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.

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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 app 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?

Second-hand fashion app 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 ->

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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:

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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

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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.

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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:

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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.

Inclusion of public service media

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This week on Media Finance Monitor

• The information ecosystem cosplaying 1989 in Davos

• Refreshing honesty from Google on publisher compensation

• An investor focused on Youtubers and the incomplete promise of the creator economy

• Reporting São Paulo from its peripheries

• 27 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

The information ecosystem cosplaying 1989 in Davos

(by Peter)

In the spirit of providing you with practical, actionable information every week around journalism, the news business and the wider information ecosystem, let’s start with Davos and abstract geopolitics.

Canadian prime minister Mark Carney gave a great speech at the World Economic Forum, basically a public-service announcement for people still emotionally invested in the end of history. On his agenda:

• Multilateralism, the international rules based order is over, is not “under-pressure”, it’s not coming back.

• We are experiencing a rupture, great power competition is the flavor of the era.

• Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Middle powers, he argues, can still act but only if they stop pretending that compliance will buy them safety. I hope he is right, I’m absolutely unqualified to say.

I think it was an honest, sobering speech, one that global elites needed to hear. I’m not sure they heard it though.

Ahead of Davos every year, the World Economic Forum releases its Global Risks Report in which 1000+ experts rank systemic risks for global stability. For years now, mis- and disinformation ranks insanely high, it was number one in the two-year outlook in both 2024 and 2025, and this year it still got second place ahead of state-based armed conflict, societal polarization, inequality and some other pretty important stuff.

Now, let me be clear: misinformation exists. Disinformation exists. It can do real harm. Nobody serious denies that.

But putting it near the very top of the near-term global risk hierarchy, in a year where the conversation is openly about coercion, territorial threats, great-power rivalry, and the breakdown of predictable rules I think it tells us more about the coping mechanism of Western-elites than about the fundamental nature of the polycrisis we are living.

“Misinformation” is a strangely comforting way to describe legitimacy collapse. It implies: the institutions were basically fine, the system was basically working, and then people were misled into distrusting it. In other words: it wasn’t our fault.

That’s why the misinformation frame travels so well among elites. It allows you to keep the old mental model (the world is mostly governable; multilateralism is basically intact; good policy exists; the public just needs better information) while acknowledging that something is on fire.

It’s the easiest way to keep cosplaying 1989 while using 2026 vocabulary.

It’s the old world talking to itself. It assumes the problem is a misunderstanding. That if we could just educate people better, help them see through the fog, they’d come back to the sensible center. They’d trust the institutions again.

They won’t. And not because they’ve been misled.

Many people don’t trust large institutions, governments, authorities, or legacy journalism for that matter, not because they’ve been hypnotized by some hostile algorithm, but because those institutions have failed them. To treat this as a purely “misinformation” problem is to treat a systemic collapse as a mere misunderstanding. If we want these institutions to be meaningful again, they don’t need better PR; they need fundamental reform. I believe this to be true even if, at the same time, bad actors do exploit and amplify these failures by information manipulation. But there is no reality where you media-literacy yourself out of this crisis without addressing the underlying institutional failure.

Which brings us to where the money is actually going or rather, where it isn’t.

Craig Newmark, one of the most significant private funders of journalism in the US announced this week he’s mostly stepping back from media support. I interpret his move as part of a larger trend we described a year ago: from billionaires to tech companies, from governments to the voluntary sector, many of the world’s largest institutions no longer see investing in the media and information ecosystem as a priority.

Alright, enough geopolitics. I promised practical utility, so let me deliver some before you start wondering if this newsletter has pivoted to international relations commentary.

What does any of this mean for people who actually run newsrooms or fund them?

First: the institutional funding landscape isn’t just difficult right now, it’s structurally unstable, and will remain so. Yes, there’s progress on some fronts (updates on the EU budget negotiations coming next week, I pinky promise), but if your core strategy is to find the next big institutional backer, convince Meta to care again, land a major philanthropist, secure that foundation grant, I’m not saying it’s impossible. I’m saying it’s not a sound plan for survival. The institutions that used to reliably fund this ecosystem are themselves in crisis, or reassessing, or simply looking elsewhere.

