Your deepest, darkest user needs and the emotional economics of modern journalism
An ambitious new European platform to distribute public interest journalism, the best paid job in a nonprofit newsroom, welcoming Austria into CEE and 24 active calls.
Welcome
This week on the Media Finance Monitor:
Your deepest, darkest user needs and the emotional economics of modern journalism
A new European platform to distribute journalism (and why you should consider joining) (x)
Is this the best paid job in nonprofit publishing?
Today we officially welcome Austria into Central and Eastern Europe
24 active calls (4 new)
Your deepest, darkest user needs and the emotional economics of modern journalism
Listening to Ariel Zirulnick talk about user needs was a revelatory experience, even after quite a few years in the industry. I think she explained it perfectly last year in this interview with Ioana:
"In most newsrooms the journalism is organized and labeled in a couple different ways: maybe you'd have 'beats,' 'story types,' and 'stages of the funnel' [for audience revenues and conversions]. They're all useful in some way – but all of these are rooted in what the newsroom needs. The user needs model creates another taxonomy for a newsroom to work within that is rooted in what the audience members need."
It's so logical and straightforward, yet I know very few newsrooms that have really embraced this mindset when making decisions about content and services.
While I found the user needs model a compelling way of thinking about and organizing editorial work, it focuses primarily on content, and I could never find easy ways to directly connect it to the business of news. That is, until I had a conversation with Lisa MacLeod from FT Strategies at the wonderful 10 Points conference in Sicily last Friday.
The conversation was about the local news and how to best serve audiences, and someone mentioned the user needs model as a helpful framework. But then we moved on to the difficulty of finding a solid business case for local news (I have the magical ability to turn every conversation into a discussion on the business of news, it's like having a special ring that compels people to discuss churn rates at dinner parties) and Lisa made this fascinating point about how some engagement/revenue generation mechanisms are really governed by "dark user needs".
I find this idea captivating, so much so that I immediately started thinking: what are the dark equivalents of user needs, and how do they drive revenues?
This is just a thought experiment, and I really don't want to oversimplify journalism or the business side of news into catering either to positive or dark user needs. But I do think some financially successful newsrooms traffic in dark user needs to some extent. In Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers, Andrey Mir makes an adjacent argument: people no longer pay for information (which is abundantly available at no cost) but rather for alignment, support outlets that validate their worldviews.
I'm not trying to preach here, I'm always suspicious of "purity" arguments, whether around funding, platforms, or content. It's perfectly okay to build gated communities and monetize users' social integrative needs. But it can be useful to reflect occasionally on our choices, making sure we're conscious of our compromises rather than accidentally sliding into them.
Another fascinating conversation in Catania about journalism's values was with Rhiannon J Davies from Greater Community Media (who I successfully convinced to try a brioche filled with pistachio granita, a local favorite) and Alex Enășescu (who had an affogato).
Rhiannon made compelling points about how newsrooms should prioritize value for communities, and I couldn't agree more. Over the past few years, I've become increasingly disillusioned with grand statements about journalism's value to society. I think if you want to make a real impact, and not incidentally: make a living, you need to start thinking more concretely about your value to individual audience members and your immediate community.
We've all seen All the President's Men and wanted to change the world. A colleague once did a presentation about FOI requests where the final slide showed him standing on a cliff with a sword, “fighting the opacity of government”. I applaud the sentiment, but I don't believe that thinking only about macro issues, attempting to address society's wicked problems, or engaging in a narrow versions of accountability journalism is going to resonate with audiences, restore trust, or help us secure the resources we need to do our work effectively.
Journalism’s sustainability and impact is most powerful when grounded in personal, proximate value, not just grand narratives. What problems are your readers actually facing? What decisions do they need to make? How can your reporting help them navigate their daily lives, address professional challenges (👋), or make the most of their communities? These aren't lesser forms of journalism, they're the foundation, the building blocks of trust that makes the watchdog stuff possible.
A new European platform to distribute journalism (and why you should consider joining) (x)
I think most of the time, the way a person or project becomes "visionary" is fairly straightforward: you have someone working on a real problem, the environment shifts, and suddenly the thing you were trying to address becomes THE issue. You might end up looking like a sage when you were really just paying attention.
