHF 40 for four, CHF 50 for eight) with specific motifs: Bern’s best swimming spots, the Gurten hill after the festival, folk performances in the Reitschule courtyard. These are the newsroom’s own images, printed and mailed. A t-shirt with the logo would have been easier. This is better.

• Contributors step forward, by name. Music columnist Fabio Lang curates an exclusive Bern playlist. Slam poet and columnist Jovana Nikic records a custom voicemail greeting for your phone. Ukrainian columnist Svitlana Prokopchuk hosts a cooking class through her local diaspora organization. Each reward is attached to a person whose work readers already know from the site. Backing the campaign starts to feel like supporting someone specific, because it is.

• The reward ladder follows the relationship. At CHF 25, you get a handwritten postcard from the editors. At CHF 130, the literature columnist reads your favorite books and sends personalized recommendations. At CHF 500, a current and a former city council president take you out for a beer and explain how Bern’s local politics actually works. At CHF 1,000, the board co-president leads a personal “democracy walk” through the city. The higher you go, the closer you get.

• Local cultural venues show up as collaborators. Tickets to the Tojo Theater, Kino Rex, dinner at the Heitere Fahne, a table at Blauer Engel (closing this summer after 30 years). These rewards place Journal B inside the city’s cultural calendar. All four sold out.

• The team sells its skills at higher tiers. For CHF 2,500, backers can book a portrait session with the staff photographer or get editorial feedback on any text they’re working on. The newsroom is offering its professional capacity directly: we know how to do things worth paying for beyond articles.

This piece is part of a series focusing on local and community journalism and is supported by the LimeNet project and the European Union.

Here are the active calls, with the largest at the top:

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Europe should acquire it.

We talk endlessly about digital sovereignty: “to enhance Europe’s strategic autonomy in the digital field“ as the European Parliament puts it with characteristic flair. The debate centers on cloud infrastructure, AI models, chips and data centers. Important things. But we keep ignoring the obvious: the digital public sphere. The infrastructure where public discourse actually happens, where opinions form, where elections are won and lost.

We communicate entirely on platforms controlled by foreign entities: Meta, Alphabet, TikTok/ByteDance, LinkedIn, and whatever Elon Musk decides X should be this week. In an era where information flow correlates so closely with power, Europe has outsourced most of its information ecosystem to American companies subject to American law, American politics, and increasingly erratic American billionaires.

The standard response has been to regulate. GDPR, the Digital Services Act, the AI Act, we seem to excel at writing rules for other people’s playgrounds. But regulation without ownership is ultimately just commentary.

Europe has zero social networks at scale

China operates behind its Great Firewall with WeChat and Weibo. Russia, with a fraction of Europe’s economic power, maintains VKontakte. Even smaller markets have managed to build social platforms of national significance. Europe, with 450 million people and the world’s second-largest economy, has produced precisely zero social networks of critical scale. Not one.

The one partial exception is instructive. Spotify, Swedish, European, global, isn’t a social platform, but it is the only European-built content platform that competes at world scale. And it’s worth noticing why it works: it runs on subscriptions. It pays creators (imperfectly, but it pays them). It doesn’t need you to be angry to keep you engaged. Its incentive structure rewards quality and catalog depth, not viralisation. Compare that with TikTok, where the entire architecture is designed to hijack your attention span. Spotify isn’t perfect, but it’s proof that European platforms can compete globally and that the subscription model produces something fundamentally less toxic than a purely ad-driven alternative.

Substack follows the same logic. Which is precisely why it’s interesting.

This isn’t about pride. When push comes to shove (and geopolitics suggests quite a bit of pushing and shoving in the near future), the platforms answer to Washington, not Brussels. They collect and exploit the data of European users to generate advertising revenue while systematically destroying the business models of European media companies. And so far we’ve mostly responded by writing more rules about how they should destroy us more politely.

Why Substack?

Substack is developing into something beyond a newsletter platform. It’s becoming a social network built on trust rather than doomscrolling, on subscription rather than surveillance, on writers rather than trolls and bots. The verification mechanism isn’t a blue checkmark sold to the highest bidder, it’s readers paying for content they value. A concept that nowadays feels almost quaint: quality as credential.

Its business model, writers charge readers directly, platform takes 10%, aligns more closely with what Europe claims to care about than anything Meta has ever attempted. Like Spotify for audio, Substack is building infrastructure where the economic incentives and the public interest roughly point in the same direction. That alone makes it an anomaly worth protecting.

The platform hosts over 5 million paid subscriptions and is growing, particularly among the kind of serious writers and thinkers who could anchor a genuine European public sphere. Unlike TikTok or Instagram, where European adoption is cultural colonization almost by default, Substack could plausibly become more European while remaining globally relevant.

For context on the price: media giant Axel Springer bought Politico in 2021 for more than $1 billion, and more recently the Telegraph Media Group for €665 million. These are clearly not unthinkable numbers. It just requires someone to think of them.

There is, however, something uncomfortable to acknowledge about the platform.

Substack is, by European standards, close to a free speech absolutist and not only does it permit content that would be illegal in many European jurisdictions, it allows creators to monetize it. Hate speech, conspiracy theories, and political extremism generate revenue on the platform. The Guardian documented the extent of this problem just weeks ago, and it wasn’t the first time. From a US perspective, this is the cost of prioritizing the First Amendment above other values. From a European perspective - where hate speech laws, dignity rights, and democratic protections routinely override speech freedoms - some of what Substack currently hosts simply wouldn’t be legal. This is a core tension in the proposal, and we’ll return to it.

