During our interviews, we asked founders to rate statements on a five-point Likert scale, from “not true at all” to “completely true.” One began: “Weaknesses in hiring and people management have slowed our development.” In two separate interviews, on consecutive days, we got the same answer: “Eight. Eight out of five.”
These organizations had built subscription funnels, developed or procured complex technology, attracted investors and navigated sophisticated capital structures. Yet, with very few exceptions, they still described hiring and managing people as a persistent weakness. Even ventures employing fifty, one hundred or two hundred people had often reached that scale while improvising one of the functions most consequential to their success.
Relative to its impact, HR is the least professionalized function in the sample. Those who had grown larger described professionalizing management as one of their hardest and most important transitions.
Everyone starts as a newsroom
Nearly every outlet launched editorial-heavy, sometimes with a staff composed entirely of journalists, and gradually “diluted” toward a stable range of roughly 50 to 75 percent editorial as the business matured.
For many journalist-founders, this required overcoming a deeply held instinct about what the organization was for. Journalism was not simply the most important function; it was the only fully legitimate activity. Particularly at the beginning, spending scarce money on anything other than another reporter could feel wasteful, even faintly sacrilegious. Eventually, however, the relevant question changed: would the next journalist strengthen the organization more than its first product manager, salesperson or growth specialist?
Hiring beyond the newsroom often enabled more journalism, not less. Several ventures began to thrive only after building the commercial, technological and organizational capacity around their editorial work. What initially looked like diverting resources from the mission became the means of expanding it.
Figure 19›Editorial vs non-editorial staff
Share of headcount, from the profiles; ~ marks ranges shown at their midpointMediapart, now one of the study’s most financially successful outlets, initially had a blind spot regarding this transition and nearly died from it. It launched with twenty-four reporters and six other staff. Its founders later admitted that they had “completely underestimated the importance of having marketing and technical teams internally at the heart of the editorial process.” Within a year, shareholders imposed an emergency action plan and provided a second funding round. After Mediapart built its non-newsroom functions, its fortunes changed; it now operates at roughly a 50/50 ratio.
A further variation appears when organizations expand internationally. Zetland began with a strong editorial team, then deliberately added product, technology, growth and administrative capacity. Its CEO, Tav Klitgaard, came from technology and product management rather than journalism.
That diversification now allows the pattern to reverse. When Zetland enters a new country, the local venture can recruit predominantly editorial staff because technology, product infrastructure and administration already exist at the center. The subsidiary hires what must remain local: journalism, editorial judgment and audience relationships. Expensive, repeatable functions are shared across the group.
From a handful to a hundred
Almost nobody in this sample started with anything resembling a company. Half of the outlets we surveyed launched with fewer than ten effective full-time staff, and most with under twenty. The handful that started bigger, with roughly twenty to more than forty staff, either brought a ready-made newsroom with them or launched with unusually large capital.
A decade or so later, roughly half of the sample now employs more than seventy-five people, and six outlets have passed one hundred and twenty-five, with the largest exceeding two hundred. Only four report twenty staff or fewer, and for at least some of them, staying small is a strategy rather than a stall.
You cannot see the wall until you hit it
The difficulty of adding staff is not linear. Founders who grew beyond one hundred employees described two breakpoints in very similar terms.
The first arrives at roughly 30–40 staff. Startup mode (everybody knows everyone, everyone is involved in everything, and every problem can be solved with a phone call) stops working. Responsibilities must be formally divided. The second arrives around 60–80 staff, when a genuine middle-management layer with defined roles becomes necessary.
“The first two steps are horrible and very hard,” CORRECTIV’s David Schraven told us. Converting a hands-on collective into an organization with systems took several years. “But when you have these systems in place,” he said, “then the next step is quite easier.”
Jean-Christophe Boulanger of Contexte mapped almost the same terrain: fluid up to about 30 people, an executive committee at 30–40, and explicit processes at 80–100. Esther Alonso Rodríguez of elDiario.es described the transition from the other side: “All of a sudden you realize that you’re too big and you cannot call just anyone. You have to call the right person.”
These walls are dangerous because they become visible only after the organization reaches them. At the thresholds, several founders found that adding an employee initially increased total workload because the organization lacked the structures needed to absorb the hire.
Three reasons hiring is hard for media ventures
Across the sample, hiring problems clustered into three categories: the cost of non-editorial talent, the absence of relevant expertise, and weak hiring processes.
Pay
Most journalism startups begin with limited resources, but founders can sometimes persuade journalists to accept below-market salaries by offering a compelling mission and the chance to build something new. Experienced developers, product managers and salespeople are usually less flexible. They have better-paid alternatives, often in a global labor market.
This makes early non-editorial hires particularly difficult. An organization may be able to afford another reporter but not a strong developer or product leader. The financial constraint is reinforced by the editorial culture described above, in which spending outside the newsroom can be perceived as wasteful.
