Every October, large parts of the European information ecosystem begin assembling consortia, negotiating projects and building budgets. Those setting out today can expect to learn their fate next August.

And so the dreaded pilgrimage begins again. Journalism Partnerships, for my money the most important call of the year, opened today alongside two others: four funding opportunities worth €20.5 million combined.

Good news first: we have updated the EU Funding Explorer. Guest view now includes the “Active EU Calls” tab, with basic information available to everyone. CSM partners also get forthcoming calls, deeper analysis and links to comparable previous projects: who won, with whom, and for what.

Journalism Partnerships has two strands. Pluralism funds intermediaries to redistribute money in smaller grants, potentially alongside training. Large institutions cannot efficiently administer hundreds of tiny awards themselves. (Disclosure: we are involved in a forthcoming project doing this.) Collaborations supports collective business, technology and production changes, making it the more natural route for many publishers.

Like some small, anxious hamster storing seeds for winter, I have been hoarding Journalism Partnerships call documents for the past few years. This week, I fed the last three editions (25-26-27) to Chat to help compare what changed. Small edits to these texts can tell you quite a lot about what the Commission wants to fund.

Most of the administrative changes arrived last year. The more revealing changes this time are in the descriptions of what the Commission wants to fund.

Below the paywall, we’ll explain

• Where to compete: where we see room for newcomers, and where incumbents have an advantage.

• What training Brussels wants: the new wording that reveals its priorities.

• Which newsroom services could win funding: an overlooked addition to the call.

Our lowest priority call

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Later that night, over some chicken in Georgian garlic sauce so good I was considering asking for a straw, we had a lighter conversation with media executives from the US and Europe. Should publishers be worried about their top writers leaving for Substack or similar?

Media Finance Monitor is where newsroom leaders, funders, and media entrepreneurs come to understand how money 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.

Subscribe now

One answer was reassuring: yes, it happens, but how many successful journalists actually want to run a business? A good newsroom pays you to report and write while other people handle technology, distribution, contracts and administration. Going independent instantly burdens you with several additional jobs that you probably never wanted.

This is very real. I like this newsletter a lot and I’m the kind of person who actually enjoys many of the other tasks too, but I still need to put it together every week, and sometimes (=right now, Wednesday night, as I’m writing this in my hotel room in Hamburg) I’d be very happy doing other things. Independence has attractions, but a lighter workload is not one of them.

But the fact that not everyone wants to become a creator is a limited defence against a market increasingly organised around those who do.

Belgian publisher Mediahuis has taken a minority stake in Kessel, a French answer to Substack. The founders retain majority ownership; the price and the exact percentage acquired have not been disclosed. Kessel helps people publish newsletters, build audiences and charge subscriptions and it also sells advertising and supports production and talent development. Mediahuis says its investment will strengthen Kessel’s technology and commercial capabilities.

I feel mildly validated. In March, Milo and I argued that Europe should buy Substack. Yes, this is a smaller transaction with a different company (my capacity to claim vindication is considerable), but I think it’s a step in a similar direction.

Our argument was that Europe should own more of the infrastructure through which information circulates. We also liked the incentives: helping people build direct relationships with audiences willing to pay for their work. Subscriptions do not guarantee quality, but persuading someone to pay and renew usually requires something more substantial than getting them to click once.

It is good to see a European publisher investing in that proposition.

Culturally coded critical infrastructure

These products overlap without being interchangeable. Steady grew out of Germany’s independent media world. Kessel is rooted in France. Substack has international reach but retains an American cultural center of gravity. Alongside the software, each offers a sense of who belongs there.

In the rest of this edition:

• The cultural and commercial barriers that make scaling across Europe difficult.

• Which publishing functions platforms can now provide, and where institutions still bring real value.

• What the latest celebrity journalist leaving a prestigious newsroom tells us about going solo.

• The choices publishers still have as the way information is produced, distributed and consumed changes around them.

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Ireland wants to remove €141 billion from the proposed 2028–2034 budget, bringing it from €1.76 trillion to €1.62 trillion in constant 2025 prices. (The familiar €2 trillion headline was expressed in nominal prices, the EU offers several ways to be disappointed by the same number.)

This would mean an eight percent cut overall, but AgoraEU, the envelope meant to support culture, civil society, and journalism would be cut by nearly 4 times the average, 30% or €2.6 billion. This is among the largest program level cuts in the new proposal in relative terms.

If you are new to the EU budget negotiation process, start here:

• We need to change the way journalism is funded in Europe

• An in-depth look at the most important media funding programs proposed in the new EU budget

• The problem at the heart of Europe’s journalism funding debate

• What the sector actually wants from the next EU budget

• We are being outlobbied

• Eleven ideas of what news is worth to the EU

  ---

As we warned multiple times, most recently in June, the Council was always going to push for a smaller overall budget, but the 30% cut proposed for Agora is unexpected.

What does it mean specifically for journalism? The Irish text does not tell us explicitly. It retains three priorities: culture, media, and democracy and rights, but specifies no amounts for each. Still, we ran the new Irish numbers against the various possible Agora allocations, to see how journalism funding could be affected.

Here is how it looks.

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• Protect the information ecosystem, not every organisation

• AI might actually need the people it’s replacing

• A partners only Capital Stacks session on the 3rd of November

• How subscriptions came to fund half of a nonprofit local newsroom

• 22 active calls (4 new)

Media Finance Monitor is where newsroom leaders, funders, and media entrepreneurs come to understand how money 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.

Subscribe now

Protect the information ecosystem, not every organisation

(by Peter)

Years ago, a media development organisation asked me for the home addresses and phone numbers of two emergency contacts for a mostly online consultancy assignment. I am not too precious about my data, but I couldn’t understand why my wife’s mother’s maiden name or her personal mobile number was necessary for me to run a service design exercise with a small investigative newsroom. I politely refused.

I have always thought this slightly Kafkaesque encounter illustrates much of what is wrong with this kind of development work: bloated bureaucracies, institutional inertia, excessive safetyism, and an obsession with process that sometimes leaves little room to consider whether any of it improves the work.

The 2025 funding crunch has cost good people their jobs and ended valuable work. Organisations have lost expertise built over years, and communities have lost support they will not easily find elsewhere. I know some of the people affected and there is no clever argument about efficiency that makes those losses less painful. But when I think about that emergency contact form and what it represented to me, maybe some change is actually welcome.

Take Internews, whose 2024 impact update described a global community of more than 1,100. With legal entities in the US, UK and France, it ran large, often government-funded projects around the world.

The wider Internews network has endured a brutal contraction following the collapse of US foreign aid. Staff, partnerships and country offices were lost. I knew people who got laid off, we actually hired some of them.

Now Internews Europe and Internews International are becoming Informed. US-based Internews retains its name; the organisations are moving towards more independent operating models.

I like the name. Public interest information increasingly feels like the relevant building block, whether delivered by a newsroom, a creator or something else. The name puts the emphasis where it belongs. And while it’s probably too early to judge the results of the restructuring, I find the willingness to rethink the organisation encouraging.

Or take the Plus alliance. In June, the European Journalism Centre joined Code for Africa, the International Center for Journalists and PROTO, which established the alliance in 2024. Members remain distinct entities, while pooling operations, infrastructure and resources. This is substantial operational consolidation, even without everyone disappearing into one legal entity.

This is very welcome. Organisations recognising that they might serve their constituents better together deserve credit. This does not negate the human and professional cost of consolidation, but preserving the work is not the same as preserving every organisation intact.

We have been advising an international newsroom that is exploring a merger. It produces work I value in a funding environment that has become punishing. I admire their willingness to confront the budget and consider surrendering autonomy in order to preserve the mission.

Funders should help organisations explore consolidation, especially in publishing. Support should make a voluntary decision possible; it should not become a donor instructing two dependent grantees to marry. There are precedents in the US and in Europe, V-Ventures is getting a CFO-as-a-service experiment off the ground.

Consolidation can destroy useful capacity, but it can also preserve more of it than several organisations struggling separately until their money runs out.

AI might actually need the people it’s replacing

(by Peter)

Time to look in on the always heartwarming world of AI-mediated information and what it does to jobs in publishing.

Future, the British publisher of Tom’s Guide, TechRadar and Android Central, is cutting jobs for the second time this year. Press Gazette reports that Tom’s Guide has lost 55% of its UK audience since the month before Google’s AI Overviews launched there, TechRadar 35%. The Verge reports that everyone at Android Central has been laid off; Future says the site will continue. In January the company made 45 editorial redundancies across its tech titles.

