In 2025 the two of us shared a stage at the Impact Days in Vienna, on a panel about funding journalism. Afterwards, someone from the audience who did a little investing came over with a confession: they had never thought of journalism as something that costs money.
“Nowadays you sit down with a laptop, write the text, press publish, and that’s it.”
They were not wrong: the cost of producing content had really collapsed even before the advent of generative AI. But they were not right either. Publishing may be almost free, but building an institution that publishes with standards, lawyers, editors and enough stability to sustain a two-year investigation still takes capital. Or at least it has for at least the past fifteen years, whatever the next fifteen bring.
We should say plainly that we still believe in those journalistic institutions, and the Capital Stacks of Journalism project is about them. Creators are doing some of the most exciting public-interest journalism around and are resha…