I studied journalism innovation programmes for years, these are the patterns I found
A guest post by Giordano Zambelli who spent four delightful years of his PhD looking at what happens when public institutions inject public money into the innovation trajectory of news organizations.
The brief marriage between news organizations and digital platforms has been one the defining journalism stories of the XXI century. “We’ll give you content, you’ll give us audience reach”. For some years, both sides invested in what seemed like a pragmatically convenient fit. Until it wasn’t. Or rather, until it became clear it never really was.
Yet, despite at least ten years of growing research into how publishers could stop “building their houses on someone else’s land”, it remains unclear if publishers are actually willing to disentangle from platforms. On the contrary, some have argued convincingly that publishers may want to disentangle in principle, but in practice, they still value too much certain platform benefits: audience reach and the revenue expectations tied to it, above all. And, in fact, while the ‘disentangle-from-platforms’ discourse grows popular, many news media are already “working out how to navigate distribution through AI platforms”. First it was SEO - trying to decode the hidden logic of search rankings - then similar guesswork spread to social media feeds; now the focus in on generative language models, with what some call GEO (Generative Engine Optimization),, except this time it is evident what the downsides of chasing platform algorithms are.
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It would be too simplistic, however, and possibly naïve, to dismiss the trade-offs that most news organizations must navigate, in their relationship with platforms. Many of them are commercial companies, after all: why expect them to make radical decisions on the ground of principles? If the discussion is around principles, then it is more logical to turn to public institutions. And, in fact, over the last ten years, public institutions in many parts of the world have created support measures to help news organizations figure out concrete paths for financial sustainability, largely in response to the severe hit publishers have taken as the news ecosystem has become increasingly mediated by platforms’ algorithms. Many of these measures have been framed as ‘innovation support’. The logic is that public support could help news organizations become more sustainable by developing innovative solutions, thereby sustaining what public institutions see as essential to democracy: the provision of diverse and public-interest news.
Over the last 4 years, as part of my PhD research, I have examined what happens when public institutions inject public money into the innovation trajectory of news organizations. There’s a lot to unpack, but two bare facts are a good place to begin.
The first one: after decades in which public institutions typically refrained from directly supporting journalism innovation, the past ten years have seen a rather tangible shift to an ‘interventionist’ approach. State-funded innovation support for privately-owned news organizations was found as structurally established in seven European countries in 2022, which became nine in 2023. Most of these programmes are still active, and additional resources come from the European Commission too, for instance via journalism-focused programmes like Journalism Partnerships, but also general innovation schemes like Horizon.
The second one is about the project-based nature of these support programmes. Most of these public resources has been distributed through competitive calls, with awarded companies mandated to implement a specific project over a set period (ranging from few months to 2 years), and with a specific objective to reach, so-called deliverables. This could be seen as a neutral choice, a procedural arrangement, while it carries some important implications, that are going to be examined below.
So, what is the verdict on this wave of publicly-funded journalism innovation programmes? What has been typically subsidized? What kind of journalistic organizations benefited from it? Drawing some evidence-based conclusions is possible thanks to a series of in-depth academic research, all conducted by different researchers between 2020 and 2025, in several countries, mostly European: Belgium, Austria, Denmark, Norway, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, a comparative analysis of existing support measures and a report that was produced in 2024 for the European Commission.
The first evident common finding of this whole body of research is that these fundings have largely benefited legacy media and incumbents, with only small pieces of the cake for news startups, small players or non-profit actors. The Austrian study concludes that: “A total of €94 million was approved for funding between 2022 and 2024 for 547 individual measures. On closer examination, however, the majority of the funding can be attributed to just 25 traditional, established media groups, which are closely interlinked”. The Norwegian/German study points that “as in Germany, innovation support in Norway has been primarily directed towards protecting legacy media rather than start-ups, indicating that it serves as a protective measure to preserve external pluralism at the media systems level”. The Danish study finds that “the analysis shows that the subsidies are fairly equally distributed between new and legacy news media, but also that over the years, an increasing share of the innovation subsidies go to legacy media”. The Belgian study, which I conducted, found that the innovation projects, in that case collaborative, can “be co-opted by some actors, particularly dominant incumbents, as revenue extraction mechanisms”.