If you read this newsletter regularly, or have worked in digital media pretty much anywhere in the past few decades, you know that one of the most disruptive changes for our sector came from the distribution side. Large platform companies like Google and Meta became the entry point to the internet for billions of people, and many newsrooms lost their ability to reach audiences directly. The loss of control over much of distribution was always problematic, but with recent geopolitical tensions between the EU and US, it's making European publishers increasingly vulnerable.
Display Europe started as an experiment to create an alternative, independent, open-source distribution platform for European journalism. Now it finds itself positioned as a promising tool in service of European digital sovereignty.
Here's how it works:
Display Europe functions as a very sophisticated content aggregator. It ingests content from publishers (they currently have 70+ partners) and creates personalized feeds for users in 21 languages, complete with AI-generated excerpts. If a user wants to read the entire piece, Display Europe pushes them back to the publisher's website and auto-generates a translation in any of their 21 languages, displayed as a clean overlay on the original text. So I can read what Krytyka Polityczna or Mensagem de Lisboa publishes despite not speaking Polish or Portuguese. For publishers, this means Display Europe can help generate new traffic and introduce their content to European audiences who would never have discovered it otherwise. Publishers can join the media hub through a fairly straightforward process, you can read more about that here.
For the European project, in political, economic, and cultural terms, to succeed, we need a European public sphere: people with different perspectives but shared facts about Europe and the wider world. Some of this exists already, but language barriers and journalism's understandable focus on local and national contexts make these efforts difficult. By aggregating content from across Europe and using AI to provide context and translation, Display Europe is helping create this common public sphere.
Because of all this, I was delighted when they reached out and asked us to help promote the project. Beyond the broader European digital sovereignty goals, Display Europe offers publishers a practical opportunity to generate new traffic and reach European audiences across language barriers. I think it's exciting to be an early adopter in such an ambitious experiment, and since it costs nothing to join, I wholeheartedly recommend checking it out.
Is this the best paid job in nonprofit publishing?
Leaning into the dark user needs a little: would you care to guess the annual salary range for the incoming publisher of Rest of World? Between $350,000 and $450,000, depending on qualifications.
Frankly, I was surprised when I saw the figure, since it's well over the sums my Central and Eastern European eyes are used to. But then, this is the US, where salaries are much higher than what we see in Europe, let alone CEE. Also, expecting nonprofit leaders to work for peanuts is somewhat misguided.
There's an excellent talk by Dan Pallotta about our flawed thinking around nonprofit compensation:
"So in the for-profit sector, the more value you produce, the more money you can make. But we don't like nonprofits to use money to incentivize people to produce more in social service. We have a visceral reaction to the idea that anyone would make very much money helping other people. Interesting that we don't have a visceral reaction to the notion that people would make a lot of money not helping other people. You know, you want to make 50 million dollars selling violent video games to kids, go for it. We'll put you on the cover of Wired magazine. But you want to make half a million dollars trying to cure kids of malaria, and you're considered a parasite yourself."
He argues this ethical framework creates a stark choice between personal prosperity and meaningful nonprofit work, pushing talented graduates toward lucrative for-profit careers. It's often financially smarter to earn more, donate significantly, receive tax benefits, and maintain wealth and influence.
This connects to a broader question about impact and structure in journalism. A LinkedIn post from last month analyzed the legal status of this year's Pulitzer winners: of the 15 prizes announced, only 2 went to nonprofit newsrooms. That's 86% to for-profits.
The Pulitzers aren't the only benchmark for excellent journalism, and one year isn't sufficient data, but the ratio is striking, especially given that the US has multiple large, successful nonprofit newsrooms.
To me, this suggests the for-profit format remains absolutely relevant in journalism and is just as capable of creating and delivering societal value as nonprofit organizations. Making money, even very good money, shouldn't be automatically suspect, whether for nonprofit leaders or corporate publishers. The question isn't the structure or the salary; it's whether the work serves the public interest.