There is a market for digital infrastructure that doesn’t need your rage

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This week on Media Finance Monitor

• Pluralism needs a business model

• Google’s new patent scaring the hell out of publishers

• Micropayments refuse to die

• How a local newsletter built a digital audience in a city shaped by print

• Check out how your government wants to change the EU’s main media funding program

• 24 active calls (5 new)

Media Finance Monitor is where newsroom leaders, funders, and media entrepreneurs come to understand how money really moves through the information ecosystem.

We decode funding, business models, policy, and platform shifts and turn them into strategies you can actually use.

Paid subscribers get premium editions, full access to the archive and all our research reports, for about the cost of a pistachio éclair and a good espresso a month.

For deeper engagement, our Partnership Program offers one-on-one strategic advisory, curated briefings, and access to our internal databases and invite-only events.

Join as a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

Pluralism needs a business model

(by Peter)

Bruges is the kind of city where you go to think about the past. Medieval towers, cobblestones, a canal that reflects nothing in particular. It seemed like an odd venue for a foresight exercise.

Civitates had gathered a group of media and democracy types to work through six scenarios for the future of Europe: political fracture, geopolitical shock, economic contraction, you get the idea. (A brief disclaimer before we go further: Civitates supports some of our work, though not this newsletter. They did not ask me to write this, and this piece is not cleared with them in any way.)

We were under Chatham House rules, so I’ll stay vague. What I can say is this: while the exercise was nominally about the future, it kept surfacing the present. Specifically, anxieties of the organizations that have spent the last decade trying to defend pluralism and democracy; and what those anxieties are doing to the way they talk, plan, and prioritize.

There’s a concept in political science called input legitimacy: the idea that a decision is legitimate because the process that produced it was fair, inclusive, and procedurally correct. It’s how a lot of journalism and civil society has historically justified itself. We follow the rules. We have editorial standards. We are accountable to our methods, even when our results are hard to demonstrate.

The problem is that people don’t evaluate us this way. They evaluate us on output legitimacy: does this thing feel useful? Does it change anything? Can I tell that it exists?

In the information ecosystem, creators figured this out faster than journalists did, and AI is figuring it out even faster than creators. Neither cares too much about process. Both are extraordinarily responsive to what people actually seem to want and this is why they are winning in the attention economy.

Defending democratic values or quality journalism on the strength of process alone (Look at our governance! Look at our ethics policy!! Look at our independence!!!) is not a sufficient answer in a moment when the alternative is something that responds to you immediately and never lectures you about what you should care about.

Losing ground - politically, financially, in terms of audience attention - has consequences. When resources tighten, old habits get renegotiated.

This is not comfortable. But I’d argue that most of the reconsideration underway in the media and democracy space is less about moral collapse and more about a long-overdue audit of what values we should keep and which dogmas we should do without.

Real coalition building, for instance, means working with people you disagree with on most things and finding the specific overlap where action is possible. That’s not cynicism; it’s how things get done. This reality is far from the romanticizing language of collaborations focusing on shared values and mutual admiration.

Similarly, the market is not only a source of contamination. It is also where scale lives and where a lot of the signals on what people actually care about come from. If our solutions are designed in ways that exclude market participation, we are building systems that are, at best, normatively satisfying but socially marginal.

The organizations most likely to matter in five years are probably not the ones with the best values statements. They’re the ones that figured out how to deliver something people actually need: reliable information, a useful service, a community worth belonging to. Pluralism and democracy don’t need more defenders who are right about everything, they need people who are honest about what works.

Google’s new patent scaring the hell out of publishers

(by María)

Google has been granted a patent for a system that evaluates pages behind search results, on metrics including bounce rate, click-through rate, and measures of content and design quality, and serves an AI-generated replacement when a page scores below a threshold. The substitute is assembled in real time, tailored to the individual user. The original page stays up. The click may never arrive.

Some experts argue the scope is limited to shopping and ads, and a careful reading by Search Engine Journal supports that view: every example, metric, and UI feature described in the document points to transactional, commercial contexts. The patent claims themselves, however, place no such restriction, leaving open the possibility that the same logic extends further.

Whether or not it does, the broader pattern is already there. Systems like Discover and AI Overviews already mediate access to content through logic publishers cannot read or challenge. This would extend that pattern from ranking pages in search to replacing them.

For publishers, it would add another layer of friction to a relationship that has been deteriorating in plain sight. Google is simultaneously the largest source of referral traffic for most outlets and the entity making unilateral decisions about how, when, and whether that traffic shows up through search, Discover, and increasingly through AI-generated summaries that answer queries without sending anyone anywhere.

The numbers behind that deterioration are not pretty. A recent Growtika study tracking Google traffic to ten major US tech publications found combined monthly visits fell from 112 million to 47 million between early 2024 and January 2026, with some outlets losing over 90% of their audience from this channel. The figures have been questioned (small sample, peak-traffic baseline, a sector hit harder than most) but even discounted, the direction isn’t news: a channel that works until it doesn’t, no warning, no explanation.

