What the sector actually wants from the next EU budget
Results from our Media Funding Policy Lab, a new tool for building newsletters, TikTok's new paid service, a French investigative outlet where readers can be shareholders and 26 active calls.
Welcome!
This week on Media Finance Monitor
What the sector actually wants from the next EU budget
Let’s meet in Perugia!
Trustfnd may be a sign we’ve reached peak newsletter fragmentation
Cameo tried celebrities. Now it’s betting on TikTok creators
Mediacités: the French investigative outlet where readers can be shareholders
26 active calls (3 new)
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What the sector actually wants from the next EU budget
(by Peter)
The reason I think our Brussels event went well is that after six hours of discussing EU media funding policy, we still couldn’t kick people out, and by 8:30 p.m. the venue was threatening us with an extra day’s charge if we didn’t leave. More than fifty organizations attended, including publishers, intermediaries, funders, policymakers and others from across the information ecosystem, to think through what kind of policy architecture the sector needs as the next EU budget negotiations move forward.
The first year or so of the advocacy effort has been relatively straightforward: it is not terribly hard to build a broad coalition around the proposition that the sector needs more money. The tricky part begins when you move to actual mechanisms, programmes and policy design. Different organizations have different vantage points on the ecosystem and different ideas about what it needs. Because of this, our goal was not to force consensus, but to surface as many reasonable ideas as possible.
We organized the lab around a simple three-step logic. First, each table was asked to describe the status quo: what is and is not working in the EU’s current support for journalism and the wider information ecosystem. Then we asked people to imagine it was 2034, the MFF had ended, and things had gone remarkably well: what does a healthier ecosystem look like? The last, and longest, part was about getting from one to the other, identifying the mechanisms, reforms and practical solutions that could move the sector from the present system to that desired future. (This was a slightly bastardized version of a format the excellent Gabriela Bacher and Sebastian Loudon pioneered in Austria when trying to rethink their national subsidy system.)
We published a longer document collecting the roughly 17 pages of ideas and recommendations that surfaced during the lab, covering everything from intra-EU and extra-EU funding to programme design, priorities and support mechanisms: a sort of everything-bagel of media funding. You can read it here. Still, this is our newsletter, not a multistakeholder communiqué, so I’m going to be a little selfish and spend more time on the proposals that feel closest to us at CSM.
We would like to see three separate funds for the information ecosystem.
The first is a matching fund under AgoraEU: public money that matches revenue organizations raise directly from readers, members, subscribers or small donors. Conceptually, it is similar to NewsMatch in the United States. It rewards demonstrated public support, strengthens direct audience relationships and crowds in private contributions. The second is a dedicated information integrity fund, also under AgoraEU, to support work addressing digital deception, foreign information manipulation and interference, coordinated inauthentic behaviour, and media and information literacy. The third is an innovation fund, ideally under the European Competitiveness Fund, where media organizations and technology companies could apply jointly to build shared sovereign infrastructure for digital publishing: CMS and CRM tools, payment systems, audience and identity infrastructure, and distribution pipelines. The goal is reducing dependency on non-European platforms.
Beyond these, we think the horizontal design of EU support matters as much as the envelopes. Applications should move to a two-stage process: a lightweight first round, with full proposals only for shortlisted applicants. The mandatory cross-border consortium requirement should end; strong national or local actors are currently excluded not because their work is weak, but because they do not fit the consortium model. Funding intensity should also be as high as possible in most instruments, or the EU risks designing programmes that only organizations with reserves and co-financing capacity can actually access. And while grants will remain essential, the EU should make serious room for impact investment, investment subsidies, and other financial instruments such as loan guarantees, especially when the goal is to help viable public-interest organizations invest in growth, technology, long-term resilience, and competitiveness.
Two further issues matter a lot to us. Pre-financing needs to be addressed seriously: even generous grant rates are functionally limited if organizations cannot carry costs while waiting for reimbursement. And the no-profit rule needs revision. The Commission cannot simultaneously call for sustainability and penalize organizations for generating revenue during or alongside a funded project. Safeguards against misuse are legitimate, punishing earned income is not.