Today we officially welcome Austria into Central and Eastern Europe
One of the more idiosyncratic debates you can hear at CEE journalism events is whether Austria should be considered part of our region. It's kind of the opposite of Slavoj Žižek's rendition of where the Balkans start, some people think the Austrians are too rich, too free, and too organized to be allowed into our exclusive club of chaos, corruption, and unreliable public services.
I have family in Austria, and because of various recent developments, I've started spending more time there: talking to people in the media sector, considering projects, paying closer attention to the scene. This also means I'm slowly becoming familiar with their surprisingly corrupt and corrosive state subsidy scheme, which is proving to be a significant barrier to innovation. So while from afar it may look like something else entirely, when it comes to the media environment, we now officially welcome Austria into CEE.
And with that, let me immediately recommend something for our ~14 German-speaking readers (who probably already know about it).
Jetzt is trying to recruit 5,000 members to launch a new, digital-native newsroom. The original deadline is/was today, and they're at a little over 3,000 pledges as of Wednesday night, so there are no guarantees. But it would be great to see something new emerge in Austria. The concept is very much inspired by Zetland (I think they're some kind of informal franchisee), and they have some impressive names attached, like Christo Grozev.
If I were beyond Duolingo level 5, I would absolutely support them, but because they made no commitment so far to describe "die Eule" as "sehr klug" or "der Elefant" as "sehr groß", I'm waiting things out.
Here are the active calls, with the largest at the top:
European Network of Fact-checkers
Who: European Commission
How much: EUR 5,000,000
What is it for: Increase fact-checking capacity and coverage across the EU
How long: Between 30 to 36 months
Deadline: September 2nd, 2025
Eligible countries: EU member states (including overseas countries and territories), as well as candidate and accession countries and countries that are associated to the Digital Europe programme.
Fighting against disinformation while ensuring the right to freedom of expression
Who: European Commission
How much: EUR 3,000,000 - 3,500,000
What is it for: Research on countering disinformation in media while protecting free expression
Deadline: September 16th, 2025
Eligible countries: EU Member States (including overseas countries and territories)
Advisory support and network to counter disinformation and foreign information manipulation and interference
Who: European Commission
How much: EUR 3,000,000 - 3,500,000
What is it for: Scaling research into tools countering disinformation and FIMI
Deadline: September 16th, 2025
Eligible countries: EU Member States (including overseas countries and territories)
Countering and preventing radicalisation, extremism, hate speech and polarisation
Who: European Commission
How much: EUR 3,000,000 - 3,500,000
What is it for: Research to counter radicalisation, hate, and polarisation online and offline
Deadline: September 16th, 2025
Eligible countries: EU Member States (including overseas countries and territories)
Detecting influence campaigns and boosting societal resilience
Who: European Commission
How much: Up to EUR 1,650,000
What is it for: Monitor disinformation narratives, mitigate polarisation in the EU
How long: 18 months
Deadline: June 16th, 2025
Eligible countries: EU Member States (including overseas countries and territories)
Cooperation with EU citizens and Youth in the United Kingdom
Who: European Commission
How much: Up to EUR 600,000
What is it for: Strengthen EU–UK ties through citizen and youth dialogue
How long: Up to 36 months
Deadline: June 17th, 2025
Eligible countries: EU member states or UK
Boosting the visibility of fact-checking content in Europe
Who: European Commission
How much: EUR 300,000 - 500,000
What is it for: Supports wider reach of EU fact-checks to vulnerable audiences
How long: Between 12 and 18 months
Deadline: June 16th, 2025
Eligible countries: EU Member States (including overseas countries and territories)
European mini-slate development
Who: European Commission
How much: EUR 60,000 - 310,000
What is it for: Support to develop documentary, fiction or animation for commercial release in digital platforms, cinema, or TV
How long: Up to 36 months
Deadline: September 17th, 2025
Eligible countries: EU Member States (including overseas countries and territories), listed EEA countries and countries associated to the Creative Europe Programme
Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate Change - NEW
Who: UNESCO
How much: Up to USD 150,000
What is it for: Strengthen information integrity on climate change
How long: 6 -18 months
Deadline: July 7th, 2025
Eligible countries: Global (non-profit organizations)
The Big Questions
Who: National Geographic Society
How much: Up to USD 100,000
What is it for: Storytelling projects on humanity, knowledge, and nature
How long: Up to 12 months
Deadline: June 24th, 2025
Eligible countries: Global
Boosting Fact-Checking Activities in Europe
Who: European Media and Information Fund
How much: Up to EUR 55,000
What is it for: Support fact-checking to counter 2025 election disinformation.