Google Discover, long treated as one of the few surfaces still sending meaningful traffic back to publishers, has followed the same script. Reach, the UK’s largest commercial news publisher, saw Discover traffic fall 46% in the second half of 2025 a channel that had been their single largest referral source with digital revenue following it down. CEO Piers North said the company now plans its business on the assumption those volumes aren’t coming back.

Micropayments refuse to die

(by María)

The concept of pay-per-article access keeps coming back, USA Today is the latest to try it. In mid-2025, the company announced it would begin rolling it out, and last week at the Citizens Technology Conference, CEO Mike Reed offered the first public update. He described early results as “interesting” and framed the move as part of a broader shift toward ‘lifetime value’ over raw subscriber volume.

The reception on LinkedIn was less interesting. Tristan Loper of the Lenfest Institute called it frustrating to see micropayments back on the agenda. Richard Gingras, former vice president of news at Google, said he hadn’t seen the model work for news. Damon Kiesow, Knight Chair in Journalism Innovation at the Missouri School of Journalism, was more direct:

“Micropayments, AI licensing AND a pivot to video. An unholy trinity.”

Richard Tofel, former president of ProPublica, offered the most useful qualifier in the same thread: micropayments might work with media-wallet type applications, but probably not without them.

It is not hard to see why the skepticism persists. With micro-payments:

• Each article requires a fresh decision, adding friction and interrupting the reading experience.

• A small transaction takes nearly as much effort to secure as a subscription, for a fraction of the return.

• At low price points, processing costs absorb a meaningful share of what comes in.

• One-time purchases do little to create the kind of ongoing relationship reader revenue usually relies on.

The most serious attempt to resolve these problems at scale was Blendle. The Dutch startup, founded in 2013 with backing from the New York Times, Axel Springer, and Nikkei, and partnerships with the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, never managed to make pay-per-article appealing to either readers or publishers, and never turned a profit. It shut down the Netherlands service in 2019. New owner Cafeyn closed what remained in Germany and the US four years later, citing a “very limited user base.”

That’s a well-funded, well-partnered, decade-long effort at the best possible moment for the experiment. “Interesting“ is a high bar to clear from here.

How a local newsletter built a digital audience in a city shaped by print

(by María)

In Münster, a German city of just over 300,000 residents, the local news market has long been concentrated: two daily newspapers operate under the same publisher and share much of their coverage. In March 2020, a group of journalists launched RUMS, a newsletter-first newsroom intended to broaden the range of reporting and perspectives available.

The project began with capital from 16 value-aligned shareholders, which supported its early development. Since then, it has built a business model centered primarily on memberships, identified by Project Oasis Directory as its main source of revenue. Additional income comes from advertising, consultancy work, technology development services, and individual donations.

Today, RUMS structures its memberships around shareable access. The standard subscription (€14.99 per month) includes a single account, while higher tiers allow readers to share it with additional users. Discounted plans are available for students and people receiving social benefits, alongside packages for companies and organisations.

The outlet now counts around 2,500 paying subscribers out of more than 6,000 total, and reaches roughly 10,000 readers per issue. Getting here, however, wasn’t straightforward. A piece in The Fix traces the newsroom’s path:

• Format choice: the founders chose a newsletter to reach readers directly, without relying on intermediaries, and to create a regular relationship with the audience.

• Early traction: the publication attracted about 3,200 free subscribers, drawn by reporting focused on context and analysis.

• Paywall attempt: five months later, introducing a paywall reduced the paying base to around 700 subscribers.

• Realization: the team recognised that many residents had limited exposure to digital news products, and that around 38 percent of Münster’s population is over the age of 50.

• Strategic adjustment: articles began to be released free two weeks after publication, alongside discounted subscriptions and community events across the city, as well as a “readers recruit readers” campaign.

According to co-founder Marc-Stefan Andres, the combination of delayed free access and direct encounters with potential subscribers helped expand the paying base. The experience, he says, revealed both the difficulty of breaking into a market shaped by entrenched print habits and the appetite for independent digital journalism once readers encountered it.

This piece is part of a series focusing on local and community journalism and is supported by the LimeNet project and the European Union.

Check out how your government wants to change the EU’s main media funding program

(by Peter)

As we reported in late January, EU member states have been quietly proposing significant changes to AgoraEU, the bloc’s main media funding program in the 2028–34 budget. Now, thanks to documents leaked to Contexte, you can see exactly what each government asked for.

With their permission, we’ve built a NotebookLM instance loaded with those documents — so you can query it directly and find out what your own government is pushing for.

Try asking: What adjustments would the Hungarian government like to see to AgoraEU’s journalism support programs? You’ll get a pretty accurate picture of where Budapest stands. Swap in any member state, or go deeper: ask who proposed public service media inclusion (Germany) or which countries want to introduce comitology to AgoraEU (AT, BE, FR, HU, LV, NL, PL, SI).

Check out the Notebook here ->

Read more

How much does the sector actually need?

It’s a great question. It’s the right question. And we are increasingly convinced we’ve been answering it wrong.

Read more

This week on Media Finance Monitor

• Journalism is the OG distillation attack

• News is out, newsletters are in

• Wordle and weeknight pasta is literally saving accountability journalism

• 26 active calls (7 new)

Media Finance Monitor is where newsroom leaders, funders, and media entrepreneurs come to understand how money really moves through the information ecosystem.

