Power near Perugia
Two stories about media money, access, and why the International Journalism Festival matters.
By the time this lands in your inbox, many of you will already be in Perugia. Maybe you are standing in line for a panel, or waiting for someone who is already twelve minutes late to Brufani. Either way, I’m going to keep this short.
I know some of you might find it a little too meta to read a newsletter about a journalism conference while at that journalism conference, but bear with me. I want to tell you two stories that I think describe what Perugia is actually for. One is straightforwardly good news, the other is more complicated. Don’t worry, both are about money.
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A few weeks ago I spoke with Andrey Boborykin, publisher of Ukrainska Pravda, about the publication’s recent minority investment from Pluralis, MDIF’s branded investment fund. He says it’s the first investment of its kind in Ukrainian digital media in over fifteen years, and it took roughly a year and a half from first contact to close.
(Disclosure/brag: I work with MDIF, though not on this deal, and they didn’t ask me to cover it.)
That first contact was here, in Perugia, in 2024. Boborykin emailed Harlan Mandel, MDIF’s CEO, to meet while they were both in the city. That meeting started what eventually became the Pluralis deal.
A typical investment process runs somewhere between six and eighteen months and has two main components. The first is an analysis of the past: what has the organization built, how has it performed, what is it worth? The second is a plan for the future: what will you do with the capital, do you have a credible strategy, can we agree on milestones? The valuation, the ticket size, the 100-day plan, all of it flows from how well both sides can align on those two things.
When we spoke about this, Andrey told me that for Ukrainska Pravda, the past is largely beside the point. Anything before the full-scale invasion began in 2022 belongs to a different country, almost literally. The macro changed so completely that pre-war revenue figures, advertising trends, and audience behavior are not particularly useful as a baseline. You start from 2022 and work forward.
Which is also what makes this such an extraordinary deal. This is not a media company raising capital in comfortable conditions, with stable assumptions, predictable market trends, and manageable headaches. This is a newsroom operating through a full-scale war, drone attacks, power cuts, donor volatility, and all the distortions that come with an economy and society under enormous strain. And still, they are building.
They have launched and expanded new lines of business: they built a live events business during the full-scale invasion, invested in video, and acquired and revived verticals. And now they are doubling down on audience revenue and experimenting with a paywall.
So when I hear, yet again, that paywalls are impossible in “our market”, I have to admit my patience is limited. Really? Impossible? Ukrainska Pravda is trying to make reader revenue work while operating in a country fighting for its survival. If they can experiment under those conditions, then quite a few other publishers can experiment too. That does not mean success is guaranteed, or that every market is the same. But “impossible” starts sounding less like analysis and more like an excuse. Difficulty alone is not a sufficient explanation for inaction.
The second story is less cheerful.
There is an exile newsroom I’ve been working with. I think they developed a solid product and a credible business plan. There was investor interest beyond the polite kind, and the plan was for them to come to Perugia, where we had planned a sit-down. But because exile is complicated, getting here was not something they could ultimately pull off.
The deal may still happen, and I really hope it does. We’ll set up a call, there will be other opportunities. Perugia is not a formal eligibility criterion for investment, and I do not want to overstate the point. But being here matters.
Perugia rewards a specific set of advantages. You need to be able to get here, which means money, and often a Schengen passport or visa, and the kind of organisational stability that certain newsrooms simply do not have. It also helps if you are comfortable with the slightly strange sport of professional socializing (I got bronze in Atlanta in 1996). None of that correlates neatly with having a great editorial product or a talented team. You can do extraordinary work and still be structurally locked out of the spaces where deals get made.
Which is why I want to shout out Deutsche Welle, who are bringing around forty people to the festival this year who would not otherwise have been able to come. That is a meaningful thing to do with resources, and I hope more organisations start doing it.
In any case, I won’t keep you any longer. Come to our panels today and our aperitivo on Friday. Make a deal, gossip about a colleague, drink a mezcal sour at Bar Brufani. I certainly intend to do all three.