The problem at the heart of Europe's journalism funding debate
The EU is about to make its biggest investment in journalism. The Commission's own data suggests it may not be enough.
For the past year and a half David and I have been talking to a lot of people from the Commission, the Parliament and elsewhere in the Brussels bubble about the next EU budget and what it should mean for journalism. Whether it’s over a truly horrible sausage roll at the Meli near Schuman or a mediocre slice of quiche at the slightly better Meli behind the Copernicus-building, we eventually get asked the same question:
How much does the sector actually need?
It’s a great question. It’s the right question. And we are increasingly convinced we’ve been answering it wrong.
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Not answering it wrong in the sense of dishonesty or carelessness. But the way the ask has been formulated, by us and by pretty much everyone else, is always in relation to the available budget. We need at least 0.15% of the MFF. We need half the Media+ envelope. We need our strand to be protected from reallocation. These are legitimate and necessary arguments to make in a negotiation. But they accept the premise that the sector’s need is proportional to the EU’s fiscal weather.
Sure, if the overall budget shrinks, we’ll likely get less. If political winds shift and independent journalism is further vilified, some programs might disappear. If audiovisual lobbies harder than news, the split changes. (We see you, movie industry. Stop it!) We keep calibrating our ask to the available supply rather than to the actual demand, and we act surprised when the final number feels inadequate.
So today, we want to try something different. In this edition we’ll
look at what the Commission’s own data says about the state of the European media industry;
hold those numbers against what’s actually on the table in the next MFF;
make the positive case for why investment in the information ecosystem works;
propose what to do about it.
Four stark figures about the state of the European media industry
A few months ago, the European Commission published the European Media Industry Outlook 2025: a cross-sector scan of Europe’s media economy that tries, in the most Commission way possible, to turn a sprawling mess of cultural, political, technological and economic crises into a series of bar charts.
It’s 168 pages, and we wouldn’t call it a pageturner. But once you strip away the technocratic language of “significant challenges“, “fragmentation“ and “competitive pressure“, what’s underneath is (for anyone working in the industry) about as close to a written fire alarm as an EU document gets.
Let’s take a closer look at four figures that we think describe the scale of the challenge facing the industry and put the money earmarked in the next MFF in context.
6.9 billion in revenue gone
That’s the baseline we’re starting from: less money in the system to pay for reporting, editing, distribution, legal risk, and all the other boring things journalism depends on.
Digital audience revenues are growing (up 52% between 2019 and 2023 from 2.5 to 3.4 billion), which is great news and an important datapoint for future program design, but these gains are nowhere close to offsetting the losses.
66% of Europeans do not spend on news
Across Europe, households spend €56.33/month on media on average, including TV, streaming, video games, books, museums, etc. News is at the absolute bottom of the media spending hierarchy with €4.17/month and 66% report not spending on news at all (Check out our interpretation of similar figures from the US in our last edition).
57,000 jobs vanished in two years
Employment across printing, publishing, radio, and television declined by 7.5% between 2021 and 2023, from 763,341 to 706,017. That’s 57,000 positions eliminated in just two years, and the EMIO notes this was already underway before COVID. Over the slightly longer view, news media employment specifically fell 4.8% between 2019 and 2023.
The media sector now has the highest labour market churn rate of any industry the EMIO report analysed: 32% over five years. And the people who do stay face deteriorating conditions: in 2022, 40% of freelance journalists reported earning less than €15,000 a year. That’s not a living wage in any EU member state we’re aware of.
Almost no one in the sector is investing in innovation
Of the top 800 companies investing in R&D in the EU, only seven are media companies. Five of those are in France. Among the world’s top 2,000 R&D investors, there are just 17 media companies total, and only three are European.
European media companies rely overwhelmingly on non-EU cloud infrastructure, non-EU AI models, non-EU ad-tech pipelines, non-EU content-discovery systems, and non-EU data analytics tools. This is not just an economic problem. After the US started banning Europeans working on information integrity last year, we explored why this dependence is dangerous for the European information ecosystem.
It’s very unlikely that Europe can regulate itself out of a technology deficit this deep. The best bet is investing our way out, but given how few companies are doing that, EU investment subsidies are clearly needed.
And yet, step back from the decline for a moment: the European news media sector still generates around €77 billion in annual revenues and employs more than 700,000 people. That is roughly the same order of magnitude as several sectors already treated as strategic industries under EU policy. Yet while defence, semiconductors, or space benefit from dedicated industrial investment programmes, journalism remains largely confined to small grant schemes.