While I really like reading them, I’m ready to concede that gadget reviews are not the most essential form of public interest information. Still, they are a useful case-study, because product advice is exactly what people now ask a chatbot for.

I recently got a MacBook Neo for a family member. I researched it on the old-fashioned internet, reading reviews and comparing benchmarks. We pay for the Wirecutter, which recommends it too.

I could probably have asked a chatbot and reached the same conclusion more conveniently. But my browsing generated something useful for publishers: visits against which they could sell advertising, and opportunities to earn affiliate commissions. The chatbot might deliver the recommendation without delivering any value for people who created the content.

The structural problem here is that the chatbot can only answer reliably, because somebody actually tested the laptop. Apple says the battery lasts 16 hours. Tom’s Guide ran one down and got 13 hours and 28 minutes, the Wirecutter had it at 14 hours. A language model cannot do that. I don’t think most readers really care who does the testing, but they do care whether the numbers are right. Once the answers stop being right, because it runs on marketing claims rather than verified information, convenience will not save the product.

There are some attempts exploring payment. Google is reportedly piloting compensation linked to content’s contribution to AI answers, and Perplexity has announced revenue sharing. But as of today, no one has a dependable, widely accessible replacement for the revenue being lost.

The most serious industry response so far is SPUR, a coalition formed in March that includes the BBC, the Financial Times, the Guardian, Sky, the Telegraph, Mediahuis, the AP and others. On 2 October it published a content telemetry standard and invited OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and Microsoft onto an advisory board.

(I grew up watching Star Trek, so I welcome an industry in which “telemetry standards” are part of my working vocabulary. The underlying economics are slightly less glorious.)

Think of the standard as a receipt. It follows an article through five stages: retrieved, grounded (fed to the model while it writes the answer), cited, presented on screen and engaged with. “Grounded but not cited“ means your work shaped the answer and you got no credit. The standard sets no prices, but supplies the numbers a deal could be built on.

All very reasonable, but it only works if the AI companies turn up. Asked whether it had accepted the invitation, Google said: “We frequently engage with SPUR and other associations on a variety of topics.“ while the others didn’t answer. Large publishers acting together is the only version of this with any leverage; alone, none of them has enough. I like the free market (I own several T-shirts saying so), but I am less sure how long we can wait for it to sort this out before some policy leverage becomes necessary.

The models can answer today because people were paid to find things out. Once they have eaten all of that (and put enough people out of work), the poor things starve.

A partners only Capital Stacks session on the 3rd of November (Save the date and/or join the Partnership Program!)

(by Peter)

We’ll do a Partner’s only, closed door, exclusive, Chatham House, VIP online presentation of the Capital Stacks report and we’ll answer any questions you may have about the findings on the 3rd of November from 15:00 CET. Organizations and individuals already in the Partnership Program will receive their invitations next week, and if you are not a CSM Partner yet, this is a good time to reconsider. There are many valuable benefits (really), you can read about them here.

How subscriptions came to fund half of a nonprofit local newsroom

(by Maria)

Sixteen thousand paying readers generate about $3 million a year for the Daily Memphian, enough to cover roughly half of the nonprofit outlet’s $6 million annual operation. Launched in 2018 to serve Memphis, with $7 million in philanthropic backing, it now combines subscriptions with advertising, events and philanthropy. In a recent interview with Medill’s Local News Initiative, co-founder and former CEO Eric Barnes laid out the economics and operating choices behind that model.

• Recurring reader revenue can make income less vulnerable to individual losses. Thousands of individual subscribers account for half of total revenue, spreading that income across many relatively small payments rather than a smaller number of large accounts. An annual subscription costs $178, so losing one subscriber has a much smaller impact than losing, for example, a $20,000 advertiser or a large grant. The outlet also favors longer commitments: around 65–70% of subscribers pay annually, and it A/B tests offers to encourage more readers to choose annual plans.

• Revenue generation needs dedicated capacity too. Alongside around 40 full-time newsroom staff, roughly 12 people work across advertising, technology, marketing, business management and customer service. Customer service is handled by staff in the same Memphis office, keeping feedback from paying readers stays close to the organization. On the advertising side, 99% of sales are handled in the local market by the outlet’s own representatives instead of through programmatic networks. In both cases, the relationships with subscribers and advertisers remain relatively direct.

• A paywall does not have to mean all-or-nothing access. Beyond its paid base, the outlet has 50,000–60,000 free registered users who can read four articles a month without paying, while public schools, libraries, senior living facilities and affordable housing receive free access. Its newsletters reach around 160,000 email subscribers, while hundreds of thousands more follow its social channels, where headlines and short updates provide another way to keep up with local news without reading every full article. Keeping some content freely available is part of the nonprofit’s mission; Barnes said a for-profit version would probably charge more and give away less.

• Audience acquisition can extend well beyond platform referrals. Direct visits to the site and app are now its largest traffic source, with email close behind and Google third. The outlet has long restricted how much of its content Google and Facebook can access, even at the expense of its search ranking, while also using local channels such as events, billboards, TV advertising and bus wraps. As referrals from search and social weaken, it is putting more emphasis on email and this “real-world marketing.” So far, those efforts have helped mitigate traffic losses, even if they have not driven a major increase in traffic.

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 22 active calls (4 new), with the largest at the top:

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It’s the kind of piece that makes you smile, shake your head and then suddenly choke on your can of Cola Zero spit, cough and laugh at the same time as one protagonist decided enough was enough and proceeded to enroll in clown school.

The story, like all others on the Boston Globe, was placed behind a paywall. It generated a thousand new subscriptions on the first day, “several thousand“ within seventy-two hours, “many thousands“ by this week, according to the Globe.

In the subscription business, you’d call the Boston Globe a “mature product”, which means it’s a 150+ year old brand that had a digital paywall for 15 years. This makes this result simply incredible. But it’s nowhere near the record.

€4 million, f…

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“Nowadays you sit down with a laptop, write the text, press publish, and that’s it.”

They were not wrong: the cost of producing content had really collapsed even before the advent of generative AI. But they were not right either. Publishing may be almost free, but building an institution that publishes with standards, lawyers, editors and enough stability to sustain a two-year investigation still takes capital. Or at least it has for at least the past fifteen years, whatever the next fifteen bring.

We should say plainly that we still believe in those journalistic institutions, and the Capital Stacks of Journalism project is about them. Creators are doing some of the most exciting public-interest journalism around and are resha…

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This week on Media Finance Monitor

• The AI influencers would like to see your newsroom’s budget

• Publishing less takes quite a lot of work

• Print is not for people who obsess about mistakes

• A local digital newsroom’s six-year road to profitability

• 28 active calls (4 new)

Media Finance Monitor is where newsroom leaders, funders, and media entrepreneurs come to understand how money 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.

Subscribe now

The AI influencers would like to see your newsroom’s budget

I check my spam folder fairly often. Partly because sometimes Google still puts important stuff there, but also because spam can be entertaining and even educational. You can learn quite a lot from what people think you might buy, and how they try to sell it to you.

In July, I received an unusually competent piece of spam, or, as its sender would probably prefer to call it, a cold outreach email.

“A publisher just asked about media finance: ‘Which grant funders are actually backing small newsrooms right now?’”

It came from a startup which offers to turn your accumulated work into a digital version of you that people can consult. Consultancy is difficult to scale without hiring more expensive people, so I could see the angle. But I’ve got used to being a single child over the past 46 years, so the prospect of having a “digital twin” was not especially appealing. Still, an interesting idea, and well-thought-out spam campaign.

I thought about the email again this week, when Patreon co-founder Sam Yam announced he was joining OpenAI to lead Creator Product, accompanied by former product head Drew Rowny and engineering head Shannon Ma.

First the obvious: that is a substantial recruitment effort, and whatever emerges, OpenAI clearly considers creators a market worth organising around.

As we have discussed here before, the existing relationship between AI and creators already puts pressure on institutional publishers.

Digital distribution came first, allowing individuals to reach audiences that previously required an institution. Then increasingly accessible subscriptions, memberships and advertising infrastructure made those audiences easier to monetise. (We discussed some of this in the piece about an apolitical beagle and the revolt of creators, still one of my favorites here.)