We decode funding, business models, policy, and platform shifts and turn them into strategies you can actually use.

Paid subscribers get premium editions, full access to the archive and all our research reports, for about the cost of a pistachio éclair and a good espresso a month.

For deeper engagement, our Partnership Program offers one-on-one strategic advisory, curated briefings, and access to our internal databases and invite-only events.

Join as a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

Journalism is the OG distillation attack

(by Peter)

I get excited when a new word drops the same ways others get excited for a new Bad Bunny album, so I was really psyched to read Anthropic’s recent press release about what they call a “distillation attack” against their model.

Anthropic says it detected “industrial-scale” campaigns by three Chinese AI labs (DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax) that used roughly 24,000 fraudulent accounts to generate 16+ million exchanges with Claude, allegedly to extract capabilities and improve their own models. The company frames this not just as competitive cheating, but as a safety issue: if you distill a frontier model, you might also distill the capabilities while leaving the safeguards behind.

I want to leave the complex geopolitical and technical implications to others, and focus on the terminological gymnastics. There is already a nice, widely understood phrase describing what these Chinese labs are trying to do: it’s intellectual property theft. Which I guess Anthropic and similar AI companies would love to avoid using given that the entire sector still has a, ahem, complicated relationship with other people’s intellectual property.

From a publisher’s perspective, the AI training story often looks like one giant, planetary-scale distillation attack. Scrape a corpus, compress it into a system that can answer questions, monetize the system and argue later about who/what fed the machine.

(One could also argue that journalism is the OG distillation attack. A reporter goes somewhere, asks questions, compresses a lot of information into something useful for their audience. Sure, the scale, speed, and means of distribution may be a little different.)

Anthropic isn’t the only AI company being creative with language this week.

OpenAI published its Signals data report, a reasonably detailed breakdown of how consumer ChatGPT is actually being used, and buried inside it is a category called “seeking information“ that is working very hard not to be called something else.

The report breaks usage into seven topics: practical guidance, writing, seeking information, self-expression, technical help, multimedia, and other. “Seeking information” accounts for roughly 18% of all messages. It sits pointedly separate from “practical guidance” (how do I do this thing?) and “technical help” (why is the red light blinking / not blinking on this thing?). Seeking information is also what you do when you want to know what happened. Some of it is, in normal English, called news consumption.

But OpenAI doesn’t want to call it that. Acknowledging a substantial “news” category in their usage data would hand publishers a useful data point in the ongoing, and very much unresolved, argument about compensation. So it becomes “seeking information“, a label that technically includes everything and specifically commits to nothing. Very neat.

Non-work usage has overtaken work usage significantly, down from roughly 50/50 in mid-2024 to about 70/30 non-work by late 2025. The data also shows who’s driving this shift: predominantly under-35, increasingly gender-balanced, and on free or entry-level plans

ChatGPT has crossed from a productivity tool into something more ambient: a place people go to figure stuff out, make sense of things, stay informed. Which sounds an awful lot like what people used to use journalism for.

According to SensorTower’s 2026 mobile trends report, ChatGPT generated $3.4 billion in in-app purchase revenue in 2025, and it is the fastest app to ever cross the $3 billion threshold.

At this point, lamenting if people would still turn to newsrooms for information the way they used to is about as useful as lamenting what the printing press did to monks doing calligraphy.

The media finance question is who gets to capture the value. Because what people are paying for is, in part, the same thing journalism has always provided: what happened, what it means, what to do about it. The delivery layer changed, but I promise you that the underlying information didn’t magically large language modelled itself into existence.

The content that makes these AI assistants genuinely useful (the recipes, the local news, the explainers, the how-tos, the what-just-happeneds, etc.) was produced by someone else, at someone else’s cost. The AI layer compresses it, personalizes it, delivers it faster and more conveniently than any individual publisher can, and captures the subscription revenue. A select group of large, mostly Global North publishers have negotiated licensing deals with OpenAI. Everyone else is, so far, providing the raw material for free.

You don’t need to be an economist to see that this is not a stable arrangement.

Either a lot of the information producers eventually go dark, which degrades the very thing that makes these models worth paying for (and, incidentally, degrades our societies along with it, but let’s not get sidetracked), or some more systematic value-sharing mechanism emerges, like what Youtube has with content creators. The distillation attack framing, the careful avoidance of the word “news”, and the reluctance to share the billions in revenue all connect to the same unresolved question. Who supplies the inputs in the information economy, and who gets to capture the value generated.

News is out, newsletters are in

(by Peter)

Pew Research Center has been doing some of the most consistently useful research for the media industry. In the past few weeks they published two studies that, read together, tell a clarifying story about what audiences care about.

The headline from the first one is bleak: just 8% of Americans say individuals have a responsibility to pay for news. 83% have not paid for any news in the past year. When asked how news organizations should primarily fund themselves, 45% say advertising and sponsorships.

One reading here could be that audiences don’t value journalism, but I don’t think that’s quite right. People pay for convenience, identity, habit, entertainment, community, self-improvement, and yes, for being reliably informed, they just don’t necessarily experience that as “paying for news”.

This is not just about terminology.

“News” is a moral category; “products” are a budget category. People don’t want a lecture about civic responsibility, they want something that earns a place in their day: a format they like, a tone they recognize, a service that saves them time or makes them smarter. Call it a newsletter, a briefing, a guide, a membership, a tool, whatever. The closer journalism gets to an audience-shaped service, the easier it is for people to pay for it without feeling like they’re being asked to subsidize an abstract institution.