Not the Marshall Plan for European Media
Under AgoraEU, the Media+ strand has a proposed budget of €3.2 billion over seven years. Media+ is split between “Audiovisual” (movies, video games, the rest) and “News” (us, mostly journalism). We don’t know the split yet (which is itself a problem) but let’s be generous and assume 50/50. That gives news roughly €1.6 billion over seven years, or about €230 million per year for the entire EU news media ecosystem.
Hold that against what we just described. €6.9 billion in lost revenues. 57,000 jobs gone. Near-zero R&D investment. Against that backdrop, €230 million a year is not the Marshall Plan for European media. It is, at best, seed money. Catalytic if spent well. Meaningless if spent poorly.
And it may get stretched thinner. As we covered in January, the Council’s compromise amendments explicitly name public service media among AgoraEU’s beneficiaries. PSM matters, and in several member states it produces outstanding journalism. But these are enormous institutions with corresponding absorptive capacity and their own national funding streams. The risk: member states use AgoraEU to ease pressure on their own PSM budgets, and the limited pot gets redirected from independent outlets, local newsrooms, and investigative publishers that have no other access to stable public financing.
We’re not arguing the EU should write a cheque for €6.9 billion. That’s neither realistic nor sensible. But there is by now a broad consensus that at least some of the information ecosystem functions as a public good, and markets are not great at delivering public goods. That’s where the public sector usually steps in.
Which is why AgoraEU shouldn’t be the only instrument in the conversation. The European Competitiveness Fund, a separate and much larger envelope, could finance what grant programmes cannot: R&D infrastructure, media-tech scale-ups, sovereign ad-tech, AI tooling — the things that might start closing that 3-out-of-2000 innovation gap. But news media isn’t explicitly referenced in the ECF regulatory proposal. Some will argue that doesn’t mean it’s excluded. Maybe. But as the ancient Celtic saying goes, what’s not explicitly written down in an ECF regulatory proposal might later be interpreted as an exclusion by a DG Grow project officer. Media should be named in the ECF, clearly and unambiguously, as an eligible sector.
The €1.6 billion matters enormously, but how it’s spent matters at least as much. And between the PSM expansion, the unresolved ECF question, and the sheer scale of the structural hole, the gap between what’s on offer and what the sector needs is wider than the headline numbers suggest.
The positive case for investment
But the case for investing in Europe’s information ecosystem doesn’t rest solely on the fact that the industry is in trouble, and it doesn’t end at the EU’s borders.
The United States was the anchor investor in the global information ecosystem, roughly half of all public-sector funding for media development worldwide came from Washington. That’s now approaching zero. Meanwhile, Russia and China are spending deliberately to shape information environments globally, including inside Europe. Someone will fill the vacuum. Europe can step into that role, not as strategic communication (a framing the sector is rightly uncomfortable with) but as a credible alternative to what Moscow and Beijing are offering. This is directly relevant to the Global Europe instrument, where allocations are regional rather than thematic: if media development isn’t protected in those envelopes, it will be quietly deprioritised.
Investment in media works, we have the receipts. Denník N, a digital publisher from Slovakia, just acquired EUobserver in Brussels, enabled in part by technology built in-house with seed funding from Google’s Digital News Initiative. Or Zetland in Denmark, recently acquired by Bonnier. The European media sector is not only declining, it is also producing growth stories, viable business models, and cross-border acquisitions.
A recent study by leading economists, commissioned by the Forum on Information and Democracy, put numbers to what many have argued intuitively: a pluralistic information ecosystem is not a cost centre for society. It enables economic growth, reduces fraud, improves governance. The sector doesn’t need these resources because platforms ate its business model. It needs them because the potential returns - democratic, social, technological, and economic - are enormous.
Contribute to our Media Policy Lab
If policymakers want a responsible answer to “how much does the sector need?”, it can’t be only “whatever we can squeeze into Media+.” It has to be a portfolio: a clear and protected internal news strand under AgoraEU; explicit eligibility for news media under the European Competitiveness Fund so the sector can actually invest its way out of the technology deficit; and a serious place for media development in Global Europe, because the vacuum in the international information ecosystem will be filled, one way or another.
On 18 March, we’re organizing a Media Policy Lab in Brussels (not at the Schuman Meli), in partnership with the MVM Group, the Global Forum for Media Development, EFCSN, and several other organisations. If you’re around and want to join, drop us a line, spots are very limited, but we’ll do our best to squeeze you in. And if you can’t make it but have thoughts on what the sector should be proposing (specific programmatic priorities, top-line allocations with justification, evidence of what works and why) drop us a line anyway.
As this piece hopefully makes clear, we have some figures and some arguments, but we need more: case studies, data, tangible proof points. The question of “how much do we need?” is only as strong as the evidence behind the answer, and that’s not a job any one organisation can do alone.