I want your money

End-of-year appeals often come wrapped in sentiment about the importance of independent journalism and the state of democracy. I’ll skip that part.

I want your money.

That’s the pitch.

End-of-year appeals often come wrapped in sentiment about the importance of independent journalism and the state of democracy. I’ll skip that part.

If you want to support independent media as a matter of principle, go find a newsroom in your own context and give them money. That’s an absolutely great thing to do.

But I’m not asking you to support us because of an abstract ideal. I’m asking you to pay for this newsletter because it’s useful to you.

We’re a small organization, six and a half people, mostly in Budapest, a little bit scattered across Europe. We spend our days working on media sustainability: consulting with publishers, advising funders, building databases, running programs, doing research, occasionally engaging in voodoo magic with a lock of hair from someone at EACEA and a budget spreadsheet.

The newsletter started closer to a vanity project. I spent most of my career writing every day as a reporter, then less as an editor, then hardly at all as an executive. I missed it. Writing this newsletter scratched that itch, finding an angle, spreading some gossip, occasionally making someone mildly annoyed.

This year, it became something more.

It’s still less than 5% of our revenues, but it’s growing both in terms of reach, income, and the time our team (mostly Maria and I) actually invest. And we are planning to do even more next year.

Here’s what I believe this newsletter does: it helps you understand how money flows through the media ecosystem, who the actors are, what their incentives look like, where the opportunities sit and where the traps are.

If you work in media, in a newsroom, a foundation, a platform, or somewhere in the policy world, this stuff can be difficult to track. The funding landscape is fragmented, the business models are shifting and EU machinery is opaque and complicated. We try to make it less so.

If you open these editions and learn something new about institutional funding, audience revenues, or commercial partnerships, if this helps you make better decisions for yourself or your organization, that’s exactly the value exchange I’m proposing.

From this edition forward, almost every issue will have a paywall at some point.

We experimented in the second half of the year, roughly every other edition had paywalled content. Now we’re making it consistent.

I’ll still aim to deliver something useful before the barrier. If you genuinely can’t afford to pay, you’ll still get some value. But most of my work involves telling newsrooms to create products people value enough to pay for and then to actually ask for that money.

It would be dissonant to exempt ourselves. So we’re not.

We have a hair under 2,000 free subscribers. As of Wednesday night, 96 people/organizations pay.

(It was 98. Then a few weeks ago someone at a conference said they’d subscribe and help push us to 100. They didn’t. There was churn. Welcome to media economics.)

This is also a test.

I think what we’re building is valuable. The feedback suggests it is. But the real test is whether people will pay for it. If they do, we’ll invest more, get better, and make this a proper pillar of what we do. If they don’t, that’s useful information too.

If the newsletter shows you what we’re good at, the Partnership Program is how you go deeper.

For €440 per year, you get a monthly consultation slot, first come, first served, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. You can talk to me or my colleagues about audience revenue, commercial partnerships, the publishing technology stack, EU funding opportunities, or whatever you need. You also get access to some of our internal databases and a guaranteed invitation to our online events.

We welcomed our 20th “partner” this Tuesday.

I originally thought this would be a way to support our EU-level advocacy work. Instead, most partners joined because they wanted regular access to expertise on their own revenue challenges. So we’ve invested accordingly, recently hired someone to help me run it, and are planning more courses and resources for next year.

If you’re looking for deeper, hands-on work, a five-year revenue strategy, a full product rollout, or a grant application written with you, we’re happy to talk about that separately as bespoke consultancy.

One session a month won’t get you those things.

What it does get you is regular access to people who spend all day thinking about media sustainability, how revenue models actually work, where funding realistically comes from, and what tends to fail quietly or spectacularly.

It’s enough to stress-test your ideas, unblock stuck decisions, sanity-check plans before you invest time and money, and avoid some very common (and expensive) mistakes.

I’m told it’s useful. Maybe we’ll eventually get testimonials.

There is no Christmas discount.

We’re raising prices significantly in January, for both the subscription tier and the partnership program. If you’ve been considering either, I promise subscribing now will feel like a discount in two weeks.

There’s a reason I’m framing this as a value exchange rather than a cause.

The best way to build something genuinely useful isn’t to ask for support and hope you’re doing good work. It’s to ask for money, listen to what people actually need, and optimize for that. The financial feedback loop makes you better at serving your audience. That’s what I tell publishers. It would be strange not to apply it to ourselves.

So: if this newsletter is useful to you, subscribe. If you want to go deeper, join the partnership program. If it’s not useful, don’t, and maybe tell us why.

That’s the honest ask.

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

CREA - Journalism Partnerships Pluralism

• Who: European Commission

• How much: Up to EUR 2,500,000

• What is it for: Funding local, regional, and investigative media strengthening democracy

• How long: Up to 24 months

• Deadline: February 4th, 2026

• Eligible countries: EU member states, including overseas countries and territories, and non-EU countries associated to the Creative Europe Programme.

CREA - Journalism Partnerships Collaboration

• Who: European Commission

• How much: Up to EUR 2,000,000

• What is it for: Support collaborative projects boosting media sustainability, innovation, and transformation

• How long: Up to 24 months

• Deadline: February 4th, 2026

• Eligible countries: EU member states, including overseas countries and territories, and non-EU countries associated to the Creative Europe Programme.

EDMO - Accelerating the best use of technologies - NEW