A person who can reach and monetise an audience comparable to a publisher’s, while carrying a fraction of its overhead, has a great competitive advantage. This creates a structural challenge for publishers on the scale of Google and Meta’s dominance of digital advertising, though it receives a lot less attention in the industry’s account of its own trials and tribulations.

But institutions still had advantages, including the resources to make things look and work professionally. Studios, production teams, designers, developers. Those advantages were already shrinking before generative AI, but they are shrinking faster now.

Take our various dashboards (on the AgoraEU programe, on income tax redirection to media, on newsletters) as modest examples. Unsurprisingly, I think they look rather sharp. More importantly, they would not exist without AI. Commissioning a development team would have made them too expensive, too slow, maybe both. A dashboard responding to yesterday’s news has limited value if it arrives 3 months later.

AI does not automatically produce good products, but it lets a small team that is willing to learn build things whose sophistication previously required substantially more money and people.

Looking professional is not the same as reporting accurately, conducting an investigation or defending it in court, but most audiences and advertiser do not pay separately for those distinctions.

OpenAI could simply be hiring people to build better creative tools, which would be useful but not especially interesting strategically. The more exciting possibility is a business around what creators already possess: distinctive expertise, recognisable identities and audiences willing to follow them.

Consider cooking. We already ask ChatGPT for recipes, and the results are generally decent. But I also follow ADIP_FOOD, whose faintly ASMR videos involve copious amounts of leeks, anchovies and eggs. I like leeks, anchovies and eggs, so there is a robust product-market fit.

Given the choice, I might prefer dinner advice drawn from his recipes and judgement over a generic answer. Imagine an interactive service built with his participation, using his work, adapting it to whatever is in my fridge. The creator could license the material, help shape the service and receive a share of the revenue. OpenAI would get a differentiated product and a reason for that creator to introduce followers to it.

The logic works for makeup, fitness, really any number of topics, perhaps even media finance, which is roughly what the spammy email was trying to sell me in July.

This would not require creators to abandon YouTube or Instagram, but give them another product to sell to people who already trust them.

The details of the arrangement (if there is an arrangement: apart from my fondness for leeks, this is mostly speculation) will matter enormously. Can creators participate on published terms, or does this become another collection of private deals for a few famous people? Who sets prices? Who keeps the customer relationship?

For publishers, a broadly accessible creator revenue programme would be an uncomfortable development: another group getting infrastructure for earning money while much of journalism is still debating on panels what fair compensation is supposed to be.

Creators would be bringing more than material for the model to consume, they would be bringing customers.

We’ll learn more soon. As always, if I’m right, I will be insufferable about it; if I’m wrong, I will make up excuses.

Publishing less takes quite a lot of work

(by Peter)

The Media Roundup has a good write-up of a Publisher Summit panel in London, where The Times, The Telegraph and Hearst UK explained how publishing less helped them grow.

The Times reported cutting sports output by around 30% while traffic rose nearly 50% year on year. Hearst also reported higher traffic from fewer articles, freeing time for membership products and newsletters.

This is a strategy I would encourage many publishers to consider and we are working with some large ones to implement versions of it. But in my experience there is a little bit of distance between a conference presentation and the operating reality of most newsrooms.

The business model has to support the strategy. Deeper engagement has a clear role in subscription conversion and retention, but if your revenues still depend on selling large volumes of advertising impressions, reducing output requires a credible plan for maintaining revenue.

Newsroom culture may also be sensitive. I’m sure many veteran readers can imagine newsrooms where asking reporters to stop covering certain things and start covering others because of audience behaviour would result in people reaching for pitchforks. An audience team with an excellent spreadsheet + deck cannot resolve this alone. You need sustained backing from editorial leadership whose judgement the newsroom respects.

Visible successes also help. Newsrooms are often competitive places, so if a reporter tries something different, produces journalism colleagues admire, and gets strong engagement or conversions, others may want to try it too.

You do need content audits, reader research, feedback and repeated adjustments, but also incentives, authority and patience.

Print is not for people who obsess about mistakes

(by Peter)

I started in print (decades ago), but had forgotten what it feels like to find a mistake immediately after sending something to the printer. Needless to say, I took it gracefully.

And yesterday I saw the first Capital Stacks of Journalism pages, pictured below. Still unbound, but looking very good. (Not on this picture, I suck at taking photos.)

We launch on 29 September: 21 news ventures, the money that built them, and what it took them to become viable businesses. Next week’s newsletter will have a certain thematic predictability.

I’ve also been building CapitalStacks.media, and I’m rather proud of it. It’s currently a coming-soon page, but I can’t wait to push the new site out. Mercifully, that version will remain editable.

A local digital newsroom's six-year road to profitability

(by María)

Lookout Santa Cruz is a digital-only news outlet serving the California county of the same name through local reporting, daily and neighborhood newsletters, and community guides. Media analyst Ken Doctor launched it in 2020.

In 2024, it had 15 full-time staff, while advertising and reader revenue covered 75-80% of its expenses in some quarters, but not consistently. That gap has now closed. Nieman Lab reported earlier this month that the operation became profitable on earned revenue in 2026, with ads bringing in around 60% of the total and memberships 40%. The outlet says it reaches more than half of adults in the county each month.

• Audience scale supported both revenue streams. For Doctor, audience size is central to the business: more readers mean greater reach for advertisers and a larger pool of potential members. Lookout has more than 40 marketing partners in each of its two markets, with deals typically ranging from $1,500 to $6,000, and expects to have more than 10,000 members across both by the end of 2026, he told A Media Operator.

• Staffing accounted for most spending. Around 70% of expenses go to talent and another 10% to technology. The remainder includes offices, marketing and community events. The bulk of the budget goes to the people producing, selling and growing the product.

• Profitability came after substantial outside funding. Lookout raised $2.4 million in initial capital to build its first operation, while its second newsroom, in Eugene-Springfield, Oregon, required around $3.5 million to launch. New titles are expected to take roughly three years to reach profitability now that central infrastructure and processes are in place. External support, including California's Local News Fellowship, also helped cover some newsroom staffing costs along the way.

• The second launch tested whether the model could work elsewhere. Lookout chose Eugene-Springfield largely because it offered a more typical local market than Santa Cruz. It also matched characteristics the company is seeking in future locations, including a major university and a weakened chain-owned daily. Less than two years in, earned income is covering around 60% of the operation's expenses, a faster start than the first.

A third newsroom is planned for 2027, with a goal of operating in five West Coast markets by the end of 2028.

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 28 active calls (4 new), with the largest at the top:

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We are launching Capital Stacks of Journalism in Budapest soon, and I wanted to invite someone from around the government to sit politely through my excellent opening speech (it will be excellent, you heard it here first) and then tell the room what they are planning for the ecosystem. So, I needed to identify whoever had written the secret plan and get hold of it.

This has proved more difficult than I anticipated, largely because there does not appear to be a secret plan at all.

Hungary’s previous media system was heavily captured, centralised around government decisions, state directed advertising and all sorts of interference. Assuming that somewhere there was a document, a strategy, a person who knew what was going to happen next was usually the right thing to do.

So I called people in the know, who are close to the new structures and some of whom may eventually become part of them. They didn’t know either.

My initial reaction was mild irritation. How can you win an election and not already have Project 2026, including a flawlessly formatted 57-page media funding strategy?

Things are happening. Public-service media is being reorganised, and the new oversight body is being assembled. But outside public broadcasting, much of the architecture is still being worked out.

There may be stakeholder consultations. Decisions may be slow. Some will probably be sensible, others less so. There will be all sorts of clumsy processes, strange appointments and constant drama. All very tedious, inefficient and generally annoying.

Probably how democratic processes usually work. But after sixteen years of not that, I’m really not used to it.

Media Finance Monitor is where newsroom leaders, funders, and media entrepreneurs come to understand how money 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.

Subscribe now

The state supplies the money, the audience allocates it

One mechanism survived the previous sixteen years, despite some late attempts to change it.

Hungary allows taxpayers to direct 1% of their personal income tax to eligible civil society organisations.

Across the whole system, 1.8 million taxpayers directed HUF 21.4 billion (€58.7 million) to 31,299 civil society organisations. Just like last year, a significant share went to media, journalism and the broader sector.

We screened all 31,299 recipients and identified 116 organisations with links to journalism, broadcasting, periodicals, journalism support or media education. Together they received around HUF 1,6 billion (€4,4 million), about 7.6% of every forint distributed through the civil 1% system.