The other Pew study looked at newsletter consumption and found that about 30% of Americans get news from email newsletters at least sometimes and that number climbs with income and education. Upper-income adults are at 38%; college graduates at 35%. This is where the two studies connect: the same demographic that over-indexes on newsletter consumption in one also over-indexes on believing individuals have a responsibility to pay for news in the other. College graduates are at 14% on the responsibility question, compared to 5% for those with a high school diploma or less. Upper-income adults are at 14%, lower-income at 5%.

If you’re looking for product-market fit for audience revenue, this is it.

The audience most willing to pay is already reading newsletters and our own audience surveys across Central and Eastern European markets, conducted over the past two and a half years in almost every country in the region, show the same pattern. Higher disposable income, heavier newsletter consumption. Better educated, more likely to already be paying for journalism. This isn’t a US-specific phenomenon. It’s a structural feature of who newsletters attract and who they serve.

(If you want to go deeper on the how, we published the Newsletter Playbook last year that covers the practical side of building and monetizing this kind of product. Worth a read if you’re at the stage of figuring out whether and how to make it work for your publication.)

Wordle and weeknight pasta is literally saving accountability journalism

(by Maria Paula)

Fresh 2025 results are in for two of the biggest names in media.

The New York Times’ Q4 report shows that only 1.47M of its 12.21M digital subscribers pay for news alone. The remaining 10.75M include 4.27M subscribed to standalone non-news products like The Athletic, Audio, Cooking, Games and Wirecutter; and 6.48M on bundles or multiproduct combinations. It seems like Wordle and weeknight pasta are, in a very real sense, supporting the accountability journalism the publication is known for.

Alongside these numbers, the company announced it would stop reporting subscribers and ARPU by product category, arguing that total figures better reflect how the business is managed. Read in context, it can be about the optics: the change comes as subscriber growth is driven primarily by non-news products and, as Andrey Mir has noted, indicators that don’t tell a flattering story are the ones most likely to disappear. But it can also be structural. The NYT now operates as a portfolio of information products, from visual investigations to recommendations for noise-cancelling headphones, and what matters is the overall health of the business, not the distinction between news and non-news.

News Corp reported its Wall Street Journal closed with nearly 4.7 million total subscribers, including 4.3 million digital, up 13% and 11% from 2024. That growth didn’t have to do with recipes or puzzles. Their core offer is information that drives decisions and moves markets. For people working in business, operating in finance, or leading publicly listed companies, it offers coverage they rely on. Not staying current carries a real cost. This is high-utility, high-impact reporting with clear providence.

Both cases show there’s willingness to pay for useful information, whether that means helping people cook gochujang buttered noodles, hedge a position, or understand what their government is doing. What’s a struggle is selling journalism purely on values. If your pitch is built primarily around abstract ideas like democracy and the public interest, your market is likely to be smaller and the business harder to sustain.

Here are the active calls, with the largest at the top:

Read more

We talked shop, and I offered unsolicited advice, as I tend to do. He was gracious about it. EUobserver was in a bind: funding was getting difficult, growth had plateaued, and the nonprofit structure made it nearly impossible to raise the capital needed to break through. He was looking for options. I thought I could help.

I connected Alejandro to Veronika Munk and Tomáš Bella at Denník N, the Slovak digital publisher that has become a real success story in European media. Denník N started in Bratislava in 2015, later expanded to the Czech Republic, and has been profitable while building one of the more sophisticated reader-revenue operations in Central Europe. I know them pretty well, knew they had some capital and an appetite to expand. I thought the fit might work.

They talked. They talked more. And now, months later, the deal is done.

We are organizing a partners-only online discussion on the 26 of February to cover upcoming funding opportunities, the state of the EU budget negotiations, and fresh intel from Brussels. If you have been considering joining the CSM Partnership Program, this would be an excellent time to do so.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out at partnership@funds4media.org

EUobserver is joining N Press, the publishing company behind Denník N. The entire team, little more than a dozen people, is staying on. The brand, domain, and mission remain the same. The investment, I’m told, is in the hundreds of thousands of euros. The goal is breakeven by year three.

I wasn’t paid for this deal, though I’ve been promised a beer and possibly dinner. Still, I’m proud of my part, and I’m disclosing it because that’s what you do.

Everything below is based on an on the record online conversation I had late January with Tomas Bella (N Press / Denník N) and Alejandro Tauber (EUobserver).

In this edition we’ll cover:

• the basics of the deal

• the short term strategy of the “new” entity

• the strengths and weaknesses of each publisher and how they hope to complement each other

• EUobserver’ competitive positioning and long term prospects

• my analysis of the challenges ahead

The basics of the acquisition

Read more

I know I’m late to this party with many excellent angry but funny, content focused, business strategic, etc takes on what happened. Still, I want to spend this edition on the structural questions underneath and what this superyacht-sized failure means for (🥁) media funding.

We are organizing a partners-only online discussion on the 26 of February to cover upcoming funding opportunities, the state of the EU budget negotiations, and fresh intel from Brussels. If you have been considering joining the CSM Partnership Program, this would be an excellent time to do so.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out at partnership@funds4media.org

Too big to fail < too big to survive

This is the rare case where we can’t comfort ourselves with the usual explanation: they just didn’t have enough money. This is an organization owned by someone with more money and better IT infrastructure than God. If money could solve it, I imagine it would be solved.