Second: it’s time to get serious about questioning what a journalism institution even is. I still believe in the value of organized, resourced newsrooms, I’ve made that case here before. But the question that matters now isn’t “how do we preserve the institutions we have?“ It’s “who is actually delivering public interest information to people, and how?“ That might be a legacy outlet that’s genuinely reformed. It might be a creator who built trust one video at a time. It might be something we haven’t seen yet. For funders, this means experimenting with backing new kinds of actors. For newsrooms, it means ruthless focus on audience needs, not the needs we assume they have, but the ones they actually show up for.

Carney told the Davos crowd to stop waiting for the old rules to reassert themselves. That advice applies for us too.

Refreshing honesty from Google on publisher compensation

(by Peter)

If you’ve been wondering where Google actually stands on paying publishers for AI training, Roxanne Carter, the company’s senior manager for government affairs and public policy, offered some clarifying testimony to the UK’s House of Lords last week.

The short version: if your content is freely available on the open web, Google does not believe it owes you a licensing fee.

When it comes to training AI models on freely available content that is available on the open web, we do not believe that we should license.

“What the AI model is trying to do is analyse huge amounts of data to identify patterns,“ Carter explained. “It is not looking to make copies. What it’s trying to do is develop new tools to then produce wholly new content.“ In other words: your journalism is training data, not a product requiring compensation, unless you’ve paywalled it or put it behind some kind of access restriction, in which case Google may talk deals.

Carter also addressed the opt-out question. Publishers can use Google Extended to block their content from being used to train Gemini and other AI development tools without losing their place in search results. That’s the good news. The less good news: this doesn’t apply to AI Overviews, the feature that synthesizes answers directly in search results using your content.

Asked directly whether publishers can opt out of AI Overviews, Carter declined to answer, saying only that “this is an issue that is live, ongoing discussion with the CMA.” Read: no, you currently cannot, and whether that changes depends on the UK competition regulator.

None of this is particularly surprising, but it’s useful to hear it stated plainly. Unlike YouTube, where creators and platform share revenue, most of the news business has no such arrangement and Google clearly has no intention of building one voluntarily. If your content is publicly accessible, they will use it. The only leverage publishers have is regulatory, and that process is moving slowly. Worth keeping in mind as you think about what’s behind your paywall and why.

An investor focused on Youtubers and the incomplete promise of the creator economy

(by Maria Paula)

In 2010, I was fifteen and spent most of my online time on Twitter. I used it as a diary, as counterintuitive as that may sound, and to connect with people who were into the same random things I was. Writing helped me sort out what was going on in my head. Because nobody there really knew who I was, it was easier to express myself. I was just talking into the void, until one day the void talked back. People replied, retweeted, stuck around. My following grew.

At first it was exciting. I felt understood, less alone. But validation began to matter too much, and I was no longer tweeting just because. I found myself thinking in 140-character blocks, checking metrics more than I would like to admit, worrying about how a line would land as if my life depended on it. I stayed in that loop until real life required more space. I went to university, had less time, and tweeting fell down my list. As I posted less, the engagement faded, and eventually the followers did too. I peaked around 21K.

I was reminded of my teenage Twitter-fame when I recently heard Derek Muller describe the pressure of keeping his Youtube channel, Veritasium alive. When everything rests on one person, small decisions like slowing down carry a cost.

Veritasium has been on since 2011 and is one of YouTube’s most successful science education channels. For a long stretch, Derek did it all alone: researching, writing, filming, editing, and handling the animations. That worked until growth changed the equation. The videos got bigger, expectations heavier, and hiring kept getting postponed because the machine had to keep moving. There are only so many hours, only so much one person can do.

Sometimes the way forward is to expand the structure instead of asking the person to stretch further. The 2023 deal with Youtube focused investor group Electrify did that. It gave Derek a chance to share the workload, take on projects that had been out of reach, and plan beyond the next upload. The funding brought breathing room, although that outcome is far from guaranteed. Peter’s writing about Task & Purpose described the opposite scenario: outside investment that raised expectations without redistributing the weight, leaving more pressure on the same person who had been carrying everything all along.