There are several reasons as to why this pattern may show up so consistently. The first is a rather practical one, and it is related to the presumably innocuous nature of these opportunities, anticipated above. Project-based work demands key pre-conditions: financial and knowledge capital. Large publishers can count on in-house grant-writing expertise, staff that can be dedicated to project management and enough financial room to absorb the self-financing requirements and cash flow availability that many calls expect. On top of that, many funded projects don’t neatly end when the funding period ends. For smaller players with limited margins, the risk is high that the project simply collapses once external funding dries up, leaving few tangible results and an exhausted team. All these elements together can act as built-in deterrents, for small players, to applying in the first place.
The second reason is subtler, but arguably more important. It has to do with the intrinsic vagueness of the concept of innovation and with how easily this vagueness gets filled with a techno-solutionist logic that large Silicon Valley companies have helped normalize as the only legitimate, if not inevitable, horizon for defining the future of journalism. As academic research consistently found, innovation in publicly-funded programmes has been typically defined in techno-centric terms: building new tech, infrastructure, and products, and only to a lesser extent investing in business, editorial or organizational development.
Put these elements together (short-term, project-based funding, often aimed at tech) and you get an advantage for already established publishers. Their organizational structures and strategic orientation make them the ideal winner of this kind of competition. If you add to the equation the close ties that these organizations tend to have with national policymakers, you start seeing a rather clear picture. At the same time, while these innovation funds are meant to help these publishers compete with platforms, ideally by differentiating, their constant confrontation with them often shapes innovation in the opposite direction, pushing strategies that end up aligning with platform logics. Think of vertical videos: a form of mimetic behaviour that should be read as a symptom of what scholars termed “media environment capture”, where the operating logics of a handful of tech companies comes to function as the default engine of the wider media ecosystem.
Innovation could, instead, be more broadly, and explicitly, defined to also appeal to other types of emerging non-incumbent actors, such as non-profit or digital-native players with a strong public-interest commitment. The innovative capacity of these actors may lay in redefining how journalism engages with the audience or tapping on alternative revenue sources that don’t need any significant investment in technology for the sake of change, something that may apply particularly to local media. Public funding for journalism innovation could, in theory, counterbalance the drift toward shiny-things that commercial actors already amplify, by “simply” offering opportunities for experimentation and wayfinding not bounded to immediate expectations of returns on investments, something I found in my own research as being highly valued by media practitioners. The focus, then, could be pulled towards the value proposition of news in relation to the informational needs of a clearly defined public. Innovation, while rhetorically appealing, has proved too ideologically loaded to serve as a reliable foundation for journalism-support policies in democratic contexts. It functioned less as a framework for sector-wide transformation than as an instrument of consolidation: a means to maintain the status quo while appearing forward-looking. The challenge is not per se to innovate within journalism but to interrogate what such innovation is for, and how its outcomes align with the diverse needs of pluralistic systems within mature democracies.
Moving to the ‘then what?’ part of this discussion is not straightforward, but at least there is currently some momentum. Some member states, like Denmark and Austria, are already revisiting their schemes, and negotiations around the budget for journalism in the next MFF (2028-2034) are moving forward. Available research doesn’t suggest that public institutions should drop innovation altogether, or ignore technological development. It suggests two things. First: if technological innovation is subsidized, it should be done in ways that reduce dependence on dominant market players and, specifically from a EU perspective, support news organizations in building real infrastructural autonomy. Second: policy definitions of innovation should be broadened explicitly beyond tech. That would allow parallel tracks, and a more diverse range of organizations competing for support. Add caps on how much any single company can receive within a funding window, plus offer structured support for smaller organizations to handle project-related burdens, and you can start correcting the tendency of these schemes to reward the already established. Ideally, you could avoid keeping alive a marriage few still want to drag. No company, after all, is better than bad company.
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