Media development works
New media investment in CEE, launching a program for exile information spaces, updates on the EU budget negotiations, Meta loses an important court case in the EU and 26 active calls.
Welcome!
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)
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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.
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: