The information ecosystem cosplaying 1989 in Davos
Honesty and copium at the World Economic Forum, Google being straight about publisher compensation, outside money helping creators, a community outlet from São Paulo and 27 active calls.
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This week on Media Finance Monitor
The information ecosystem cosplaying 1989 in Davos
Refreshing honesty from Google on publisher compensation
An investor focused on Youtubers and the incomplete promise of the creator economy
Reporting São Paulo from its peripheries
27 active calls (6 new)
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The information ecosystem cosplaying 1989 in Davos
(by Peter)
In the spirit of providing you with practical, actionable information every week around journalism, the news business and the wider information ecosystem, let’s start with Davos and abstract geopolitics.
Canadian prime minister Mark Carney gave a great speech at the World Economic Forum, basically a public-service announcement for people still emotionally invested in the end of history. On his agenda:
Multilateralism, the international rules based order is over, is not “under-pressure”, it’s not coming back.
We are experiencing a rupture, great power competition is the flavor of the era.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Middle powers, he argues, can still act but only if they stop pretending that compliance will buy them safety. I hope he is right, I’m absolutely unqualified to say.
I think it was an honest, sobering speech, one that global elites needed to hear. I’m not sure they heard it though.
Ahead of Davos every year, the World Economic Forum releases its Global Risks Report in which 1000+ experts rank systemic risks for global stability. For years now, mis- and disinformation ranks insanely high, it was number one in the two-year outlook in both 2024 and 2025, and this year it still got second place ahead of state-based armed conflict, societal polarization, inequality and some other pretty important stuff.
Now, let me be clear: misinformation exists. Disinformation exists. It can do real harm. Nobody serious denies that.
But putting it near the very top of the near-term global risk hierarchy, in a year where the conversation is openly about coercion, territorial threats, great-power rivalry, and the breakdown of predictable rules I think it tells us more about the coping mechanism of Western-elites than about the fundamental nature of the polycrisis we are living.
“Misinformation” is a strangely comforting way to describe legitimacy collapse. It implies: the institutions were basically fine, the system was basically working, and then people were misled into distrusting it. In other words: it wasn’t our fault.
That’s why the misinformation frame travels so well among elites. It allows you to keep the old mental model (the world is mostly governable; multilateralism is basically intact; good policy exists; the public just needs better information) while acknowledging that something is on fire.
It’s the easiest way to keep cosplaying 1989 while using 2026 vocabulary.
It’s the old world talking to itself. It assumes the problem is a misunderstanding. That if we could just educate people better, help them see through the fog, they’d come back to the sensible center. They’d trust the institutions again.
They won’t. And not because they’ve been misled.
Many people don’t trust large institutions, governments, authorities, or legacy journalism for that matter, not because they’ve been hypnotized by some hostile algorithm, but because those institutions have failed them. To treat this as a purely “misinformation” problem is to treat a systemic collapse as a mere misunderstanding. If we want these institutions to be meaningful again, they don’t need better PR; they need fundamental reform. I believe this to be true even if, at the same time, bad actors do exploit and amplify these failures by information manipulation. But there is no reality where you media-literacy yourself out of this crisis without addressing the underlying institutional failure.
Which brings us to where the money is actually going or rather, where it isn’t.
Craig Newmark, one of the most significant private funders of journalism in the US announced this week he’s mostly stepping back from media support. I interpret his move as part of a larger trend we described a year ago: from billionaires to tech companies, from governments to the voluntary sector, many of the world’s largest institutions no longer see investing in the media and information ecosystem as a priority.
Alright, enough geopolitics. I promised practical utility, so let me deliver some before you start wondering if this newsletter has pivoted to international relations commentary.
What does any of this mean for people who actually run newsrooms or fund them?
First: the institutional funding landscape isn’t just difficult right now, it’s structurally unstable, and will remain so. Yes, there’s progress on some fronts (updates on the EU budget negotiations coming next week, I pinky promise), but if your core strategy is to find the next big institutional backer, convince Meta to care again, land a major philanthropist, secure that foundation grant, I’m not saying it’s impossible. I’m saying it’s not a sound plan for survival. The institutions that used to reliably fund this ecosystem are themselves in crisis, or reassessing, or simply looking elsewhere.
Second: it’s time to get serious about questioning what a journalism institution even is. I still believe in the value of organized, resourced newsrooms, I’ve made that case here before. But the question that matters now isn’t “how do we preserve the institutions we have?“ It’s “who is actually delivering public interest information to people, and how?“ That might be a legacy outlet that’s genuinely reformed. It might be a creator who built trust one video at a time. It might be something we haven’t seen yet. For funders, this means experimenting with backing new kinds of actors. For newsrooms, it means ruthless focus on audience needs, not the needs we assume they have, but the ones they actually show up for.
Carney told the Davos crowd to stop waiting for the old rules to reassert themselves. That advice applies for us too.
Refreshing honesty from Google on publisher compensation
(by Peter)
If you’ve been wondering where Google actually stands on paying publishers for AI training, Roxanne Carter, the company’s senior manager for government affairs and public policy, offered some clarifying testimony to the UK’s House of Lords last week.
The short version: if your content is freely available on the open web, Google does not believe it owes you a licensing fee.
When it comes to training AI models on freely available content that is available on the open web, we do not believe that we should license.
“What the AI model is trying to do is analyse huge amounts of data to identify patterns,“ Carter explained. “It is not looking to make copies. What it’s trying to do is develop new tools to then produce wholly new content.“ In other words: your journalism is training data, not a product requiring compensation, unless you’ve paywalled it or put it behind some kind of access restriction, in which case Google may talk deals.
Carter also addressed the opt-out question. Publishers can use Google Extended to block their content from being used to train Gemini and other AI development tools without losing their place in search results. That’s the good news. The less good news: this doesn’t apply to AI Overviews, the feature that synthesizes answers directly in search results using your content.
Asked directly whether publishers can opt out of AI Overviews, Carter declined to answer, saying only that “this is an issue that is live, ongoing discussion with the CMA.” Read: no, you currently cannot, and whether that changes depends on the UK competition regulator.
None of this is particularly surprising, but it’s useful to hear it stated plainly. Unlike YouTube, where creators and platform share revenue, most of the news business has no such arrangement and Google clearly has no intention of building one voluntarily. If your content is publicly accessible, they will use it. The only leverage publishers have is regulatory, and that process is moving slowly. Worth keeping in mind as you think about what’s behind your paywall and why.
An investor focused on Youtubers and the incomplete promise of the creator economy
(by Maria Paula)
In 2010, I was fifteen and spent most of my online time on Twitter. I used it as a diary, as counterintuitive as that may sound, and to connect with people who were into the same random things I was. Writing helped me sort out what was going on in my head. Because nobody there really knew who I was, it was easier to express myself. I was just talking into the void, until one day the void talked back. People replied, retweeted, stuck around. My following grew.
At first it was exciting. I felt understood, less alone. But validation began to matter too much, and I was no longer tweeting just because. I found myself thinking in 140-character blocks, checking metrics more than I would like to admit, worrying about how a line would land as if my life depended on it. I stayed in that loop until real life required more space. I went to university, had less time, and tweeting fell down my list. As I posted less, the engagement faded, and eventually the followers did too. I peaked around 21K.
I was reminded of my teenage Twitter-fame when I recently heard Derek Muller describe the pressure of keeping his Youtube channel, Veritasium alive. When everything rests on one person, small decisions like slowing down carry a cost.
Veritasium has been on since 2011 and is one of YouTube’s most successful science education channels. For a long stretch, Derek did it all alone: researching, writing, filming, editing, and handling the animations. That worked until growth changed the equation. The videos got bigger, expectations heavier, and hiring kept getting postponed because the machine had to keep moving. There are only so many hours, only so much one person can do.
Sometimes the way forward is to expand the structure instead of asking the person to stretch further. The 2023 deal with Youtube focused investor group Electrify did that. It gave Derek a chance to share the workload, take on projects that had been out of reach, and plan beyond the next upload. The funding brought breathing room, although that outcome is far from guaranteed. Peter’s writing about Task & Purpose described the opposite scenario: outside investment that raised expectations without redistributing the weight, leaving more pressure on the same person who had been carrying everything all along.
Money can reshape a project, but it rarely fixes the mismatch between what one individual can realistically sustain and what the system demands. Even with better funding and infrastructure, creators remain exposed to forces they cannot predict or control.
Content with little or no creative intention can outperform carefully crafted material, even when logic would suggest otherwise. Hank Green’s experiment made this tangible: his 12-hour white-noise video earned over $10,000 in eight months, mostly from YouTube Premium watch time. Cases like this illustrate a broader pattern: online success often reflects the murky and unstable rules of the platforms more than effort, quality, or editorial intent.
Reporting São Paulo from its peripheries
(by Maria Paula)
In large parts of the São Paulo metropolitan region, local journalism is uneven or absent, and information often circulates through informal channels. Agência Mural emerged in this context. Founded in 2010, it operates as a nonprofit local newsroom focused on low-income neighborhoods in the city’s peripheries. Today, its reporting relies on a network of around 70 correspondents who live in the areas they cover, supported by a core team of 13 full-time staff. In a recent interview for DW Akademie’s Survive and Thrive podcast, executive director Izabela Moi sums up the stakes simply: “When information doesn’t exist, it disengages you from reality.” This idea guides the newsroom’s daily practice.
Coverage is built on staying in place rather than parachuting in. Reporting begins with everyday concerns voiced by residents, while official data and government responses are incorporated later for verification and context. Work develops over time around long-term issuesrather than isolated incidents.
Violence and corporate publicity are excluded from the editorial line. Routine crime coverage is omitted, as mainstream media already concentrates heavily on these narratives. Content centered on institutional or corporate good deeds is also excluded.
Public information is reshaped for local use. Mural works with data that exists but is often hard to access and navigate, publishing election candidate records, climate-impact databases by territory, and breakdowns of public spending. Materials are designed primarily for mobile, where around 90% of the audience accesses information.
Correspondent training is integrated into the newsroom’s work. Each year, around 30 residents are selected for a six-month training period. They learn editorial standards while actively producing stories, then either continue as correspondents or move on to other outlets. Over 15 years, around 700 people have taken part.
Funding that builds connection. Even when grants remain the main source of income, donations, crowdfunding, textbook syndication, and small community-facing initiatives are highly valued for the links they create with residents, and were described to us as impact more than a business model.
This last piece is part of a series focusing on local and community journalism and is supported by the LimeNet project and the European Union.
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