In 2013, when I was a doctoral student, searching for a topic for my PhD thesis, I kept running into start-ups and entrepreneurship. Berlin and other parts of Germany were in the grip of a certain start-up hype, and not even a PhD candidate could really escape it. For the economy at large, newly started ventures were celebrated as drivers of disruption and economic renewal. Surely, I thought, the same promise ought to hold for journalism, whose transformation preoccupied me deeply even then. Against this background, I decided to devote my work to recently started ventures in German journalism. Yet contrary to my hopes for the potential of new media organizations–and for a reform of the industry from its margins–what I mostly found, when my research was finished in 2016, were struggling ventures. In that sense, my dissertation became, almost against my intentions, also a study of entrepreneurial failure.
I begin with this anecdote because the Capital Stacks of Journalism study sets out along the opposite, and complementary, path. It examines the success factors and enabling conditions of journalistic start-ups in Europe, a focus it shares with academic research, in which the (economic) conditions of success of news start-ups have likewise come to the fore: In one of the first published studies, Bruno and Nielsen (2012) investigated nine strategically selected news start-ups from Germany, France, and Italy, coining the now widely cited phrase “survival is success” given the generally precarious conditions of journalism entrepreneurship. Mohammed et al. (2026) analyzed 24 journalism start-ups in the United States recognized by The Next Challenge for Media & Journalism and the Nonprofit News Awards, finding that grants and philanthropic funding were the most widely used revenue sources among these successful ventures. Massey (2018) analyzed 127 independent digital-native news ventures in the United States and showed that–contrary to popular wisdom–in this sample revenue diversity did not necessarily enhance financial success. O’Brien and Wellbrock (2024) examined 49 German digital journalism start-ups and found that entrepreneurial success in their sample was primarily shaped by founders’ experience, skills, and a well-functioning organizational setup.
From a research perspective, the examination of successful cases alone is not sufficient, since it leads into the problem of survivorship bias–or, in methodological terms, of selecting cases based on the dependent variable: Conclusions about the conditions of success are drawn from cases that did in fact succeed, while unsuccessful ventures remain outside the observation (Parker, 2009). Analyzing the factors behind failure can help to identify typical mistakes, to initiate processes of learning and to set more realistic expectations of news ventures’ potential for innovation (Buschow, 2020).
What should investors know from current research in order to assess journalistic start-ups, so that typical factors of failure can be anticipated and forestalled from the outset?
One way to answer this question is to deliberately invert the case selection. In a subsequent paper based on my PhD work (Buschow, 2020), I examined 15 German digital-native news ventures started between 2011 and 2015, explicitly focusing on the ones that were struggling at the time of investigation or had already been shut down. The study, based on the methodological triangulation of interviews, document analysis, and site visits, investigated the phase before market conditions had exerted any real pressure. If a venture stalls at this stage, competition and market structure cannot be blamed; the causes lie in the practice of starting up. My research reconstructed six such practices that every news venture has to accomplish, each with its own characteristic way of going wrong:
1. Challenging tasks and unexpectedly high workload: Founders in my sample consistently underestimated how much non-journalistic work a news venture requires, e.g. in accounting, contracts, technology or legal matters. Many started out expecting entrepreneurship to buy them more freedom for journalism, but the opposite happened. Some came to miss precisely the legacy publishing houses they left in protest. In a more recent study by Anja Noster and myself, too, early-stage teams lost months to choosing a legal form, notary appointments, nonprofit status and tax offices, with one describing its central challenge as becoming a media company at all, having until then been “a group of people that had done this as a hobby” (Noster & Buschow, 2026, p. 170). Investors should make sure that founders are aware of the change of role this involves–from journalist to entrepreneur–as well as of the challenging (administrative) tasks and the unexpectedly high workload that come with it, and that they embrace them.
2. Teams are too homogeneous: In my sample, founders rarely came from industries or professions other than journalism. Overwhelmingly, they were (former) journalists with near-identical career paths. Only two of the 15 investigated ventures were founded exclusively by people from outside the industry. However, when teams are formed around personalities with similar backgrounds, the diversity of emerging challenges to starting up cannot always be efficiently addressed by the founders. Thus, investors should make sure that founding teams in journalism are not too homogeneous.