Partizán was the largest civil-society recipient in the entire country, with HUF 576.9 million (€1,58 million) from 42,854 taxpayers. Telex came second with HUF 543.3 million (€1,48 million) from 35,319 people.

Since unused tokens have a tendency to burn a hole in my pocket exactly the same way unspent money does, I just had to build a dashboard.

It is in English, converts the figures into something comprehensible for people who do not instinctively think in hundreds of millions of forints, and lets you explore individual organisations, categories and the wider trends.

Now let me tell you why I like this mechanism, why I think this may have been its high-water mark, and what the next Hungarian media-funding system should learn from it.

Quacks like a market!

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This week on Media Finance Monitor

• Nobody understands user needs like the person robbing you

• Someone still has to pay the lawyers

• We sold the first account for our new EU media funding tool

• Newsletter masterclass (x)

• 31 active calls (6 new)

Media Finance Monitor is where newsroom leaders, funders, and media entrepreneurs come to understand how money 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.

Subscribe now

Nobody understands user needs like the person robbing you

(by Peter)

I am the dad/prehistoric fish thing in this picture.

I need to be at the airport three hours early and I need to establish eye contact with my gate two hours before departure. I get a lot of grief for this from my wife and pretty much everyone who has ever travelled with me. I am not afraid of flying but for some reason I am very afraid of being late. We all have our idiosyncrasies.

So on Monday morning I was at Budapest airport at 6:00 for an 8:30 flight to London, where I had been asked to steer a day of strategy discussions for the MVM group, which brings together the largest international media development organisations.

At the counter they asked whether I had a visa. What visa?!!?! Since earlier this year, it turns out, an EU passport gets you into Britain only with an Electronic Travel Authorisation, applied for online. “It’s usually quick,” the agent said, which is not a sentence a person like me hears as reassurance with a narrow 150 minute window before the flight.

I felt the anxiety coming on as I Googled “UK ETA VISA”. The site was straightforward, some basic details, passport number, etc. There were two options, a standard fee, around €25 with a 3 day turnaround, or a two-hour express service for €270. Ugh. But I had made commitments so I clicked pay.

My bank’s app normally takes a thumbprint and moves on. This time it stopped and asked: Are we sure about this transaction?

That was when I first looked at the website and the URL properly.

By any reasonable measure, I am an extremely, terminally online person. I also had governments try to hack my accounts before, so I tend to be cautious. I smell a phishing email a mile away, I scroll past sponsored results on principle. But none of it mattered, because whoever built that site had apparently thought harder about my Monday morning than I had. They knew there would be someone at check-in discovering a requirement they had never heard of, being told it “usually” is very quick, with a flight in two hours. They knew that person would google, not read, and click the first thing that promised speed.

A perfect scam for a perfect moment. It worked on someone who writes about information ecosystems for a living.

Lucky for me, my Hungarian bank found the transaction suspicious even while I was actively confirming it. I would quite like Google to have applied comparable curiosity before selling these people the ad.

Reuters’ reporting on Meta’s internal documents last year put scam and banned-goods advertising at roughly a tenth of that company’s revenue. The scammer can afford the cost of buying those clicks because the payoff is €270 per frightened traveller.

Last year we wrote about dark user needs, but this is something else: a legitimate, urgent, need for information and a service, served exploitatively. Strip out the fraud and what remains is a deep understanding of users and their needs most newsrooms don’t have. Someone mapped the exact moment a specific person needs a specific information/service, and made sure they were the first thing that person saw.

Reaching that moment gets harder as AI becomes ambient and questions move inside a conversation with your phone. And the economics already favour the person who stands to make €270 from scamming you over the newsroom hoping to maybe earn a little advertising revenue by explaining why you shouldn’t pay.

Anyway, you can apply for the actual ETA through an app. The passport’s biometric chip against the phone, a selfie, a declaration that you are not a terrorist, £20. Approval took five minutes, so I still had an hour and forty to look at my gate.

Someone still has to pay the lawyers

(by Peter)

This story is from early August, but I missed it then and think it is super interesting. SpyTalk’s Jeff Stein faced a $1 million defamation suit after reporting that incoming Pentagon official Keith Bass had been forced out of the CIA. His lawyers argued it was a SLAPP, a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, otherwise known as trying to silence criticism/scrutiny through legal means. It’s quite popular all over the world, especially in certain European jurisdictions.

Substack has a “Defender” programme against suits like this, and they bankrolled Stein’s legal defense. The initial legal work alone cost tens of thousands of dollars and without help, he was worried about having to sell his house. They won, the case was dismissed.

In Capital Stacks of Journalism, which we’re launching on 29 September (yes, you will hear quite often about Capital Stacks in the coming weeks/months/decades), we mostly study institutions. Newer, leaner ones – the outlets in it are startups of the last fifteen years, not the entrenched incumbents of Europe – but institutions all the same: owners, editors, standards, lawyers.

I’m broadly excited about an information ecosystem where more individuals and small teams can reach audiences and make money. This is a very large generalisation about a very complicated shift (I know, you come here for this kind of nuanced analysis). Still, institutions provide things we should be reluctant to lose. Like for example, lawyers of all things.

There is a reason so many difficult investigations still come from recognisable newsrooms. You need time to pursue something that might go nowhere, colleagues with different skills, editorial scrutiny, and someone keeping the publication running while you disappear into documents. Doing this alone, with subscribers expecting something every week, is harder.

And if you do hard hitting accountability journalism sooner or later someone will sue you and you need to be able to absorb that risk too, potentially putting your house on the line, which is not the most appealing prospect to most people.

A publisher is a bundle of functions: audience access, editorial standards, a team, legal cover, etc.. Substack does the first partly, the middle two not at all, and has now done the fourth. It is an infrastructure company picking up a publishing function, and that matters, because it is how the trade-offs of a more fragmented information ecosystem get hedged. Lower the legal risk to individuals and small teams, and more of the dicey public-interest stories get done outside institutions.

We sold the first account for the new EU media funding tool ❤️‍🔥🤑🎆💰👾

(by Peter)

Last week we dedicated an entire edition to the EU Media Funding Explorer. A day after launch, we had our first purchase. I spend a lot of time telling publishers that willingness to pay is useful feedback, and I’m happy to report that receiving it is also quite pleasant.

Since then, I’ve had many conversations about the tool, received thoughtful suggestions, and heard from several other organisations that seem close to joining. We also got shoutouts in Wayfinder and Splice Frames newsletters and on LinkedIn. Thank you to everyone who shared it, tried it, asked questions or pointed someone our way, it makes a real difference.

One purchase is perhaps a little early to declare a market conquered, but the combination of interest, specific feedback and someone actually paying makes me think we might be onto something.

(I promise not to report every subsequent purchase here. I suspect that’s not what you’re here for, and I’m hoping it would become a serious problem for word count.)

Newsletter masterclass (x)

(by Peter)

Fatchilli is running a masterclass on newsletter strategy. Disclosure first: they sponsored our Enterprise Publisher Newsletter Report, which covers 859 newsletter products across 32 publishers in ten European countries, so I am not a neutral arbiter. But I was enthusiastic about them before they became a sponsor: I approached them about getting involved exactly because I rate their product: REMP is one of the best CRM tools available to mid-sized and larger publishers, and I used it myself for years. They also have David Tvrdon, who knows more about newsletters than almost anyone in European publishing. Worth a look.

Here are the 31 active calls (6 new), with the largest at the top:

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Whether grant money, especially public money has any business propping up journalism used to be a hotly contested question. But as the business model kept coming apart and newsrooms had to, ahem, consolidate, a lot of this debate kind of resolved itself.

In the US, grants come mostly from philanthropy, but Europe doesn’t have American philanthropy (or the American theory of society that produces it), so a large part of what private foundations do there, the public sector does here. There are private funders, philanthropies, and impact investors in Europe too and they are doing very important work, but if you run a European newsroom and want serious institutional money, sooner or later you end up at the European Commission.

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But even if you think taking European money is fine, accessing it may still be a big problem. EU fundin…

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This week on Media Finance Monitor

• US government money is back. Europe will not like what it funds.

• The EU will admit creators, but they are not allowed to ask questions

• We have a website!

• How a UK local news network learned what scales and what doesn’t

• 33 active calls (6 new)

Media Finance Monitor is where newsroom leaders, funders, and media entrepreneurs come to understand how money 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.

Subscribe now

US government money is back. Europe will not like what it funds.

(by Peter)

Let’s start with “I told you so” because that’s such a universally graceful look.