Money can reshape a project, but it rarely fixes the mismatch between what one individual can realistically sustain and what the system demands. Even with better funding and infrastructure, creators remain exposed to forces they cannot predict or control.

Content with little or no creative intention can outperform carefully crafted material, even when logic would suggest otherwise. Hank Green’s experiment made this tangible: his 12-hour white-noise video earned over $10,000 in eight months, mostly from YouTube Premium watch time. Cases like this illustrate a broader pattern: online success often reflects the murky and unstable rules of the platforms more than effort, quality, or editorial intent.

Reporting São Paulo from its peripheries

(by Maria Paula)

In large parts of the São Paulo metropolitan region, local journalism is uneven or absent, and information often circulates through informal channels. Agência Mural emerged in this context. Founded in 2010, it operates as a nonprofit local newsroom focused on low-income neighborhoods in the city’s peripheries. Today, its reporting relies on a network of around 70 correspondents who live in the areas they cover, supported by a core team of 13 full-time staff. In a recent interview for DW Akademie’s Survive and Thrive podcast, executive director Izabela Moi sums up the stakes simply: “When information doesn’t exist, it disengages you from reality.” This idea guides the newsroom’s daily practice.

• Coverage is built on staying in place rather than parachuting in. Reporting begins with everyday concerns voiced by residents, while official data and government responses are incorporated later for verification and context. Work develops over time around long-term issuesrather than isolated incidents.

• Violence and corporate publicity are excluded from the editorial line. Routine crime coverage is omitted, as mainstream media already concentrates heavily on these narratives. Content centered on institutional or corporate good deeds is also excluded.

• Public information is reshaped for local use. Mural works with data that exists but is often hard to access and navigate, publishing election candidate records, climate-impact databases by territory, and breakdowns of public spending. Materials are designed primarily for mobile, where around 90% of the audience accesses information.

• Correspondent training is integrated into the newsroom’s work. Each year, around 30 residents are selected for a six-month training period. They learn editorial standards while actively producing stories, then either continue as correspondents or move on to other outlets. Over 15 years, around 700 people have taken part.

• Funding that builds connection. Even when grants remain the main source of income, donations, crowdfunding, textbook syndication, and small community-facing initiatives are highly valued for the links they create with residents, and were described to us as impact more than a business model.

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:

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The organizations, that Secretary of State Marco Rubio would probably describe as being part of the Global Censorship-Industrial Complex, were part of Meta’s Third-Party Fact-Checking (3PFC) program, a global information integrity initiative under which certified fact-checking organizations were tasked to identify mis/disinformation on Facebook, Instagram and Threads and would receive compensation in return from Meta.

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.

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But almost exactly one year ago, on the 7th of January 2025, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg announced in a Facebook video that the company was killing the 3PFC program in favor of a Community Notes styles initiative modelled after X. Zuckerberg’s announcement focused on the US, but most fact-checkers in Europe and elsewhere were expecting for the entire program to be shut down. Existing contracts were set to expire at the end of 2025 so the ecosystem assumed that was how long they had left.

Meta’s program was quite generous. As we wrote last year, “rumor has it some outlets earned as much as $700 per fact-check. In most contexts, that’s far more than the cost of production, making Meta the primary financial backer of anti-disinformation efforts worldwide.” This financial support was, of course, no longer in-line with the direction of US domestic politics and Meta’s effort to cozy up to the executive branch and the wider MAGA movement, which equated most, or perhaps all anti-disinformation efforts with censorship. With Meta leaving the scene, a devastating collapse of the global information integrity ecosystem was all but inevitable.

So imagine the surprise of fact-checkers outside the US, when they opened the email a day before Christmas, and found out that while the US government is banning people for their anti-disinformation work, Meta is actually willing to extend their contracts.