For a long time, being big was its own protection.

People renewed subscriptions out of habit. Advertisers kept a line item because it felt risky to remove it. Politicians still returned your calls because you were still, technically, you. In the good old days, even platforms sent you some crumbs because you were a “quality publisher,” and for a while everyone liked saying how much they appreciated quality news when they were testifying before Congress.

But scale is no longer a business model in news. Scale became an enormous cost structure. Scale became a minefield of internal politics. Scale became the inability to change.

Big institutions that grew up in a world of scarcity (scarce channels, scarce content, scarce alternatives) thrived because scarcity of supply meant abundance of attention. And abundant attention meant a lot of money. Being big, having solid infrastructure, reach, and a large volume of content was more than enough when there were only so many places people could go.

That equation has flipped. Abundant content, abundant channels, abundant choices means the one thing that’s now genuinely scarce is attention. And when attention is finite and everything else is infinite, the old business model collapses.

It is probably true that Bezos was disengaged, Lewis was incompetent, that they made a series of catastrophic individual decisions and all of this made things dramatically worse. But even without these factors, with a competent CEO and an engaged owner, the Washington Post still needed to fundamentally change, and that is an incredibly difficult thing to pull off.

All big organizations are notoriously bad at change, but big newsrooms are in their own category. Unlike most other workplaces, reporters and editors often work for their guild, their own professional and moral convictions rather than a manager or an owner. In most jobs, if your manager tells you to do something, you are expected to do it, and if you consistently ignore what your manager is telling you to do, either you or the manager loses their job. In many newsrooms reporters can ignore editors and both of them can ignore management and everyone will still turn up for work every day. Moral narratives about what journalism is for, who it serves, and who gets to decide whether it’s good are so deeply ingrained in many organizations that telling them they needed to change because the world is changing around them is very hard.

And when the change you’re attempting isn’t just operational but ideological, repositioning the editorial identity of an organisation whose staff were specifically hired to execute a different vision, it’s nearly impossible. Look at CBS, where Bari Weiss is trying to do something structurally similar. The specifics differ, but the core problem is the same: trying to perform heart transplant while the elderly patient is running a marathon. Uphill. During a heat wave. While insisting they are fine.

In many ways, it’s easier to just start something new.

Three entirely realistic strategies for long term sustainability

So what does survival actually look like now? I think there are really only three paths.

Read more

Welcome!

This week on Media Finance Monitor

• When big tech is saving democracy and the fourth estate

• Prediction markets are funding good journalism (and fueling disinformation)

• We are bestsellers on Substack 🥳 and about to launch a new vertical🎉

• How Chat GPT is replacing local news

• 21 active calls (1 new)

Media Finance Monitor is where newsroom leaders, funders, and media entrepreneurs come to understand how money really moves through the information ecosystem.

We decode funding, business models, policy, and platform shifts and turn them into strategies you can actually use.

Paid subscribers get premium editions, full access to the archive and all our research reports, for about the cost of a pistachio éclair and a good espresso a month.

For deeper engagement, our Partnership Program offers one-on-one strategic advisory, curated briefings, and access to our internal databases and invite-only events.

Join as a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

When big tech is saving democracy and the fourth estate

(by Peter)

There is a specific kind of intellectual comfort in the “Fourth Estate” model of journalism. A very prestigious newsroom with serious journalists wearing serious suits looking at serious news and holding the powerful accountable. Back in the late 1990s I got into journalism in no small part because of this “All the President’s Men” branding. But the reality of how we now hold power accountable is shifting toward something far more decentralized.

After ICE agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota, the Trump administration’s response was blunt: the victims were agitators, domestic terrorists, they were out to harm federal agents who acted in self-defense.

These narratives collapsed entirely, within days. Not because reporters were embedded with immigration enforcement, not because of some well-placed source within ICE or the administration leaking insider information, not as a result of freedom of information requests by some newsroom. These false narratives collapsed because ordinary people standing nearby had smartphones.

We spend a lot of time in this newsletter cataloguing technology’s corrosive effects on the information ecosystem. Algorithmic amplification of garbage, platform dependency, the hollowing out of news economics, AI-generated slop flooding the zone. Maria’s piece below on OpenAI and local newsrooms adds to that ledger. The case against Big Tech is long and well-documented.

But Minnesota reminds us (okay, at least it reminds me) the equation is more complicated than that.

This particular act of accountability journalism required a confluence of technological developments that simply didn’t exist ten-fifteen years ago: phones with cameras good enough to capture usable evidence; batteries lasting long enough for extended recording; bandwidth making uploads instant and frictionless; platforms enabling rapid distribution. Each component was necessary. Together, they created conditions where anyone present at a newsworthy event can become a primary source of documentary evidence.

This is the fourth estate function in its most classical form: exposing state lies about state violence. But the production model underneath it is no longer classical at all.

The footage from Minnesota was damning, but it wasn’t self-explanatory. You could watch the videos and form impressions, but forming impressions and establishing facts are different things. This is where I think institutions might have a competitive edge. The New York Times’ frame-by-frame visual investigation (reconstructing the sequence of events, mapping movements, demonstrating exactly when and how the administration’s claims diverged from documented reality) required specialized expertise that most individuals simply don’t possess. It required time, methodology, and the kind of forensic attention that turns raw footage into evidence.