3. Lack of contacts and relationships: Because certain tasks could not be staffed, most ventures in my sample depended on external supporters–developers, designers, lawyers, accountants–who frequently worked unpaid. Without money as an incentive, social and symbolic capital became the actual operating resource. Founders who lack this non-economic capital cannot mobilize the work their venture needs. A study by Powers and Vera-Zambrano (2016), too, should alert investors to the need to pay attention to founders’ networks. The researchers investigated why, over the period studied, 51 online news start-ups were formed in Seattle / USA and only four in Toulouse / France; they found founders to be distinguished not so much by business or technical skills but by the social and symbolic capital they could convert into the resources their ventures needed.
4. Conflicts between journalistic and economic practices: When the same person writes the story and sells advertising space, the separation of editorial and commercial functions stops being an organizational arrangement and becomes a matter of individual self-discipline. Founders in my study were well aware of this conflict, but financial pressure eroded it: in one case I investigated, the team had to choose between accepting a large corporate publishing project it had always refused on principle, or running into personal bankruptcy. In news start-ups, it is particularly difficult to achieve the news media’s traditional separation between “church and state” (Carbasse, 2015, p. 267). Ventures that do not actively moderate this tension can stall on it, a failure factor that barely exists in other industries and that investors should keep an eye on.
5. Ignoring the user’s perspective when starting up: In journalism, the founders’ first focus is often on the production of high-quality content rather than on profit and growth (Deuze, 2017). However, if a venture’s goal is to reproduce professional journalistic standards under digital conditions, these start-ups are often conceived from a producer’s perspective. In the ventures I studied, the interests and needs of potential users played only a minor role in their experimentation with news media content and new journalistic products. Investors should check with founders, especially those with a background in journalism, if there is a tendency to ignore the user’s perspective. As a study by Naldi and Picard (2012) has shown, founders too are not immune to a “formational myopia” (pp. 76-77), whereby longstanding practices and mindsets from the industry are transferred into new ventures–a decisive source of failure, as these organizations then apply the same (unsuccessful) methods as legacy publishers do to respond to market challenges.
6. Underfinancing: Financial barriers to starting up are low–but this is precisely a trap. It makes launching feel like an adequate test of viability. Founders in my sample systematically underestimated the cost drivers of everyday operations: acquiring paying users, maintaining a presence across a growing number of media platforms and, above all, producing quality content, which remains stubbornly labor-intensive. Chronic underfunding then pushes key work onto temporary, casual and voluntary arrangements, so that ventures actually founded in protest against the precarization of journalism end up reproducing it.
Because this study focused on the early start-up phase–before ventures are even exposed to the competitive circumstances of any particular national media market–the findings from the German market should be of interest for, and largely transferable to other parts of the world. That transferability has limits, however, and they widen as a venture ages: the further a start-up moves into the market, the more its fate is decided by market conditions and the structural context, factors it does not solely control.
Further, conditions of national markets differ significantly. Relly and Chadha (2025) showed this at the extreme, demonstrating for the case of Yemen that in politically unstable contexts threats, censorship and the absence of state support constitute massive risks for media entrepreneurs.
In comparison to general entrepreneurship studies, research on news ventures is not yet advanced enough to allow founders and investors to base their management decisions on scientific evidence. Closing that gap would mean extending the analysis to more markets and regions and comparing patterns of failure between them; including the later life-cycle stages, where market pressure, product characteristics and growth crises take over; and, above all, collecting data at several points across a venture’s life cycle rather than at a single moment, for which longitudinal and ethnographic designs remain rare. Such research would deepen our understanding of the causes and processes surrounding failure, support measures to tackle them, and eventually help new digital ventures in journalism to prosper.
References
Achtenhagen, L. (2017). Media entrepreneurship—Taking stock and moving forward. International Journal on Media Management, 19(1), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1080/14241277.2017.1298941
Bruno, N., & Nielsen, R. K. (2012). Survival is success: Journalistic online start-ups in Western Europe. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2017-12/Survival%20is%20Success%20Journalistic%20Online%20Start-Ups%20in%20Western%20Europe.pdf
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