In this edition we’ll discuss:

• What we know about the terms Meta is offering to the newsrooms

• How European regulators perceive the new deal

• How Meta is using the Oversight Board to buy time and spread responsibility

• And how newsrooms are thinking about the future of the program

What we know about the terms Meta is offering

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This week on Media Finance Monitor

• We analyzed every successful Journalism Partnership project from 2021 to 2025.

• We share the magic numbers on success rates (falling drastically), grant amounts, and consortium size.

• Plus: 5 additional tips regarding budgets and formatting that we learned the hard way.

• And as usual, we list 26 active grant calls with 4 new opportunities.

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 have vivid memories of one trip to Germany a few years ago, supposedly a holiday, that turned into a multi-day budget emergency because a €1.7 million Journalism Partnerships proposal was missing €0.64.

Due this year on February 4th, Journalism Partnerships is probably the single largest and most important media funding opportunity in Europe. It also doubles as a psychological experiment in the Milgram tradition, except instead of electric shocks, you spend days trapped inside a Commission budget table made of static cells and quiet despair.

So if you’re staring down an unruly budget, negotiating a consortium where everyone has excellent ideas about what the other partners should do, or trying to describe an activity that made perfect sense until you had to fit it into EU prose - this edition is for you.

We analyzed every project funded under Journalism Partnerships since the call launched in 2021. This dataset covers 5 years, 33 “Collaborations” projects and 9 “Pluralism” actions. If you are currently debating whether to add that sixth partner or how much budget to ask for, here is your benchmark.

1. The “Magic Number” is 6.03

The eligibility criteria set the floor at three partners for Collaborations. Some applicants may aim for this minimum to keep coordination simple. The data suggests this is a strategic error.

• Average Consortium Size (Overall): 5.29 partners.

• Average for Collaborations: 6.03 partners.

• The ceiling: The largest successful consortium had 11 members.

A consortium of 5-6 partners appears to be the “sweet spot” for evaluators. It is large enough to demonstrate genuine cross-border/cross-sectoral impact and diversity, but small enough to avoid the operational paralysis that plagues double-digit consortiums. If you go much larger (10+), you risk looking unmanageable; if you go smaller (3), you risk looking unambitious.

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You’ll tell me it was the internet. Facebook and Google and all the Big Tech. The collapse of advertising. Evil populists and the revolt of a misguided public. Mobile phones and influencers, short-form attention spans and AI. Kids these days. Perhaps twenty years of compounding structural failures.

Sure. Some of these may have had a hand in it.

But I have a different theory. I think it was the hit HBO show, The Newsroom. I’m Very Serious.

For those of you living in blissful ignorance: Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom ran from 2012 to 2014 and it told the story of a fictional cable tv channel and its flagship evening news show. If it had a thesis, it was that if we just found a smart enough anchor (Will McAvoy/Jeff Daniels) to lecture the public from a high enough tower, order would be restored. It was the ultimate fantasy of the “institutional” era, a last ditch attempt to end history.

Maybe it was a love letter to a dying world or a eulogy to a corpse by someone who didn’t quite understand how it died. It was a series about serious people in serious rooms making serious decisions about what the public needed to know. There was also a lot of yelling, because it was okay to yell at your employees as long as you thought you were right. How far we have fallen...

Also, incidentally, it was romantically, famously, and completely wrong.

The business was the responsibility of some other people and those people were the enemy. Caring about what your audience was interested in was for sellouts. The internet was a joke, literally, the digital guy existed for comic relief. Moral clarity was the only game in town, and it was okay to compare a political group (Tea Party) to mass murdering extremists (Taliban) on prime-time television as long as you found their politics distasteful.

But more than any of these, the show really religiously, fanatically worshipped process and intentions above anything else.

If you find the Media Finance Monitor useful, if it helps you understand a messy, shifting media economy and perhaps make better decision, I’d be genuinely grateful if you became a subscriber.

We’re updating our pricing on 1 January, but until then you can still join at the current rates (€8/month, €60/year for the standard subscription, or €440/year for the Partnership Program).