In February 2025, as USAID implementing partners began receiving termination notices, I made a prediction: the Trump administration would not simply abandon foreign assistance, including support for the information ecosystem in Europe but rather replace the programmes and people it disliked with ones more inclined to agree with it. This was based on the assumption that Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, JD Vance and the upper ranks of MAGA were not actually in the business of reducing their own power. Now here we are, almost exactly 1.5 years later and I’m happy to report that I was right. (If you must know, it’s not a humbling experience at all, if anything, it’s the opposite.)

A few weeks ago the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL) published two calls for Europe, for a little less than $3 million combined, and it will fund projects that I can guarantee most of the EU institutions and European media will dislike.

Today we’ll get into what the Trump administration is trying to fund, why I think there is not going to be a lot of competition despite the formally open calls and I will even tell you who I think will be the most likely recipient of this money.

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If you are even a little bit in the newsletter game, you know what July and August do to open rates. If you are not, two things: A) get into the newsletter game, it’s fun; and B) very few people read niche newsletters in July and August, especially the kind of B2P stuff we publish here.

So this week, it’s only the active calls. Next week, barring a major media-funding-related emergency, there will be no newsletter at all. We’ll be back with our regular programming on 27 August.

In the meantime, if you simply cannot enjoy the beach, the mountains, a staycation or a relatively empty office without reading about media and money, then you are basically me. Also, here are five posts from this year that I thought came out rather well.

• The market for belonging

• The problem at the heart of Europe’s journalism funding debate

• Why Europe should buy Substack

• We analyzed 859 newsletters: these are the things publishers keep missing

• Diminishing returns on media capture

Here are the 28 active calls (4 new), with the largest at the top:

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A user could select a real place, type a prompt and ask Google’s Nano Banana 2 model to produce a photorealistic image grounded in the platform’s satellite, aerial and 3D imagery. People immediately started generating scenes of bombings and humanitarian crises that had not happened. Google paused the feature after, in its words, “people [began] sharing screenshots of generated imagery that appear to violate our policies”, and said it would work on stronger safeguards. Some product risks are apparently impossible to anticipate, even for one of the world’s largest technology companies, with almost unlimited engineering, policy and research resources. If you cannot sympathise with Google being surprised that its fake-satellite-image generator produced fake satellite images, you really do not have a heart.

Some people took all of this as the most recent proof that our shared reality is shattering. And while I agree it was a dumb product decision, I am less convinced that it changed the economics of misinformation as much as the response suggested.

Media Finance Monitor is where newsroom leaders, funders, and media entrepreneurs come to understand how money 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, access to our internal databases and invite-only events.

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The underlying question is whether we think misinformation is primarily a supply-side or a demand-side problem.

If it is a supply problem, Google has plainly made things worse. Manipulating satellite images was already possible, but it required some skill, software and time, and generative AI now reduces all three. Under normal economic conditions, lowering the cost of producing something will usually lead to more of it being produced.

The same has already happened across large swathes of the information ecosystem. My most recent encounter has been on YouTube, where fake movie trailers, synthetic explainer videos, imaginary celebrity news and rankings of the ten most terrifying medieval kings now proliferate endlessly. (My feed may contain a higher volume of medieval elites than yours, but trust me: the wider phenomenon is real.)

YouTube says mass-produced, repetitive and generic AI content is not eligible for monetisation while synthetic content can earn money when it contains sufficient originality and value. This is a sensible distinction and an enforcement nightmare. There is a huge grey area with material that is not quite fraudulent, not quite useful and engaging just enough to produce some revenue.

The unit economics are attractive. Generative tools reduce the fixed cost of production, platforms provide global distribution, and even a small amount of engagement can be converted into some advertising income. Most individual experiments will fail, but when production is nearly free, a producer can run thousands of experiments.

This is the supply-side effect of AI that matters. Still, supply is only valuable when it meets demand.

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This week on Media Finance Monitor

• The slopulists are winning

• The inbox is where the paying readers are

• Media is investable, I have two biased sources

• Gambling might finance even more journalism

• What maturity looks like for independent local news

• 28 active calls (4 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 slopulists are winning

(by Peter)

The great Lucy Kueng posted a super interesting working paper earlier this week on generative AI and self-published fiction. The researchers analysed 14,419 self-published, genre-fiction books sold on Amazon between 2023 and 2026. Books in which they detected substantial AI-generated text (more than 25 per cent) generally sold fewer copies. But they were not commercially irrelevant. Some reached meaningful scale, entered Top-25 rankings and took a growing share of sales.

Meanwhile, the overall supply of books exploded in these 3 years. The number of books recording sales in a quarter grew 19-fold compared with 2023; revenue grew ninefold.

The numbers are really fascinating (or maddening, depending on what you think about AI generated content.)

To me, this looks like evidence for something creative industries prefer not to hear (and something I’ve been harping on for a while): consumers care less about the production process than producers do.

We spend our lives making things, so the method feels central. Was this beautiful, elegant, whimsical sentence written by hand? Was AI used only for editing, or also for drafting? Which model? Was the prompt sufficiently artisanal? We then project this obsession onto the audience.

On the other side of the transaction, most consumers are buying an outcome. Did the book entertain them? Did the article explain something? Did the newsletter help them make a decision, feel clever, feel less alone or avoid wasting money? (In case of this specific newsletter, the answer to all of that should be an easy yes.)

AI use may impact the answer to these questions, but provenance is not, for most people, the product itself.

The study does not prove that readers are indifferent to AI. The books did not disclose its use, and the researchers identified it using detection software. We do not know how buyers would have behaved if every title carried a large MACHINE-MADE sticker. But it does show that substantial AI use does not automatically prevent a product from satisfying demand.

There is still a market for craft. The Atlantic can sell distinguished human writing, just as Hermès can sell a handmade bag. Some audiences will care deeply about provenance and pay a premium for it, that is a perfectly legitimate and viable business. But it’s clearly not the whole market.

The new Pangram integration on Substack lets readers request an estimate of how much of a post was written by hand or with AI assistance. The result appears only to the reader who asks for it. I think it’s a great feature, which suits Substack’s positioning as the home of quality writing. It is still somewhat inaccurate (it incorrectly says this post is 100% human made even though I used AI for editing). I am also curious how many people will use it repeatedly, and, having discovered AI in something they previously valued, actually stop reading.

My guess is: not that many.

For the record, we use AI throughout our work. English is not my first language. Media Finance Monitor has a two-person editorial team, and for both of us it is the side job of a side job. ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini help us research, edit, design and build. Our dashboard explaining the European Parliament’s amendments to AgoraEU is more useful than the long article I could have spent 6 hours writing and you could have spent eight minutes not reading. I’d like to think I was still needed, Ethan Mollick calls this co-intelligence.

Whether AI is good for the labour market, the climate or the soul is above this newsletter’s pay grade. But should small information businesses use it? To me, that is barely a question at all.

The inbox is where the paying readers are

(by Peter)

A significant share of modern office work consists of moving from an inbox to a browser tab and back again. Publishers may have underestimated the strategic importance of this extremely sophisticated workflow.

Greg Piechota writes in INMA about a new Northeastern University study that tracked the desktop browsing of 4,608 US adults. Email absorbed 24.9 per cent of their online time, almost level with social media at 25.3 per cent and nearly ten times the 2.5 per cent spent on news websites. Gmail alone accounted for 16.4 per cent of all browsing time. The average participant spent more time there than on the bottom 300,000 websites combined.

The study only captured personal desktop use, excluding work computers and mobile devices. For the professional classes, who spend much of their working lives inside Gmail and Outlook, the inbox may occupy an even larger share of the day.

These are also the people most likely to pay for information products. Our audience surveys across ten European markets show a close correlation between newsletter consumption and willingness to pay for online content.

INMA’s own benchmarking data points in the same direction. Across 317 news brands, publishers with greater newsletter penetration also tend to have more digital subscriptions. This is correlation, not causation: newsletters may generate subscriptions; paid subscribers may sign up for newsletters; strong media brands may simply produce more and better stuff. Still, the median publisher’s newsletter audience is six times larger than its subscriber base. That is quite a lot of potential customers sitting in one of the few remaining channels the publisher controls.

For much of the paying audience, the inbox it is the internet’s front page.