Expertise
Many ventures began developing subscriptions, memberships and other audience-revenue models before these approaches were widespread in their markets. There were often no experienced audience-revenue or growth specialists who understood funnels, retention or pricing in a publishing context.
Sometimes the necessary skills existed under different names and in different industries. One outlet found an effective leader for its consumer revenue operations in the former founder of an online dating platform. He did not come from journalism, but understood customer relationships: how to structure and price an offer, introduce paid access and identify what users would pay for.
Successful outlets learned to recruit for underlying capabilities rather than conventional media credentials. They also learned to search beyond journalism, something newsroom-centered organizations do not always do naturally.
Process
Many ventures began without an HR function, clearly defined roles or consistent assessment criteria. Hiring depended on founder instinct and enthusiasm for individual candidates.
One interviewee recalled a chief executive hiring people because he had “seen a spark” in them. The problem, he said, was that the organization needed someone with specific skills, “not the spark.” Years later, it was still dealing with problems created by those early decisions.
Hiring requires defining the role, identifying the capabilities missing from the team and assessing whether a candidate can perform the work. A promising personality is not a substitute for a staffing plan.
Several outlets responded to missing talent by creating their own pipelines. Internship programs worked best when treated as long-term training and selection systems rather than sources of cheap labor. At one organization, roughly 70 percent of interns later became employees. Others reported that many senior journalists had entered through internships. Where the labor market could not supply the people a novel model required, successful outlets helped create them.
Sustainability as culture
Many editorially successful news organizations operate with a powerful division of responsibility: journalism is the real work, while the organization’s financial fortunes are someone else’s problem. The survivors in this sample managed to break that assumption. They built cultures in which financial sustainability was understood as every employee’s responsibility, not something delegated to a commercial department, fundraiser or lone executive.
Their mechanisms were very different and sometimes based on opposing philosophies.
Figure 20›Four ways to make sustainability everyone’s job
Mechanisms found across the cohort, sometimes based on opposing philosophiesConversion-linked pay
Denník N developed the best-known version, linking part of journalists’ compensation to the subscriptions generated by their articles. The variable component is around 5-10 percent of a journalist’s salary.
Its architect, Tomáš Bella, argues that the purpose was cultural rather than financial: “We created the culture of journalists caring about the conversions and caring about the results ... every single day and every single hour of their working life. And the fact that we are paying bonuses based on that is part of why they care.”
The group also produced something close to a natural experiment. A sister outlet in a neighboring market resisted conversion-linked compensation for years, adopted it only under financial pressure, and then began growing rapidly.
An internal stock market
Contexte created an employee holding entity through which any staff member with at least six months’ tenure can buy real shares during an annual purchasing window. The price follows a fixed valuation formula, and the company can lend employees the money needed to participate. Staff now collectively own about 6 percent of the business.
The founder describes the arrangement not as fundraising but as a mechanism for ownership, alignment and retention. Employees can watch the company’s value change, choose whether to invest further and share in the value they help create.
Several other founders considered employee share plans, and some were developing them. One outlet bought back more than 15 percent of its shares partly to seed an employee ownership scheme. Others rejected the idea, fearing that unequal ownership would create internal hierarchies, power struggles and disputes over entitlement.
Employee ownership is therefore not a consensus solution. Contexte represents its most developed form in the sample; elsewhere, founders considered similar questions and reached the opposite conclusion.
Engineered cross-functional alignment
Several outlets embedded sustainability in organizational routines rather than pay. Business, product and technology staff attend editorial meetings, while journalists participate in discussions about audiences, products, costs and revenue. Shared workspaces and cross-functional meetings are deliberate.
At Chora & Will Media, every proposed project passes through a review involving editorial, operational and commercial leaders. They consider its editorial positioning, production requirements, cost and revenue potential before deciding whether it should launch. The purpose is not to give commercial staff authority over journalism, but to make sure editorial and financial thinking happens in the same rooms.
Radical target transparency
The leanest mechanism requires neither bonuses nor shares. Some organizations publish monthly growth targets internally and give every employee access to performance data.
“Anyone can log in and see how we’re doing against the target. There’s literally a line,” explained Joshi Herrmann of Mill Media. A strong investigation is no longer understood only as an editorial success. Staff can see that it generated twenty subscribers, what those subscriptions are worth, and how the revenue helps pay salaries and fund the next investigation.
Transparent or egalitarian compensation
Some organizations explicitly rejected performance pay. Mediapart uses three transparent, seniority-based salary grids, published on its website, yet expresses the same underlying philosophy: “It’s everyone’s business to have a sustainable business model.”
One outlet goes further, operating a flat “unity wage” in which employees receive the same salary. Responsibility and seniority are recognized through additional vacation rather than higher pay.
These systems can look contradictory: individual bonuses versus equal salaries, employee shares versus deliberate non-ownership, yet they serve the same purpose. They make it difficult for employees to believe that sustainability is someone else’s job. The editorial mission remains central, but financing that mission becomes part of the organization’s common work.