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The mission to civilize

There’s a moment in The Newsroom where Jeff Daniels’ character describes his philosophy as “a mission to civilize“. He frames it as noble aspiration, Don Quixote and the Uncaring Brutes.

If only the public understood what the good, educated people wanted them to understand. If only they’d stop being so wrong.

No agency. No humility. No recognition that audiences might have legitimate reasons for their choices. Just a conviction that journalism’s job was to tell people what was Important, and that the audience needed to be scolded into caring.

“Is this information we need in the voting booth?” was the only relevant question. Entertainment, lifestyle, practical information, service journalism - distractions from the Holy Mission. Frivolous, unserious, beneath us.

Unfortunately, voting is an incredibly abstract way to exercise agency.

The connection between my vote and actual outcomes is tenuous at best. It’s mediated by layers of representation, coalition-building, compromise, and sheer chaos that no individual can possibly track. In most systems, I’m choosing between bundles of positions I only partially agree with. The world is so dizzyingly complex that no single vote maps cleanly onto real-world results. I check a box, and then... things happen. Somewhere. To someone. Probably. Eventually. Maybe not because of my vote specifically, but you know, in general.

I’m not saying political information doesn’t matter, of course it does. But journalism’s obsession with the voting booth and accountability, at times to the near-exclusion of everything else, is a spectacular own goal.

People make consequential decisions every day. What to buy. Where to work. How to manage their health, their money, their relationships. What to learn. Who to trust. Is that raspy sound my baby just made a sign of something serious? (Asking for a friend.) And the subsequent decisions are concrete, immediate, and actually responsive to good information.

Help someone make a better choice about any of these things, and you’ve done something real. Something they’ll notice. Something they might even pay for.

If journalism had spent less time lecturing people about their civic duties and more time being useful in their actual lives, we might not be in this mess. And if you help people navigate these choices well, they’ll trust you. And that trust might eventually extend to your political coverage too. But The Newsroom (and dare I say, some actual newsrooms) have it backwards: lead with civic duty, and the audience will follow.

[Sounds of crickets in an empty field - The audience did not follow.]

Trust the process

The Newsroom codified a very specific delusion: that the value of journalism comes from how it is made, not what it does for the user.

The editorial layers. The verification protocols. Two independent sources. The separation of business and the editorial and church and state. The principled arguments in glass-walled offices.

Don’t get me wrong, these things can be valuable. They exist for a reason, they tend to produce reliable information. But they have no inherent worth. Something isn’t good or trustworthy simply because it went through a process. It’s good if it’s actually true and useful. The process is supposed to serve that goal, not replace it.

This distinction matters enormously, and somewhere along the way, the industry lost sight of it.

Real, lowercase “n” newsrooms inherited the same confusion. We built elaborate systems and convinced ourselves that the systems were the point. We measured our virtue by our procedures. And when audiences stopped trusting us anyway, we couldn’t understand why. We were doing everything right. (On a related note: I spent dozens of hours hunched over my laptop re-watching The Newsroom and fact-checking for this Very Important Post, don’t believe Patrick Boehler, my suffering is actually a public service)

It turns out, and I’m hoping you are sitting down for this one: audiences don’t care about your process. They never did.

What consumers actually care about

Consumers, silly as they are, mostly care whether things work.

Take Chinese electric vehicles, which are flooding European markets. I think many consumers understand, at some level, that China is a geopolitical competitor. They’ve heard about working conditions, human rights records, strategic dependencies. The process by which these cars come into existence is, by many standards, problematic.

And yet: the cars are good enough. They’re significantly cheaper. They’re electric, which some buyers care about. So people buy them, because they need transportation, they have limited budgets, and the outcome (a functional car at a reasonable price) matters more than the production process.

This isn’t moral failure. It’s rational prioritization. Most people don’t have the bandwidth to audit every supply chain, evaluate every geopolitical implication, research every labor practice. They rely on outcomes as a proxy for everything else.

The same logic applies to information.

I had a debate recently with an editor I really admire about whether a reporter covering technology should ever write sponsored content in their area of expertise.

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