Before the summer, we published our own European Enterprise Publisher Newsletter Report, analysing 859 newsletter products from 32 publishers across ten markets. We found an industry that has deployed newsletters widely without really developing them as premium products. Some 83 per cent are free. Standalone paid products remain rare. Only one in six publishers features a newsletter above the fold on its homepage, while almost half show readers no content sample before asking them to subscribe.

Enterprise publishers still mostly use email as a pipe back to the website. Meanwhile, Substack and the wider newsletter creator economy have demonstrated that the email itself can be the premium product.

You can also browse all 859 newsletters in our explorer, including their topics, cadence, send days, access models and signup flows. Click around, I promise it is more interesting than a database of 859 newsletters has any obvious right to be.

The research was sponsored by FatChilli, they are the reason we could make it available for free. They will run a practical newsletter masterclass this autumn covering strategy, editorial choices, audience growth and technology. You can still register your interest here.

Media is investable, I have two biased sources

(by Peter)

MDIF and I have had a long relationship across a great many things. As usual, this is both a disclaimer and a brag. It also means I never feel like the ideal messenger for MDIF-related news.

Still, its 2025 Year in Review is worth a look.

At the end of 2025, MDIF managed $119 million across 56 companies in 31 countries. During the year, it made $9.7 million in cash investments, added six companies, collected $1.4 million in interest, dividends and capital gains, and recovered $1.53 million in principal. Five companies left the portfolio after repaying in full.

The report also lets you follow five years of assets, investments, returns and portfolio changes. Rather than venture-capital fireworks, consider this evidence that patient, flexible capital can move through independent media and come back.

Media is investable.

If 30 successful years of MDIF do not convince you, please wait for our Capital Stacks of Journalism report, launching on 29 September. I am currently spending most of my waking hours writing it, thinking about it and moving design elements by three millimetres. I am biased about this one too, but it will still be excellent.

Gambling might finance even more journalism

(by María)

Prediction markets (~gambling) have spent the past year moving deeper into mainstream media. Eventual is a new publication built specifically around them. Founded by Alex Keeney, who previously wrote and produced podcast about the sector, the outlet publishes daily articles, free and paid newsletters and a twice-weekly live show. Polymarket is its exclusive data partner and launch sponsor. The company plans initially to rely on advertising and sponsorships before adding enterprise data products.

The venture shows a wider opening for information businesses around prediction markets.

Platforms have already found reasons to work with established media. Kalshi and Polymarket have already brought their data into established news products through partnerships with CNN, CNBC, Yahoo Finance and Dow Jones. Those arrangements put prediction-market prices in front of much larger audiences while associating the platforms with major media brands. Regular reporting takes a bet beyond the trading screen: it explains why the odds are moving and turns an isolated wager into a story audiences can follow. Eventual is building an entire publication around that work.

But the commercial opening extends beyond attracting audiences and doing promo work for these betting platform.

Information becomes especially valuable when it helps someone make money or avoid a loss, creating demand for research, data and analysis. Financial markets have long rewarded people who understand a company’s performance or anticipate a regulatory decision before either is fully reflected in prices.

Prediction markets extend the same mechanism to elections, appointments, court rulings, speeches, conflicts and other events that can be made tradable. They turn information asymmetries and/or judgment into positions that can pay. Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour has described the ambition as making any difference of opinion tradable. Publications, intelligence services and market tools can sell research, data or analysis to traders, funds and companies trying to sharpen their estimate of an outcome. Journalism can also give them that edge.

The morality of this, of course, is very complicated. A White House teleprompter operator reportedly made more than $100,000 on Kalshi betting on words from Donald Trump speeches he knew in advance through his job.

As more events become tradable, more information acquires commercial value. Media and other information ventures, journalism included, have an opportunity to capture some of this, but they need to navigate some very thorny ethical dilemmas.

What maturity looks like for independent local news

(by María)

LION Publishers has turned data from its Sustainability Audit into a public dashboard containing 480 completed audits from 438 independent news businesses in the US and Canada. It brings together self-reported figures on revenue, cash, audiences, staffing and operating practices, allowing users to compare different parts of the sector.

The framework assigns each result to one of four stages: Preparing reflects foundational work (12%); Building, the formalization of operations (62%); Growing, greater viability and expansion (24%); and Sustaining, the capacity to absorb disruption and plan beyond immediate survival (2%).

The figures below show where those differences appear.

Financial position and audience size

Annual revenue rises at every stage, but cash on hand climbs more steeply. The later groups appear to have a larger buffer against payment delays or a weak quarter. Since these are separate medians and do not count for expenditure, they suggest stronger liquidity rather than runway.

On the audience side, web reach outpaces revenue growth in the first two comparisons. Between Growing and Sustaining, both increase at nearly the same rate. Newsletter lists expand more steadily throughout.

Staffing outside the newsroom

Non-editorial capacity expands selectively. Operations staffing remains limited, while tech/product reaches a median of one person and stays there. Revenue is the only support function that gains depth at each stage. The pattern is consistent with commercial work moving from shared responsibility to a dedicated team, without creating a large back office.

Internal systems and audience insight

Most of the measured practices are already common by the Growing stage. Tracking loyal users is the exception, becoming widespread only in Sustaining. What sets the final group apart is this knowledge of who returns and how those relationships may translate into financial support, rather than another internal process.

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 28 active calls (4 new), with the largest at the top:

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Since then, Sebastian has served as a kind of gateway drug to audience revenue for a great many people in Europe. Steady has become one of the most important membership platforms in Germany, particularly for individual creators and smaller independent newsrooms. And Sebastian has c…

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This week on Media Finance Monitor

• Eleven ideas of what news is worth to the EU

• 25 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

Exactly a year ago, to the day, the European Commission published its proposal for AgoraEU, the €8.6 billion programme meant to fund culture, media and civil society under the EU’s 2028–2034 budget. Since then the text has been through several rounds of member state surgery in the Council and a draft report in the Parliament. Now the amendment stage has arrived: 1,544 amendments from MEPs, of which 372 touch media and journalism (at least according to our count), adding up to eleven distinct visions of the programme’s architecture.

In this piece, we’ll walk you through the most important amendments and what they mean for the future of media funding in Europe and introduce the MEPs who would cut all funding from media in the next EU budget.

The zero-sum game, now in writing

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After being pushed off screen, she did not disappear. Instead, she built a successful audience-funded interview show on Patreon: long-form, public-interest conversations with some of Hungary’s most important cultural figures, from across the political spectrum, paid for by a loyal community of viewers. This is exactly the sort of thing that sounds impossi…

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This week on Media Finance Monitor

• What are we good for?

• What your open rate, conversion rate, and price should actually be

• Local news is routine, but not automatic

• 24 active calls (2 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 are we good for?

(by Peter)

A few years ago, I found myself at breakfast in a Brussels hotel during yet another two-day media funding event. You know the type: name badges, aggressively burgundy carpets, and people trying to solve the world’s wicked problems from panels and PowerPoint decks.

Suddenly a reasonably successful media investor sat down next to me. I introduced myself, and over dry scrambled eggs and soggy bacon, we started talking about public subsidies, private capital, and how to get more resources into public interest journalism.

At some point he told me to stop trying to prove journalism’s “societal” value. Go down that road, he said, and you’ll lose: some of the value is self-evident, and the rest is a fight you can’t win.

He was half right.

He had a point about the fight: set journalism against malaria nets in an aid budget and you will lose most days, and probably you should. But I think he was wrong that the value is self-evident. It is not evident to most funders, investors, to the audience and, if we’re honest, not always to ourselves. We need to understand what journalism is for, and not only when we’re asking someone for money.

Which is why I believe The Value of Journalism study (by Mel Bunce and Beth Pearson) is so important. It does the unglamorous work of gathering the evidence, and grew out of the research working group of the Media Viability Manifesto, where some of us spent last year arguing that the sector had to get better at demonstrating exactly this.

The strand I care about most is journalism as an economic enabler. The report presents evidence showing every dollar spent on journalism can return more than a hundred in recovered funds, better public services and lower corruption. A decline in press freedom tracks a one-to-two per cent fall in real GDP growth. In Uganda, publishing school budgets in local papers raised the share of funds actually reaching schools from 13 per cent to 80 per cent. None of this is self-evident, it had to be measured.

This is, of course, not going to change the minds of people who think “media freedom” is what happens when they personally own all the television channels. But there is a large and important group of decision makers who are neither hostile nor fully convinced. They have watched the business model collapse, platforms extract value, creators build direct relationships with audiences, AI take over search, and public trust in institutions weaken. They are asking legitimate questions. Is journalism still a business? Where is there market failure? What should philanthropy fund? Where can private capital help? When are public subsidies justified? And, perhaps most uncomfortably, are we trying to save something because it is valuable, or because we used to value it?

We really shouldn’t dismiss these questions and I think the report gets us a little closer to some of the answers.

Evidence of value is one argument; what to do with it is another. Reflecting on another, more recent media funding summit in Brussels (I swear these are like waffle kiosks in that city) Leonard Novy wrote about how newsrooms, and perhaps the wider sector needs to move from fundable to investable. It’s a great line, in large part because in 5 words it describes a process so painful and complex that many newsrooms don’t even attempt it.

Moving from fundable to investable means rebuilding almost everything about how an organisation runs, including the editorial side, which was never a separate thing. The durable ventures will be the ones that manage it, and most people underestimate how much of a retooling this actually requires.

A new brief titled Private Capital Mobilisation in Support of Media (by Clare Cook, Ole Dahl Rasmussen and Giordano Zambelli) maps that terrain.

It opens with two full pages of acronyms, which may frighten off the faint-hearted, but push past them: what follows is very useful. The brief works at two levels at once. It handles the macro, systems-level questions, how you build a market where one barely exists, while staying concrete about specific actors, specific instruments.

For a policy crowd, I think the value is in the comparisons. The brief looks at how agriculture and off-grid energy built their financing landscapes over two decades, pipeline-building, guarantees, sequenced capital, patient concessional money, and asks what transfers to media and what doesn’t. The honest answer is: less than you’d hope, but not nothing.

For an operator, it’s a different kind of useful. If you run a small independent newsroom and you’ve started wondering what investment might even look like, who invests, through which instruments, and you don’t already live in the world of impact finance, all of it sounds alien. This is as good a starting point as any, and there aren’t many starting points. And if you want to go deeper, get Aunnie Patton Power’s Adventure Finance, it is the clearest guide I know to how these instruments actually work.

Taken together, the two reports point in the same direction. We need better evidence about what journalism is good for, and better financial machinery to support the parts of journalism and media infrastructure that markets alone will not sustain.

What your open rate, conversion rate, and price should actually be

(by María)

In a first-birthday post for his Substack, Derek Thompson noted the newsletter had nearly 110,000 subscribers and a paid conversion rate of around 5.5%. He did not disclose his income, but said it had surpassed his former Atlantic salary after about five months and kept growing.

Thompson is an excellent and well known reporter. He is the ceiling, which is very useful to see, but the floor and the middle are where most of this market exists.

Beehiiv’s State of Paid Newsletters 2026 offers a wider view. Paid subscription revenue on the platform grew from $8 million in 2024 to $19 million in 2025, with $35 million projected by the end of 2026. The share of revenue-generating users earning through paid subscriptions doubled, from 15% in Q1 2024 to 30% in Q1 2026.

• Pricing has a stable midpoint, but the range varies by niche. The median paid newsletter charges $10/month or $100/year, unchanged from 2024. Investing sits at the high ($27/month, $292/year); Travel sits at the low end ($7/month, $80/year).

• Conversion rates are low at the median, but much higher at the top. The median free-to-paid conversion rate is 0.62% (about six paying subscribers per thousand free ones). Investing converts at 0.84% at the median and 18.69% for the top 10%; Finance at 0.78% and 20%. Sports has the highest median at 1.93%, but the sample size is relatively small.

• Retention changes what each paid subscriber is worth. Estimated lifetime runs from about six months for Money to nearly 20 months for Food & Drink, with News close behind at around 18 months. Monthly churn moves in the opposite direction, from 16.67% in Money down to 5.06% in Food & Drink. Median LTV ranges from $83 in Community to $230 in Investing.

• List size alone does not predict revenue. A 5,000-subscriber Investing newsletter, using median conversion and pricing, can generate roughly $13,600 a year. The same-size Travel list, at its median conversion and pricing, generates about $1,260.

Despite how well independents are doing, our review of 859 newsletters from 32 enterprise publishers across 10 European countries found enterprise publishers still underuse the format.

On an ever so slightly related note: we are the #10 newsletter on Substack in Hungary. We are not sure what this means, but◝(ᵔᗜᵔ)◜

Local news is routine, but not automatic

(by María)

A recent study from the Media Insight Project looks at how Americans across age groups get informed. It is based on a nationally representative poll of 1,009 teenagers ages 13-17 and 1,092 adults. The main frame is generational, but the section on local news includes findings worth a closer look.

• Local outlets still lead, but they are part of a wider information mix. Sixty-five percent get local news and information from them often or sometimes. But 58% get it from people they know personally, 33% from local creators or influencers, and 29% from community organizations. For publishers, the information market extends beyond newsrooms.

• The most followed topics are practical and repeatable. Weather or traffic leads overall, at 65%, followed by crime and public safety, 49%, and government or politics close to home, 39%. These are everyday information needs, the kind that can bring people back to alerts, newsletters, guides or other service formats.

• Regular use does not mean high marks. Local outlets are present in people’s information habits, yet the top-box ratings are modest: 27% say they do extremely or very well at covering important community issues, 24% at verifying facts, and 23% at being transparent. That presence can create openings, but durable revenue depends on becoming a source audiences value enough to return to, recommend or support.

Daily utility can open the door. The harder task is becoming distinct and trusted enough to be the go-to source people rely on, and turning that position into something they will pay for.

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 24 active calls (2 new), with the largest at the top:

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This work happened through MDIF’s Amplify Europe programme and it sits alongside an investment Pluralis (an MDIF managed fund) has since made in HotNews’s parent company ZYX Publishing. That being said, neither HotNews nor MDIF sponsored this edition, it’s our own editorial production.

I asked Isa to write up the experience because I think it’s useful to understand what it took to get there in a market that keeps insisting reader revenue won’t work.

Four weeks before the launch of HotNews Premium, I was in Perugia at an aperitivo, talking with a few Romanian media people about audience revenue and publisher sustainability. I was building the audience revenue programme for HotNews, a large horizontal news publisher in Romania. While I was explaining the project, someone running a newsroom looked at me and said: “This will never work back home.”

It wasn’t the first time I had heard that. Over the year I spent building the project, that sentence was the first argument I had to overcome in both internal and external conversations. I understood where it came from.

The subscription culture that exists in parts of Western and Central Europe or the US does not have the same foundation here. Before HotNews Premium, no large generalist news publisher in Romania had built a digital subscription product around its journalism. There was no obvious local precedent to point to and say: this is what success looks like.

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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Audience revenue does exist, but in a very specific form. Romania has a 3.5% fiscal facility, which allows taxpayers to redirect part of their income tax to an NGO of their choosing. The outlet that has mastered this is Recorder, the investigative publication where I started my career. Tens of thousands of people fill out forms each year to redirect taxes toward their journalism. In 2024, that mechanism helped them raise over 1.1 million euros, plus another 290k through the corporate profit tax donation. That is nearly 60% of their total revenue for the year.

Those numbers are impressive, but they are not the norm. The system creates a winner-takes-all dynamic, with a few strong players capturing most of the money and the rest left with small amounts. It also creates a particular kind of support habit. People who care about journalism are used to helping by redirecting money that would otherwise go to the state, not necessarily by taking out their card and paying from their own pocket every month. It is a form of voluntary support, but it is not the same as a subscription habit.

Outside that mechanism, the donation market is thin and in the for-profit part of the sector, audience revenue is even thinner.

At the same time, advertising is still a real business in Romania. Television captures around 50% of all advertising spend, but digital advertising remains vibrant, and some of the money that historically went to television is still moving online. For a publisher like HotNews, advertising is not a declining legacy revenue stream kept alive out of nostalgia, it still pays the bills.

In 2025, HotNews recorded total revenues of 3.5 million euros, with 94% coming from advertising, 4% from copyright licensing, and 2% from grants. We were operating at a 17% EBITDA margin.

That also changes the incentives. If there is still meaningful money to be made from digital advertising, the case for audience revenue becomes more complicated. A membership or subscription product can introduce questions about reach, product friction, advertising inventory, editorial priorities, and how commercial partners will react. When advertising is collapsing, experimenting with reader revenue is easier to justify. When advertising is still generating significant income, the internal question becomes: why risk disturbing something that works?

So the scepticism was rational.

