The Hungarian policy innovation fueling the renaissance of nonprofit newsrooms

The mid-1990s saw the Hungarian parliament adopt a policy so innovative and effective at nurturing civic engagement—and later nonprofit journalism—that it was embraced across the region.

Hungary and "pioneering funding policy that enables newsrooms and civil society organizations" aren’t phrases that typically appear in the same sentence these days—unless that sentence also includes "crackdown" and/or "restrictions."

Last week, our organization, the Center for Sustainable Media, earned the dubious honor of being named in the latest report from Hungary's Sovereignty Protection Office—a government body whose name sounds like it was generated by an AI trained exclusively on Orwellian prose. We have no idea what we’re accused of or what consequences might follow—bureaucratic cliffhangers are all the rage in Budapest these days.

While landing on lists like these feels partly like validation (we must be doing something right!) and partly like a government-prescribed anxiety, it certainly doesn't suggest we'll be receiving any state medals for advancing independent journalism anytime soon.

But it wasn't always like this.

In fact, the mid-1990s saw the Hungarian parliament adopt …