The moral conundrums of making a living

Good journalism requires principles; keeping a company alive demands a healthy dose of pragmatism. While the founders in this study generally balanced the two pretty well, when it came to revenue, on who should pay for journalism, their convictions sometimes took on an almost religious intensity.

Some consider advertising incompatible with independence and put every word they publish behind a paywall. Others hold that journalism must remain free to everyone, making a paywall unacceptable. Several eastern publishers treat national public money as contamination while accepting EU money without qualms. In Western Europe, EU money tends to be suspect while national money is often acceptable.

Everybody loves audience revenue

Having some audience revenue was an eligibility criterion for this study: we deliberately selected outlets that had persuaded at least part of their audience to pay. Even so, its dominance surprised us.

At Chora & Will Media, reader payment is a side dish beside a commercial operation that supplies roughly three-quarters of income. At Telegram readers supply less than a quarter of revenue, and at Tsüri about a third; elDiario.es earns around 40 percent of its money from its 120,000 members. 444’s readers provide about 60 percent of Magyar Jeti’s core revenue. From there the share climbs: The Kyiv Independent’s members supply nearly two thirds of monthly income, Dossier’s members around 70 percent, and the most reader-funded publishers, from Zetland and Denník N through Republik and De Correspondent to Mediapart, draw from two-thirds to nearly all of everything they earn from their audiences.

This finding about the demand for journalism is pretty encouraging: across richer and poorer markets, people are willing to pay for quality information. While much of that payment is transactional: readers and professional users buy journalism because it is useful to them, sometimes people also pay voluntarily for journalism that remains freely available to everyone. They are not buying access so much as subsidizing a public good: helping ensure that journalism they believe society needs continues to exist. Our interpretation: journalism is not dead, neither as a product nor as a social project. When publishers produce information that people value, whether for themselves or for the society around them, a meaningful number will pay to sustain it.

Gates, and the drift toward them

The practical question every reader-funded newsroom must answer is whether payment buys access or merely expresses support. The cohort divides into three broad strands.

Nine ventures sell access to most or all of their core journalism: Mediapart, Contexte, Brief.me, Krautreporter, Denník N, Zetland, Follow the Money, Republik and De Correspondent. The walls vary in hardness and permeability, but the underlying bargain is the same: payment ordinarily buys entry into the product.

Eight operate mixed-access models: 444, Mill Media, Chora & Will Media, Telegram, elDiario.es, Dossier, El Orden Mundial and, since May 2026, OKO.press. All leave a significant amount of journalism freely available while reserving particular stories, newsletters, podcasts or other privileges for paying members.

The final four make payment entirely voluntary: The Kyiv Independent, Recorder, Tsüri and CORRECTIV. At CORRECTIV, selected investigations now require free email registration, but none of these four currently charges for access to its core journalism.

These are not static categories. Krautreporter launched with its journalism open with only commenting restricted to members, then introduced a paywall in its second year. 444 launched voluntary donations in 2017 and converted them into a fully developed membership with exclusive content in 2021. Telegram introduced a paywall in 2021 and now keeps roughly a fifth of its content behind it. In May 2026, just as we were conducting this study, OKO.press ended a decade of completely open access by moving most of its content behind a paywall. CORRECTIV has introduced a mailwall and told us it is examining further experiments with transactional relationships. The Kyiv Independent migrated from Patreon to its own membership program without closing its journalism, but that strengthened the transaction and the direct relationship even if it did not add a gate.

The logic is not unique to this cohort. In a 2021 Reuters Institute study of nineteen independent outlets across sixteen countries in Central and Eastern Europe and the Global South, one of this report’s authors found that outlets with active paywalls derived, on average, a larger share of their revenue from audiences than those without one. Other research points in the same direction. In one study of recent American subscribers, 61 percent of those identified as paywall converters said they subscribed when they reached their limit of free articles. A 2026 behavioral study covering more than 209 million page views similarly found that encountering a paywall made otherwise comparable readers far more likely to subscribe.

None of this means that a hard paywall is always the correct answer. Most readers who encounter one leave, and restricting access may cost in reach or impact. Mission, identity and market conditions matter. An outlet publishing information that it believes everyone must be able to access may rationally decide that the additional revenue is not worth the exclusion.

Nor does the transaction have to take the form of a hard wall. A registration requirement, a meter, a minority of members-only articles, an exclusive newsletter or some other genuinely useful benefit can create enough friction to turn goodwill into payment. There is a pool of readers who value journalism and may even want to support it, but will not do so until the exchange is made concrete. Keeping everything open can therefore be a principled and strategically coherent choice, but in revenue terms, it is also a choice to leave some money on the table.

Divisive advertising

Over the last three decades, a significant part of independent journalism has built its identity in opposition to commercial media. Advertising came to represent not merely a revenue stream but a set of flawed incentives: dependence on traffic, reluctance to offend sponsors and pressure to soften the boundary between editorial and commercial work. That inheritance is visible throughout this cohort: skepticism is widespread, and several publishers refuse advertising altogether as a promise of independence and a way to keep the organization focused.

Contexte and Recorder both carried advertising in their early years and have since all but abandoned it. Contexte moved toward a pure business-subscription model; Recorder toward voluntary reader support and tax-designated contributions. Leaving it behind clarified the product, the business model and, eventually, the publisher’s identity. Where audience support becomes central to the proposition, the absence of advertising can itself become part of what readers are being asked to support.

