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 funding is highly technical, it rewards organisations that already understand the ecosystem, already sit inside consortia, already have the grant writers and the size. Often the same names win, year after year, which can be kind of annoying, especially if it’s not you. This was part of why we started the advocacy work: to make the next budget and the funding programs within it less restrictive by design. If policy is one way to lower the barrier, then the tool we are building is hopefully another.

Vibecoding for European media funding

For veteran readers this may come as something of a shock, but we work with EU funding even more than we write about it, and we write about it a lot.

We apply for it, we help our clients apply for it, we implement EU-funded projects and help others to do so. We work with funders on how to best deploy resources and, occasionally, advise European institutions on how funding programmes might work better.

Over the years this produced a patchwork of internal tools, and in 2024, for the advocacy work, a proper database of how much the EU had spent on journalism, media and the information ecosystem since 2014. That turned out to be as useful for client work and our own proposals as it was for lobbying.

Then coding tools became ambient, everyone started announcing the death of software-as-a-service, and we thought: if anyone can build software now, so can we. In May we set out to rebuild the database automatically, with a long-time friend of mine, Peter Raci, an AI data engineer at a very large software company, whom I talked into moonlighting. A closed beta went to the CSM Partnership Program in July and today we are announcing it for everyone.

EU Media Funding Explorer 0.1.1.1.0.a.1

After all this introduction, it might be a little anti-climactic, but the EU Media Funding Explorer catalogues roughly 800 EU-funded projects touching journalism, media and the wider information ecosystem from 2014 to 2026: 1,800 organisations, €900+ million in funding.

It is built on three official sources, the Financial Transparency System, the Funding & Tenders Portal and CORDIS. (One caveat up front: we consider the data complete through 2024, but none of the three sources update in real time, so for 2025 and especially 2026 there is some lag: there are projects we know about that aren’t in it yet.)

All of these databases are freely available for everyone, though they are not always the most user friendly. What we think is the added value, and what we are trying to sell you on is what we created on top, with decades of experience in EU funded projects: cleaning, reconciling and connecting the datasets, showing the relevant datapoints, identifying patterns and surfacing relationships the official databases do not contain.

Who applies with whom? What does a realistic project look like on a given stream? How much more does a coordinator take than a partner? Is a stream open or essentially sewn up?

Stream Explorer: what does applying here actually look like?

Pick a stream (Creative Europe, Horizon, CERV, the international instruments, and so on) and see the median project, the middle 50 per cent, the top 5 per cent threshold, the usual consortium size, and what leading is worth relative to joining. Journalism Partnerships opens every ~October. This is where you find out whether your ask is realistic before you write 50 pages.

Geography: who is winning in my country?

Funding by region, then by country, then the ranked list of organisations in each. The number one in Hungary is an organisation I had a leadership role in for a while; I’d like to think the two facts are related.

Players: how closed is the field?

On Creative Europe, the top ten recipients take 44 per cent of all funding. Worth knowing before you apply: it tells you whether a stream has room for newcomers, or whether your best bet is trying to become a partner to an incumbent. Concentration curve, top-10/25/50/100 shares, full leaderboard, filterable by year, region and stream.

Keywords: what does the Commission think it’s paying for?

Most projects in the source data had no themes attached, so we reconstructed them: Claude Fable (We spared no tokens!) read each project’s material against a hand-tagged example set, and we checked the results. The heatmap shows which topics got money, year by year.

Network: who runs with whom?

Every dot is an organisation, every line a shared project. Dot size is funding, a ring means they’ve led at least once, arrows point from partner to lead. Pick an organisation and the graph rearranges itself around its co-applicants. (This is the view I’m proudest of, and I’ll admit a disproportionate share of the last four months went into the animations. I can now lose five minutes dragging nodes around for no professional reason.)

Project Finder: has someone already done this?

Free-text search across every project, with filters for stream, region, country, keyword, year, consortium size and funding band. Everything opens into a detail sheet: what the project did, who was in it, who led, how the money split (flagged wherever the Commission published no breakdown and we divided it evenly), and a link to the portal page where one exists. Click any organisation for its full record: projects, streams, smallest and largest ticket, usual partners, years active.

What’s next

We are still in beta, but have a roadmap running to next May in multiple stages. Up next: open calls with excerpts, matched to the previous calls they resemble, then a partner recommendation engine, then a budgeting module.

What it costs

The Explorer is part of the CSM Partnership Program, which now costs €999 a year. That gets you twelve months of the tool and every update to it, plus a monthly one-on-one slot with me or a colleague on whatever you’re working on: funding, revenue, product, investment. We think the tool alone stands in for a few years of accumulated grant experience; the consultations, I’m told, are also worth having. Around 30 organisations are in already.

If you’re a small organisation, a local non-profit or an individual creator, write to us and we’ll find a discounted rate. If you’re a large organisation and Substack’s payment processing defeats your finance department, as it usually does, we’ll draw up a contract and you can wire the money. If you’re merely curious, there’s a guest view: one aggregated overview, everything else locked, but it should be enough to get a sense of the thing.

(Questions, comments, words of appreciation → partnership@sustainablemedia.eu)

We’ll raise the price again in three or four months, once the next stage ships, so from that perspective, you could consider the current price a discount. Our ambition, obviously, is that using the tool and the Partnership Program should be worth a lot more than the €999 it costs.

Anyway, here we are, at version 0.1.1.1.0.a.1. We think it’s good, but of course we would say that.

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.

Subscribe now

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.

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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.