How long: Up to 12 months
Deadline: June 30th, 2025
Eligible countries: EU, EFTA and UK
Journalism Science Alliance Grants - NEW
Who: Journalism Science Alliance
How much: Up to EUR 50,000
What is it for: Support journalist-scientist collaborations for evidence-based reporting
How long: 8 months
Deadline: August 4th, 2025
Eligible countries: EU member states and Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Norway, Serbia and Ukraine
Pre-litigation Research Support - NEW
Who: Digital Freedom Fund
How much: Up to EUR 45,000
What is it for: Planned litigation concerning the free flow of information online
Deadline: July 15th, 2025
Eligible countries: Council of Europe Member States
Litigation Track Support - NEW
Who: Digital Freedom Fund
How much: Up to EUR 45,000
What is it for: Supporting legal action to protect online information flow
Deadline: July 15th, 2025
Eligible countries: Council of Europe Member States
Legal Defense Fund
Who: IFCN
How much: Up to USD 40,000
What is it for: Support fact-checkers facing legal or harassment threats
Deadline: Ongoing
Eligible countries: Global (IFCN verified signatories)
Machine Learning Reporting Grants
Who: Pulitzer Center
How much: Up to USD 25,000
What is it for: Strengthen data-driven reporting using data mining
Deadline: Ongoing
Eligible countries: Global
Business Continuity Fund
Who: IFCN
How much: Up to USD 20,000
What is it for: Support for fact-checkers disrupted by disasters/conflict/repression
Deadline: Ongoing
Eligible countries: Global (IFCN verified signatories)
Professional Development Grants for Environmental Journalism
Who: Journalismfund Europe
How much: Up to EUR 20,000
What is it for: Capacity building of environmental investigative journalists
How long: Up to 12 months
Deadline: October 9th, 2025
Eligible countries: European countries
Environmental Investigative Journalism
Who: Journalismfund Europe
How much: Up to EUR 20,000
What is it for: Conduct investigations about Europe's environmental affairs
How long: Up to 12 months
Deadline: July 24th, 2025
Eligible countries: European countries
SAFE: Support and Assistance Facility for Experts
Who: EMIF
How much: Up to EUR 10,000
What is it for: Financially supporting European counter-disinformation entities facing urgent threats
How long: Up to 3 months
Deadline: Rolling basis (submissions open until February 27th, 2026)
Eligible countries: EU Member States (open to EMIF grantees, EFCSN fact-checkers, and EDMO members)
Global Reporting Grants
Who: Pulitzer Center
How much: Up to USD 10,000
What is it for: Support in-depth, high-impact reporting on critical issues
Deadline: Ongoing
Eligible countries: Global
Audience-Engaged Journalism Grants
Who: BIRN
How much: Up to EUR 8,000
What is it for: Produce audience-engaged stories
Deadline: June 18th, 2025
Eligible countries: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Czech Republic, Poland, Serbia and Slovakia
Sphera Media Collabs
Who: Sphera Network
How much: Up to EUR 7,000
What is it for: Short documentaries on social issues through personal narratives and human-centered storytelling
Deadline: July 12th, 2025
Eligible countries: EU Member States and Ukraine (excluding Belgium, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Spain)
Science Misinformation Journalism Grant
Who: Pulitzer Center
How much: Depends on project’s scope and size
What is it for: Journalism combating science denial and misinformation
Deadline: Ongoing
Eligible countries: Global
Until the next issue, thanks for reading and take care.
Peter Erdelyi and the rest of the Center for Sustainable Media team