But rejecting advertising is not a condition of producing serious public-interest journalism.

One of the largest businesses in the cohort, elDiario.es, with roughly €17.35 million in annual revenue, has sustained advertising and reader payments as two major pillars for years, with ads accounting for more than 50 percent of revenue. Magyar Jeti is earning north of a million euros from advertising. At Chora & Will Media, advertising and branded content supply roughly three-quarters of revenue, down from 100 percent at launch. Telegram earns roughly half its income from branded content produced by its own studio. Denník N maintains a smaller but meaningful advertising business alongside subscriptions, while Tsüri also generates meaningful advertising revenue.

Advertising is less important to this cohort overall than audience revenue. It is no longer the default economic engine of journalism. But it continues to finance a meaningful amount of public-interest content in Europe, including at some of its most successful recent startups.

Institutional revenue: more than expected

Because this is a cohort of commercially successful ventures, we expected grants to be marginal. Instead, we found substantial institutional funding in the histories of much of the sample, including some of its most commercially successful publishers. Grants may not dominate their revenue today, but they played a large role in building these organizations. Because of how much they shaped these ventures, we return to the grant story in the outside perspective that follows.

Beyond the core

Some outlets have built substantial businesses around books, events and other products adjacent to their journalism. Others have pursued an almost ascetic focus on one product and one source of value. Both can produce sustainable companies; they place their risks in different places. Diversification introduces complexity and distraction but creates additional sources of revenue. Focus protects attention and keeps costs legible, but can leave the business more exposed to a single product or market.

Recorder has debated book publishing and decided they “were not so in love with this idea”; their events are free while peers monetize theirs, and they describe most new product lines as a distraction from the twenty long-form video investigations they want to deliver for their audience each year. Contexte came close to building a job board, deprioritized it, and has just finished a ten-year vision in which alternative revenue “is not a big part of the main plan.” Yet both are incredibly successful; Contexte is also one of the largest businesses in the cohort, and their focus has not prevented them from building a company of considerable scale.

This should not automatically be read as either superior discipline or a lack of ambition. It is a particular theory of how a media company becomes stable: improve the core product, grow its audience and resist adding activities that increase complexity. Whether such focus eventually becomes a strength or a constraint depends on the outlet, its market and how much room the core product has left to grow.

The diversifiers are not all pursuing radically different ideas. Across the cohort, publishers return to a fairly small menu of adjacent products, with book publishing being the most persistent theme. Several have experimented with periodical print magazines, generally with limited financial success. Events recur as both a business and a tool for strengthening the relationship with readers. A few publishers have built content studios around their advertising operations, as discussed above. Others have diversified editorially: Magyar Jeti, for example, has built the dedicated fact-checking site Lakmusz and the science publication Qubit around 444. Denník N combines subscriptions with books, print products and sister publications; Chora & Will Media operates a full production house; and De Correspondent has built the cohort’s most substantial book operation.

There is also geographic diversification. elDiario.es and Mill Media have expanded within Spain and the United Kingdom respectively, while Zetland and Denník N have taken their models across national borders. We turn to those expansion strategies in the last chapter. Here, the focus remains on the adjacent activities that recur most clearly across the cohort.

Books. De Correspondent publishes a deliberately small list of four to eight titles a year and sells it into a book membership that delivers every title automatically, guaranteeing a first print run of 3,000–4,000 copies that covers each book’s costs and lands nearly every title on the national bestseller list. More than 152,000 copies were sold in 2023, for some €1.5–1.9 million, a fifth of the company’s revenue. Follow the Money runs a smaller operation in a separate entity at around five percent of revenue; Denník N publishes books as brand-deepening companions to its subscription; Magyar Jeti / 444 is also growing its book business.

Books also serve as an unexpectedly effective retention tool, giving digital journalists time away from the newsroom’s daily tempo to pursue a subject in depth and giving another reason for talented people to stay. Several founders observed, with some affection, that even journalists read online by hundreds of thousands remain unusually excited by the prospect of 5,000 physical copies carrying their name.

Events. In the media industry, particularly in the United States, events are often treated as an obvious profitable extension for journalism and information businesses. That logic was not really present in our cohort. Some publishers, like Contexte, stay away from events almost entirely, citing focus. Others use them primarily for community and retention rather than revenue: Recorder’s events are free on principle, while Dossier’s member evenings are attended largely by existing members and valued for the renewals they help secure.

While Tsüri is quite successful at monetizing gatherings through sponsorships, only Chora & Will Media has turned events into a business at real scale. It produces three major events each year, a podcast festival in Milan, a technology-and-philosophy summit and a B2B summit on urban development, all profitable through tickets and sponsorship. Live events are also packaged into many of its commercial partnerships, making them part of a year-round production operation rather than a sequence of occasional gatherings. Across the rest of the cohort, however, events function more as community infrastructure than as a serious independent revenue stream.

The stage. Three ventures have developed a more unusual variation on the events model: adapting their journalism into plays performed on stage.

Chora & Will Media produces shows through its dedicated production entity, and its journalists are front and center on stage. Dossier has built a small ladder of formats: member events, lecture performances with journalists alongside actors, and full theater plays where Dossier develops the story but the theater writes the script. And for CORRECTIV professional actors perform it: the newsroom keeps the research and co-writes the script, and then releases the text royalty-free so theaters across Germany can stage it.