What made HotNews’s case different, and unusual in a global context, was that we weren’t doing this under pressure. It was an intentional management decision to explore audience revenue before it became existential. That gave us room to think, to test, and to be wrong in controlled ways. But it also raised the stakes: in a crisis, experimentation is easy to defend because doing nothing is obviously worse. In our case, there was something to lose. That meant the project had to be ambitious enough to matter, but careful enough not to damage a business that was already working.

I came to HotNews as Head of Data and Research after a master’s at The London School of Economics, where I focused on the impact of audience revenue programmes on the journalism that publishers produce. The subscription project became mine to build.

We started with an audience survey, mapping the habits and spending behaviour of HotNews’s most loyal users. At the same time, we started to think about the necessary tech and after months of vendor evaluation, we landed on Piano for paywall and related infrastructure. We launched author-driven newsletters, grew them, and planned to gradually move them behind the paywall.

The HotNews Premium we landed on is a freemium model where, in addition to exclusive content, subscribers get access to all newsletter editions, priority in the comments section, a 40% discount for books purchased from our partner, and, for annual subscribers, access to The New York Times.

A little bit about the NYT deal:

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This week on Media Finance Monitor

• Society pays for what helps society. People pay for what helps them.

• The drive to hold AI companies accountable is gaining ground

• What local news audiences actually pay for

• 24 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

Society pays for what helps society. People pay for what helps them.

(by Peter)

I’m in Vilnius this week for GlobalFact, talking to fact-checkers and the information-integrity crowd about money. Telling people about platforms cutting support, philanthropy shifting priorities, public money being political, and the “market” being very hard makes for really cheerful conversations. I can highly recommend it.

My title was: “Society pays for what helps society. People pay for what helps them.”

I think most of the information-integrity world lives somewhere between those two sentences and would rather not choose. I understand the reluctance.

The value of fact-checking, anti-disinformation work, and media literacy is real but diffuse. Improving the information environment benefits society in the aggregate. This is valuable but really hard to bill for. The broader and fuzzier the benefit, the harder it is to get any single person to pay for it.

This is the classic public-good/market-failure problem. When markets fail, usually the public sector or philanthropy steps in. For years, there was an elite consensus around the value of this work, which helped sustain public subsidies, philanthropic money, and platform support. In many contexts, that consensus has now cracked.

So my pitch was to take the other route seriously. If you want individuals, companies, or institutions to pay you, you need to solve a problem concrete enough, urgent enough, and useful enough that someone reaches for a card. Not “support democracy.” A patient deciding whether to take a drug, a small business trying not to get scammed, a pharmacist fielding the same misinformation twenty times a week.

The new Reuters Institute Digital News Report arrived just as I was writing the speech, and proceeded to support my argument almost suspiciously well.

(I will allow myself a tiny bit of tasteful bragging here. Jim Egan, the new lead author of the report, was generous enough to tolerate some of my unsolicited advice while the questionnaire was being developed, especially around what the survey might usefully ask on payment and motivation. I am very good at giving unsolicited advice, as friends, family, colleagues, restaurant waiters, and most recently several confused staff members at Warsaw airport can confirm. I’d like to claim credit and will settle for proximity.)

Among people who pay for online news, 81% say direct benefits are at least part of their reason for paying. Almost half also mention values-based motivations, such as supporting journalism because it matters to society, but the hierarchy is clear: a lot more people pay because the product helps them directly than because journalism is good for everyone.

This is not some depressing finding about human nature. People can care about society and still need a personal reason to take out the credit card.

For information-integrity, this is uncomfortable because the field has often been built around the opposite logic. The work is packaged for funders, platforms, policymakers, and society in the abstract. Less often is it packaged for a specific user with a recurring problem and a reason to pay.

The DNR also shows how fast the competitive landscape is changing. Among online news payers, 56% report paying a traditional news organization, 23% pay a digital-only outlet, and 15% pay an individual.

That gap between digital-only outlets and individuals is not very large, which is a very large structural problem for institutions.

Even digital-only news organizations have editors, managers, finance teams, product people, lawyers, systems, meetings, and at least one person whose job appears to involve walking slowly between rooms with a laptop and a reusable water bottle.

A creator may be one person, or a tiny team with a newsletter, podcast, YouTube channel, and direct payment relationship with an audience. If the revenue lines are becoming even vaguely comparable while the cost structures remain wildly different, the economics will become increasingly difficult for institutions.

Which brings me to how people pay, where the report and our own Capital Stacks of Journalism research point in the same direction. (I’ll say as little as possible about Capital Stacks, partly because it isn’t finished and partly out of superstition.)

Across the payment modalities, pure voluntary donation, where you get nothing in return but the warm feeling of having supported the cause, is consistently the smallest category, a minority habit even in the market where it runs highest.

That matches what we’re seeing across the European publishers in Capital Stacks: audience revenue is the center of gravity, and the overwhelming majority gate something. Of roughly twenty outlets, perhaps two or three live on voluntary donations alone, and two of those are quietly building an exclusive product. Voluntary support is the model organizations aspire to escape, not the one they build toward.

That is also difficult for the information-integrity space, where gating content or creating exclusivity still feels alien to most operators.

So this is the uncomfortable place I left the fact-checkers of Vilnius. If your public funding is secure, defend it and serve the public. That is a gift; use it well. But if it isn’t, and for much of this field it visibly is not, then wanting market revenue without changing how you operate is not a realistic strategy.

The drive to hold AI companies accountable is gaining ground

(by María)

Publishers are trying to take a more active role in setting the conditions under which AI companies use their work. SPUR, a coalition created to develop standards and licensing frameworks around usage rights, shows how quickly that push is becoming more structured. Launched in late February by the BBC, Financial Times, Guardian, Sky News and Telegraph Media Group, it recently announced 30 new members and released draft specifications for reporting content-use events.

Others are also thinking about the usage-compensation problem. In Harvard Business Review, economist E. Glen Weyl and computer scientist Raul Castro Fernandez propose a collective royalty-style system built on two datasets AI companies already produce during model training: the data mixture (which tracks how sources are blended and reveals the relative value of each) and scaling laws (empirical estimates of how performance responds to additional data and compute). They argue those inputs are enough to price content, making the objection that paying large numbers of rights holders would be too complex overstated.

But those efforts address only one side of the debate. The other begins when AI systems turn source material into something of their own: outputs that may go beyond, or contradict, what the originals actually say. At that point, the question is who bears responsibility for the result. A preliminary ruling in Germany gives an early indication of how it can be answered.

In a dispute over false accusations in Google AI Overviews, the Munich Regional Court found the company liable for the content the feature generated as the damaging claims in the summary did not appear in the cited sources, weakening Google’s argument that it was only directing users to third-party material. The court treated the difference between retrieving and generating as legally significant: ordinary search surfaces links; an AI Overview produces something new. That was enough in this case to exclude Google from the protections available to hosting providers, including the Digital Services Act’s safe harbours.

What local news audiences actually pay for

(by María)

When a U.S. local daily opened its records to researchers Gregory J. Martin, Shoshana Vasserman, and Cameron Pfiffer, they gained access to four years of data that captured which stories people clicked and which ones led them to subscribe. The dataset included 1.2 billion user sessions, 605 million article visits, and more than 55 million individual paywall events.

Depending on the metric, reader demand looked different. Sports, entertainment and syndicated columns tended to draw traffic. Public health, local politics and economics (the kinds of coverage typically described as hard news) tended to generate subscription value. The average local news article generated roughly twice as much subscription value as the average entertainment piece.

Martin, lead author of the paper, told Nieman Lab: “Willingness to pay in attention is really different than willingness to pay in dollars”. A click can mean interest, habit, distraction or just a good headline. A paywall conversion signals a stronger commitment: money behind the decision to keep reading. Traffic shows what draws attention; subscription value shows what turns some readers into subscribers. Both matter, but they measure different things. Treat them as interchangeable, and the picture can be misleading.

At this newspaper, the most popular stories often drew casual visitors, the group least likely to subscribe, so more clicks did not necessarily mean more subscriptions. The choice of metric also has strategic implications: had it optimized for traffic, it would have expanded entertainment and cut local news. Optimized for subscription revenue, the opposite.

That data also revealed how individual behavior shifted depending on access. Before subscribing, when the paywall limited how much users could read, they were more likely to devote that scarce access to civic coverage. Once the limit disappeared, entertainment and columns took up more of the extra time. Civic coverage was diluted, but did not disappear from the mix.

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 24 active calls (3 new), with the largest at the top:

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