Verification, in other words, remains an institutional strength. The technology to capture newsworthy moments has been democratized; the technology and expertise to rigorously verify them has not, at least not yet. For publishers trying to figure out where they fit in an increasingly decentralized information ecosystem, this matters.

But a competitive edge and a sustainable business model are not the same thing. The New York Times’ visual investigations unit is extraordinary and it’s also a small part of a mega-machine sustained by Wirecutter affiliate revenue, The Athletic’s sports subscriptions, cooking apps, and games. The analysis that held the administration accountable is subsidized by product reviews and Wordle. Verification may be what makes institutional journalism irreplaceable; it’s unlikely to be what pays the bills alone.

Prediction markets are funding good journalism (and fueling disinformation)

(by Peter)

If you watch closely, there’s some fascinating word magic happening right now: gambling becomes “prediction markets,” bookmakers become “truth machines,” and suddenly it’s acceptable for CNN, CNBC, and the Wall Street Journal to partner with what are, functionally, betting platforms.

In December, CNN struck a deal with Kalshi to integrate prediction market data across its television, digital, and social channels. Days later, CNBC announced its own exclusive Kalshi partnership. Yahoo partnered with Polymarket, the other major player, in November and in January Dow Jones also announced an exclusive deal with them, bringing its data to the WSJ, Barron’s, and MarketWatch. The mainstreaming is complete. Gambling has put on a suit.

This isn’t entirely new territory. Sports betting has fueled sports media for years, with different countries drawing the line in different places. In Bulgaria, 2024 restrictions to betting and related advertising shook parts of the news sector quite significantly. The media market is brutal, and I understand, even if I don’t endorse, how publishers ended up accepting gambling money to stay afloat. But the power of the rebranding is amazing. “Prediction markets“ lets highbrow financial publications do what they might have hesitated to do with DraftKings.

The ambition is also remarkable. Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour told a Citadel conference in December that the company wants to “financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.“ If that isn’t the kind of sentence you’d find embroidered on a late-capitalism throw pillow, I don’t know what is.

While I’m sure these deals bring new resources to important journalistic institutions (and also provide new relevance for some audiences), the entities behind them are also fueling disinformation.

Axios published a detailed account this week of how prediction markets have become engines of viral misinformation, pumping out false, misleading, and context-free claims optimized for engagement rather than accuracy. Polymarket falsely attributed quotes to Jeff Bezos. During the Minneapolis ICE chaos, Polymarket claimed deportations would cost Minnesota a congressional seat, a post amplified by the Department of Homeland Security before being deleted. Kalshi falsely suggested the US and Denmark were in “technical talks” to buy Greenland.

This is having a cultural moment partly because the current US administration has embraced crypto, and embracing crypto means embracing the prediction market ecosystem that emerged from it. The regulatory environment is permissive, the valuations are soaring (Kalshi just raised $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation), and media partnerships are how these platforms buy legitimacy and potentially new customers.

For Europe, the picture looks different, at least for now. The EU’s regulatory regimes (and perhaps the cultural traditions around gambling) are more rigid. This usually is my complaint, since it means slower adoption of new things. But here, maybe conservatism has an upside. Europe isn’t rushing to integrate betting odds into its news coverage (and it currently isn’t governed by a faction enthusiastically financializing every difference of opinion). I’m not usually the one making moral arguments about funding sources, but I do think there’s a hierarchy, and gambling money sits near the bottom. Calling it something else doesn’t change what it is.

We are bestsellers on Substack 🥳 and about to launch a new vertical🎉

(by Peter)

This is a media product about media products, so there is inherently a high level of navel-gazing in every edition. Because of this, we try to keep news about ourselves at a minimum. But this week is an exception to that rule because

• we officially became “bestsellers” on Substack

• we are launching a new vertical next week.

The first is more straightforward: we have been growing our paying subscriber base steadily since the end of last year (if you need me to convince you to pick up a paid sub, read this abstract piece from December: “I want your money”) I’m not sure if the bestseller badge comes with a lot more than a boost to our vanity, but it still feels very nice and it literally could not have been possible without you, so sincerely, thanks for your support.

If you’ve ever heard me speak in any context or read anything I’ve written about what makes media work, you know I’m obsessed with focus. Laser focus. Depth over scale. Pick your niche and serve it relentlessly.

So naturally, we’re launching a second newsletter for an entirely different industry.

Introducing Plancha, a newsletter for people who run restaurants, hotels, and hospitality businesses in Central and Eastern Europe.

Food has been my other obsession for as long as I can remember. I love eating it, thinking about it, writing about it. Some of my favorite pieces I’ve ever written have been about food, how ramen went from post-war survival food to global staple, how Franco-era politics accidentally turned San Sebastián into the culinary capital of the world. And through personal circumstances, I’ve ended up surrounded by people who do this professionally: chefs, restaurant owners, operators.

This newsletter, the Media Finance Monitor, started as a hobby. Now it has sponsors and well over a hundred paying subscribers and we take it quite seriously. That success made me think: what if we could build something similar for hospitality?