Subscribe now

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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When something went wrong for journalism in Hungary over the last 16 years, you knew exactly who arranged it, why, and which state-aligned oligarch or government decree would deliver it. The global version worked the sameish way. Whenever the business of news got turned on its head somewhere, you could reliably trace it back to a trillion-dollar tech company explaining, with great patience, that it was merely a neutral platform, that it doesn’t make content, it just happens to collect most of the money your content generates.

An antagonist gives you a story, a strategy, and on some days, maybe even a sense of purpose.

The bad news we’re bringing today has no antagonist. The MEPs involved are probably well-meaning. The cultural sector is well-meaning. Civil society is well-meaning. Everyone is conscientiously advocating for their own corner, exactly as they should. But the sum of all this well-meaning self-interest is that the invisible hand is now somewhat visibly showing the finger to the journalism industry.

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

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

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

Join as a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

What the rapporteurs propose

Two editions ago we briefly covered the draft report by the two MEPs in charge of AgoraEU, Emma Rafowicz (Culture committee) and Alice Kuhnke (Civil Liberties). Having now spent more time with the text, and having compared notes with partners across the sector, the picture has not improved.

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

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

• The Motion, the Myth, the Multiannual Framework

• 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

• Microlooting the next EU budget

  ---

The headline change: journalism would get its own strand. Under the Commission’s original proposal, news support was bundled into MEDIA+ alongside the audiovisual industries, the stated logic being that movies, games and news face some overlapping structural pressures (platform dependency, AI disruption, collapsing distribution, the usual suspects). The rapporteurs propose to carve out a separate “Information and Journalism“ strand instead.

On the architecture itself, we are mostly agnostic. There are respectable technocratic arguments for both setups, and a dedicated strand has one real advantage: the money is visibly ours and harder to quietly reallocate to the next European prestige film fund. So while separation could be fine, separation with a smaller budget is not, and it seems like that is what’s on the table. Our position, shared by partners across the sector, is that a standalone strand only works with a fixed allocation of at least 20% of AgoraEU: roughly what journalism could have expected under the Commission's original architecture. The rapporteurs are proposing considerably less.

The math is going the wrong way

The Commission gave MEDIA+ €3.2 billion without specifying the split between audiovisual and news. We didn’t love the ambiguity; our proposal was 40% audiovisual, 40% news, 20% flexibility buffer, since “flexibility” is one of those Brussels magic words that, like competitiveness and security, seems to act on European officials as a powerful psychedelic, rendering them highly suggestible. If we assumed something around a 50-50 split, it would have meant roughly €1.6 billion for journalism over seven years.

The rapporteurs propose increasing the overall AgoraEU envelope from €8.6 billion to €10.7 billion, and allocating a fixed 11.7% of it to “Information and Journalism”. That’s about €1.25 billion. So: a bigger overall program, a smaller journalism share than the one implied by the Commission’s smaller original proposal. Culture and civil society allocations grow substantially, ours shrinks.

And €1.25 billion is the optimistic scenario. The Parliament can wish for a larger envelope; the member states pay for it, and the prevailing mood in the Council at any given moment is not generosity. If the final budget lands closer to the Commission’s €8.6 billion baseline, 11.7% becomes roughly €1 billion, which against the current MFF is little if any increase. When the rapporteurs’ defenders suggested in the Parliament debate that this amounts to a tenfold increase for journalism, that is, to put it gently, not a calculation we can reproduce.

For scale: by the Commission’s own estimates, EU news media revenues are running about €7 billion lower per year than in 2019. Nobody is asking the EU to backfill that hole. But if Europe’s answer to a €7-billion-a-year structural disruption is €1 billion over seven years, we should moderate our expectations about what Europe actually intends to do for its pluralistic information ecosystem.

Should a budget proposal tell newsrooms what to write about?

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

These entities have a lot to gain from newsletters and despite having the brand authority, archives…

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This week on Media Finance Monitor

• Media development works

• Launching the Newsroom Pivot Program 2026

• The journalism strand might be a demotion

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

• Two studies for local media

• 26 active calls (6 new)

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

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

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

Join as a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

Media development works

(by Peter)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Launching the Newsroom Pivot Program 2026

(by Peter)

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

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

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

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

It looks something like this:

• You come with an idea.

• We work on it together.

• You build.

• You launch within 8–12 weeks.

• You test, learn, improve, and iterate.

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

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

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

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

EU budget: The journalism strand might be a demotion

(By David & Peter)

Let’s try peak EU budget lingo:

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

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

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

Let’s stick with version two.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(by María)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two studies for local media

(by María)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Both countries are now redesigning their information ecosystems.

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

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

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

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

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

Join as a free or paid subscriber.

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Subsidized stagnation or authoritarian innovation

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

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

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

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

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

The two systems, unsurprisingly, produced very different outcomes.

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

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

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

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

Hungary’s three layers of reform

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This week on Media Finance Monitor

• The market for belonging

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

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

• How El Tímpano is monetizing trust with underserved communities

• 23 active calls (1 new)

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

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

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

Join as a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

The market for belonging

(by Peter)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(by María)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Australia tries to get platforms to pay for news, again

(by María)

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

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

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

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

How El Tímpano is monetizing trust with underserved communities

(by María)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Join as a free or paid subscriber.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is EU funding actually for?

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

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This week on Media Finance Monitor

• The toxic story journalism tells its funders

• Repression is an effective product manager

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

• What the numbers say about local news sustainability

• 26 active calls (7 new)

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

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

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

Join as a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

The toxic story journalism tells its funders

(by Peter)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Repression is an effective product manager

(by Peter)

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

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

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

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

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

Vinted CEO invests in public-interest journalism

(by María)

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

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

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

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

What the numbers say about the sustainability of local news

(by María)

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

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

  

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

  

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

  

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

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

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

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

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