Strategy for the sector that never had a Golden Age
We worked with 50 publishers this year. Here is what we learned.
Independent, digital media has probably never enjoyed a true golden age.
There were moments of promise, scattered waves of optimism, and periods when new technologies or funders unlocked brief surges of growth. But the deeper reality, especially for small and medium-sized outlets, has always been shaped by fragility, dependence, and constant improvisation. Sustainability was more aspiration than norm, and many of the organizations that survived did so through a combination of mission-driven stubbornness, creative patchwork funding, and sometimes an ability to adapt faster than their larger, slower peers.
Even against that backdrop, 2025 brought a colder, starker reality.
Much of the institutional funding that supported public-interest journalism over the past decade is being reorganized and often reduced. U.S. government-backed media programs have disappeared. European funding is mostly stable but no meaningful growth in sight before 2028. Emerging funders are moving slowly, cautiously, and often without clear strategy or long-term commitments.
The commercial alternatives haven’t miraculously become easier, either.
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Advertising was always a steep climb for this part of the sector, partly because the math of the open web demands the kind of scale independent outlets rarely possess, and partly because many simply didn’t view it as an ethical revenue stream. Necessity is now changing minds on the ethics, but the economics remain brutal.
For a long time, audience revenue was the best bet and arguably, it still is. We saw outlets in this small-to-medium space leverage it to build genuine stability. But let’s not pretend it was ever easy; building a robust membership or subscription program requires tech, strategy, and above all, people. And those people tend to be on the expensive side.
Given this backdrop, the historic difficulty compounded by the specific shocks of 2025, I will admit that I started this year in a not-so-good place. There was a heaviness to January, a sense of deep uncertainty about what was left to break. I found myself staring at spreadsheets trying to figure out which scenario is least catastrophic.
But as the year unfolded, something shifted, not in the macro conditions, which remain generally challenging, but in what we were seeing on the ground.
Our work this year with nearly 50 outlets has shown something that’s easy to miss when you only look at the macro trends: there is extraordinary resilience, creativity, and capability in this part of the media ecosystem.
The wisdom of 50 newsrooms
The range was enormous. On one end: institutional publishers with 100+ staff, dedicated editorial and product teams, sales departments, and all the organizational complexity that entails. On the other: scrappy media ventures that are essentially one or two people doing everything: writing, editing, publishing, audience development, revenue strategy, and occasionally remembering to eat.
I know all of you are awaiting our highly anticipated 2025 Activity Report with the same enthusiasm we are looking forward to eventually writing it. But until that moment of collective joy arrives, I want to focus on the collaborations that shaped the strategy guide we are releasing today.
The anchor of this work, and the reason this report exists, is the Perspectives project, coordinated by the Goethe-Institut and co-funded by the European Union. Through this program, we worked deeply with 13 independent, digital newsrooms from Central and Eastern Europe. The strategy guide we’re releasing today was produced through that collaboration, shaped by their questions, their constraints, and their experiments.
Beyond that cohort, we worked with another 35+ newsrooms through other programs or direct partnerships. While the report focuses on the findings from the Perspectives group, those insights were pressure-tested against the experiences of dozens of other publishers we supported this year. It is informed by the collective intelligence of the entire independent media ecosystem in our region.
The power of small
Large media organizations were built for an era where stability, brand scale, and institutional legitimacy were strategic assets. In today’s environment, those same characteristics often become constraints. They make experimentation slow, cultural shifts difficult, and technological adaptation expensive. They produce inertia that smaller outlets, by their very nature, don’t have.
Lean, mission-driven organizations closer to their communities can move faster and respond better to audience signals. They can rebuild trust through direct relationships. They can experiment with emerging technologies with less bureaucratic delay. That can be an incredible comparative advantage.
Small newsrooms can target specific needs rather than broad markets. They can develop niche value propositions that can’t be easily replicated. They can create clarity where larger organizations drown in complexity.
The very conditions that have destabilized the old media environment create openings for new forms of relevance and resilience.
And that is exactly what this guide tries to help with.
While it’s written primarily with small and medium-sized independent publishers in mind, my hope is that even larger newsrooms will find something useful in it, if only because the pressures reshaping the ecosystem spare no one, regardless of size.
The guide is organized into three parts.
The first section looks outward, at the shifting macro environment: the collapse of the referral economy, the rise of extraction-based distribution, the volatility of platform visibility. We argue that chasing scale is a losing battle for most, and why the future belongs to vertical focus and direct relationships.
The second section turns inward, focusing on clarity: understanding user needs, articulating a unique value proposition, and using tools like value curves to diagnose where your work genuinely stands out and where it doesn’t.
And the final section looks under the hood, at the publishing technology stack: how to choose the right systems, when to build and when to buy, how to avoid the traps that drain capacity, and how to match your CMS and workflow decisions to your actual strategic priorities.
Taken together, these sections form a simple scaffold: not a universal recipe, but a structured way to think about decisions that matter, especially in a year where clarity, adaptability, and focus are becoming the most important assets any newsroom can have.
Beyond scale: How media is redefining value in 2025 - Notion microsite
Beyond scale: How media is redefining value in 2025 - PDF version
Read it, use it, share it and let us know what we missed.
Our excellent colleague María Paula Ángel Benavides led the creation of this guide, structured our scattered materials, and single-handedly built out the technology section.
This guide was created as part of the Perspectives project coordinated by the Goethe-Institut and co-funded by the European Union.