Plancha is the attempt. Utility first. Helping owners and operators make better decisions about their businesses, understand their customers, and stay ahead of what’s changing in the industry. No PR dressed up as journalism. No trend pieces disconnected from the reality of margins, staffing, and difficult suppliers.

I’m not doing this alone. I have excellent co-conspirators: Zsofi Bajor, Georgiana Ilie, Alexei Korolyov, Miklos Rozsa, María Paula Ángel Benavides - journalists and industry people who actually know what they’re talking about.

The site is live. The first issue goes out Wednesday, February 11. We’re starting with Austria, Hungary, and Romania, with plans to grow. It’s free to sign up. If you’re in hospitality, or know someone who is, I’d love for you to check it out.

(Don’t worry, this newsletter will still focus on media & money and honestly, I don’t expect many crossover editions.)

How ChatGPT is replacing local news

(by María)

So, as Peter explained above, we are launching Plancha next week, and for the first edition, I needed data from the Google Places API. A year ago I wouldn’t have known where to start. This time, I asked Gemini and got what I needed without really understanding the coding required. I did not go on Stack Overflow or any other website, just explained the task and AI gave me the information.

News consumption is following a similar pattern. According to a recent post by OpenAI, ChatGPT now handles about a million prompts a week asking for local news. People still care about what’s happening around them, but many of them no longer visit their local websites to get the information, they just ask their friendly neighborhood Large Language Model instead. There are no website clicks, no ad views, no news subscriptions. The interface keeps and monetizes the entire relationship. It’s not difficult to see how this makes local news production even more difficult than before.

Large publishers have more room to maneuver. Groups like News Corp, The Atlantic, Vox Media, and Condé Nast have signed licensing deals with OpenAI. Even if these deals don’t solve the underlying problem, they bring revenue and some influence over how their work shows up. Axios, while doing some local coverage, fits that profile. They’ve just signed a partnership with OpenAI to expand their work in nine new communities.

Smaller local outlets are in a different position. They produce a lot of the original information people are asking for, but the way people consume it no longer lines up with how that work is paid for.

The current situation resembles user-generated content on Facebook: some creators receive compensation through opaque, invitation-only deals, while the vast majority produce value and see nothing in return. OpenAI’s licensing agreements with major publishers follow this pattern, a few big names get paid, the system stays black-boxed, and everyone else is left guessing.

ProRata is betting on something closer to the YouTube model: a clearer, more systematic path to compensation for anyone willing to share their content. YouTube still concentrates enormous power relative to creators, Google sets the rules, controls the algorithm, takes its cut. But at least the mechanism is legible. Creators know how monetization works, even if they don’t control it.

That may be the best future local news can hope for: not ownership of the relationship, but a seat at the table and a visible path to payment. It’s not a solution, but it’s better than being free training data.

This last piece is part of a series focusing on local and community journalism and is supported by the LimeNet project and the European Union.

Here are the active calls, with the largest at the top:

Read more

I’m writing this edition from my glorious room at Motel One on Rue de la Royale. I’m in town for actual MFF related work with our excellent advocacy director (and co-author of this edition) David Kardos but instead of planning a bright future of the European information ecosystem, a lot of our day was spent anxiously sifting through the “compromise text”, the newest version of the Agora program.

Since last July, we’ve been operating in a bit of a honeymoon phase with the initial budget proposal which was very favorable to the news sector. But now, the other shoe is beginning to drop.

The Council’s consensus amendments to AgoraEU leaked (you can read the document on Contexte) as my plane touched down, and while nobody should be shocked that nation states have opinions about how their billions should be spent, the proposed adjustments are not all good.

In this edition we are going to look at

• Where the MFF negotiations stand

• What the Council wants to change

• What it means for the sector

Media Finance Monitor is where newsroom leaders, funders, and media entrepreneurs come to understand how money really moves through the information ecosystem.

We decode funding, business models, policy, and platform shifts and turn them into strategies you can actually use.

Paid subscribers get premium editions, full access to the archive and all our research reports, for about the cost of a pistachio éclair and a good espresso a month.

For deeper engagement, our Partnership Program offers one-on-one strategic advisory, curated briefings, and access to our internal databases and invite-only events.

Join as a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

This is where we are in the negotiations process

The Multiannual Financial Framework, the MFF is the EU’s 7-year budget, with the current cycle ending in 2027. Negotiations for the next 2028-34 period already began in 2024 and last summer, the European Commission (EC) presented its first draft, with AgoraEU, the Global Europe instrument and the European Competitiveness Fund being the three most important programs for the information ecosystem. The first proposal actually looked very promising for journalism support.

After the Commission’s first draft three parallel sets of processes started.

On one hand officials within the EC started stakeholder consultations and began planning out what actual support programs could look like. While everything in Brussels is at least somewhat political, this is largely a technocratic process where various departments (DGs) within the Commission try to find out ways of implementing the will of elected representatives and the member states.

The European Parliament, which, at the end of the 2 year negotiations process will have to vote for the MFF also expressed opinions about the initial draft of the Commission, but none of these were directly related to the 3 important funding envelopes.

At the same time, in the European Council, member states also started negotiating around topline allocations and the top level priorities of the programs. While implementation and the granular design of the programs are mostly the responsibility of the Commission, the member states have a lot of influence over the broad directions and priorities. We now have the first leaks from how the Council would change the initial proposal, this is what we are going to be discussing today.

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