You can read our more carefully argued policy version here. This is not an exhaustive blueprint for EU media funding, nor a claim that every existing programme should be discontinued and replaced by my hobby horses. Some current mechanisms work well, others work badly, and many land in the large European category of functioning, but not quite as intended. We are simply highlighting the gaps, missing instruments and design flaws that we think matter most.
All of these are the product of a genuinely collective effort. I’m very grateful to Deutsche Welle Akademie and EFCSN, who helped make the lab possible, to Civitates for supporting our broader work, and to the many organizations and individuals who showed up, shared ideas and stayed in the room long enough for the venue to consider charging us extra. We may have facilitated the process, but these ideas do not belong to us alone; they belong, in the broadest sense, to the sector. That is exactly why we are publishing them openly and encouraging others to use them however they see fit: circulate them, build on them, disagree with them, wave them in front of your national government, your permanent representation, the Parliament, the Commission, or anyone else involved in shaping the next MFF. The negotiations are still underway, which means the advocacy is still underway too.
Let’s meet in Perugia!
(by Peter)
Like lemmings, salmon, or caribou following some ancient migratory instinct they can neither explain nor resist, we are heading to Perugia. A few things to know if you’re also making the journey:
On the 16th, half past noon, Brian Morrissey and I are recording an episode of The Rebooting live on stage. We’ll be talking somewhere in the vicinity of the attention economy, creators, and funding models. I’m excited about this to the point of low-grade anxiety, which is usually how I know I care about something. I’m aware we are competing with the powerful counter-programming force of bruschetta and April sunshine, but if you feel like joining us instead, we would be delighted.
Later that afternoon, Catarina Carvalho from Mensagem de Lisboa, Laura Moore from Deutsche Welle Akademie, and Diego Agúndez from the European Commission will be discussing - and I hope you are sitting down - the next EU budget and what it means for media funding. If you are reading this newsletter, you care about this, so come.
And on 17 April, we’re also launching a new project with our Vienna based co-conspirator Milo Tesselaar called Capital Stacks of Journalism, looking at digital media ventures founded in roughly the past 15 years that managed to build real sustainability or profitability, how they launched, what kind of capital they used, and how their businesses evolved. The basic premise is that investing in journalism is not, in fact, always identical to setting money on fire. If that sounds interesting, drop us a note. It’s a side event, so space is limited, but we’ll do our best.
And more broadly: my co-founder Miklós, our Director of Advocacy David, and our senior associate Marton will all be in town. If you want to talk media business strategy, EU funding, audience revenue, or commercial partnerships, find us or drop a note to hello@funds4media.org and we will sort something out.
Trustfnd may be a sign we’ve reached peak newsletter fragmentation
(by María)
For $8.50, readers can get 30 days of access to the newsletters of journalists Marisa Kabas, Katelyn Burns and Kat Tenbarge at roughly half the combined individual price. The offer, reported by Nieman Lab, is sold through Trustfnd, a startup that lets creators on Ghost and Beehiiv run joint subscription trials. Michaël Jarjour, who co-founded the company, claims two of the three creators gained more paying subscribers during the test period than they had in the entire previous year, though conversion data has not been disclosed.
No major newsletter platform currently supports this kind of cross-platform bundling natively. Both Ghost and Beehiiv told Nieman Lab they are watching the space; though, as Beehiiv CEO Tyler Denk put it, bundling can get “messy and complicated”, especially when participants are not part of the same company. The challenge is less technical than structural: how to split revenue, who owns the subscriber relationship, what happens when one contributor outgrows the arrangement.
Trustfnd sidesteps those questions with a time-bound format (30, 60, or 90 days), turning bundles into acquisition tools rather than long-term products. That lowers the stakes, but it also means the hardest frictions remain untested. However, the startup’s bet fits a broader pattern. After a period of extreme unbundling, where individual creators built their own paid audiences and readers accumulated subscriptions, the market is beginning to swing back toward aggregation. When individual subscriptions pile up and solo creators struggle to expand, aggregation starts to reassert itself.
