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 reshaping how content is produced, distributed and consumed all over the world, but most groundbreaking investigations still come out of newsrooms rather than solo accounts. Safety, standards, fairness and shared knowledge matter.
Milo had another story. Raising money for an audience-funded project in Austria, where digital reader revenue is still a novel idea, he had been told by a veteran executive:
“I don’t believe in audience revenue.”
We both frowned at that one. Audience revenue is not a belief. It exists. It works, market after market: not easily, not for everyone, but reliably enough to have a formula.
People with resources are often curious about journalism and well-intentioned toward it. Then the money goes to climate, technology or social impact. Journalism, they tell us, is hard to understand, and it has the reputation of a bottomless bucket. The sector is partly to blame. Two decades of platform disruption and political interference taught publishers to tell a story of hardship. That may be a fine story for a grant application, but it is a toxic one for an investor.
It was Milo who said we had to do something about it. The one-line description we have used ever since is that “investing in journalism is not always like setting your money on fire.” Sometimes it is. But not always, and we thought the “not always” could use some evidence.
So from the end of 2025 to autumn of 2026 we looked at more than thirty ventures launched across Europe in between 2008 and 2021 and settled on twenty-one: newsrooms, publishers, information ventures, call them what you like, that got together, built something and became viable, sustainable and in several cases rather profitable. Capital Stacks of Journalism tells their stories.
We are not fundraising for anything, and we are not promoting the twenty-one, though an investor could do worse than start there. We want to crowd more capital into the ecosystem and, along the way, show operators how others have done it.
Underneath it all is a very short argument: journalism still matters, businesses can be built to produce it and what can be built can be invested in.