The question is whether bundling can remain lightweight or has to eventually become something more structured. The Every started in 2020 as a simple bundle between two Substack writers. As it grew, it built its own CMS, editorial process, and revenue-sharing system. Five years later, it operates as an organisation combining editorial output with its own tools and infrastructure, including software products. It suggests that bundling may be a starting point, but rarely stays that way.
Cameo tried celebrities. Now it’s betting on TikTok creators
(by María)
Cameo is a platform where people pay creators and celebrities to record short personalized videos: birthday shout-outs, pep talks, that kind of thing. It blew up during COVID, doing ~$100 million in gross revenue in 2020 with a team of nearly 400. A year later it hit a $1 billion valuation. Then it fell hard: multiple rounds of layoffs, a team that shrank to a few dozen, and a valuation down more than 90%. The company has been rebuilding since.
Last week, Cameo and TikTok announced a partnership to let U.S. creators sell personalized videos directly inside the app. TikTok creators have been one of Cameo’s fastest-growing segments, and according to CEO Steven Galanis, they drove the platform’s strongest year yet in 2025.
TikTok users already spend money within the app. Live gifting, series subscriptions, and TikTok Shop (estimated at ~$19 billion in global GMV in Q3 2025, roughly on par with eBay) have made in-feed purchases routine. But those are either tips, access, or products. Cameo adds a different category: a creator making something because you asked for it.
OnlyFans shows that this model can scale. Some top creators there earn more from custom content and paid direct messages than from subscriptions. The platform works in large part because the, ahem, closeness is the product. People pay for direct, personal attention from the creator, and that is a big part of what brings them back.
TikTok produces a similar dynamic, but most of it happens without a transaction. Creators talk into their phone cameras, respond to individual comments, address their audience as if they know them. Viewers develop a sense of familiarity that feels more immediate than what a YouTube video or a podcast generates. Whether that is enough to build a paying habit without the “intimacy” that OnlyFans has going for it, is what this partnership will test.
Mediacités: the French investigative outlet where readers can be shareholders
(by María)
In most of France’s major regional cities, local media is typically dominated by a single legacy newspaper. Mediacités was founded in 2016 on the premise that these regions had strong political and economic powers but not enough independent reporting to hold them accountable. It operates small newsrooms in four cities: Lille, Lyon, Nantes, Toulouse.
It carries no advertising. Their view is that ad revenue can represent a conflict of interest when the pool of potential advertisers and the subjects of your investigations can overlap. Subscriptions account for nearly 80% of revenue instead, supplemented by donations (which nearly doubled in 2024, from around €34,000 to €61,000), public subsidies, occasional grants, and some income from article resale and editorial services.
The outlet also lets its audience become shareholders. Through a programme called the Société des Amis (SDA), people can buy actual shares in the publishing company at €1.56 each, with a minimum investment of around €201 and a cap of €5,000. Because Mediacités qualifies as an “entreprise de presse solidaire d’information”, France gives investors a 50% tax deduction, cutting the real cost roughly in half.
The programme had 208 members holding 6.34% of the capital at the end of 2024. It has since grown to 238, with over €168,000 invested collectively. The co-founders and newsroom journalists collectively hold 43%, and no individual shareholder owns more than 7%, meaning the SDA is the single largest.
The programme has its own governance, with an elected president and annual assembly. Those who want to can get more involved: attending the weekly team meeting, joining working groups on strategy, and testing new features early. But editorial independence is non-negotiable: shareholders have no say in what gets published.
Mediacités posted its first positive operating result last year. Public subsidies played a role in it, but so did readers. A frequent argument against paid local journalism is that people won’t pay. This outlet has them subscribing, donating, and even buying equity in the company.
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 active calls, with the largest at the top: