When Chora Media started in 2020, expansion was already the founding idea. One founder came from cinema; the plan was to build journalism as intellectual property (podcasts first) and carry the stories onto screens and stages. Today the holding places Chora & Will Media alongside Be Water Film and Be Water Live: the newsroom generates the IP, the sister companies repurpose it for cinema, television and live production, and IP already contributes a visible 8 percent of revenue. Mediapart has produced three documentaries and launched its own video-on-demand platform; its Sarkozy–Gaddafi film drew more than 100,000 people into French cinemas and earned around €100,000 in the first year of exploitation. Its GM calls this “experimenting”: subscriptions still account for 99 percent of revenue. CORRECTIV and Dossier transform their investigations into plays that tour German and Austrian theaters. If the first fifteen years of this cohort were about building newsrooms, the direction of the next fifteen is already visible in what the strongest publishers are building around them.
Others expand across the map. Denník N entered the Czech Republic in 2018 through a joint venture with local investors and a local team rather than by exporting itself, then got involved in two properties there, and then acquired the Brussels-based EUobserver from its cash reserves in February 2026, the largest acquisition by a cohort member, though exact figures haven’t been disclosed. Contexte recently launched its Brussels edition, also financed from cash flow.
Zetland, now majority-owned by Bonnier News, expands country by country through local subsidiaries and local teams: joint ventures in Finland and Norway have launched, and Germany may follow. Austria’s JETZT, by contrast, licenses Zetland’s technology without becoming a Zetland company.
It does not automatically work. De Correspondent tried to export its celebrated Dutch brand into a global English edition, The Correspondent, and failed while the original continued to thrive; Chora & Will Media considered exporting its model to other countries, but decided it is not a priority right now.
Within national borders, the road has been smoother: elDiario.es built scale across Spain through seventeen regional entities (fourteen are joint ventures with local journalists or newsrooms), while Mill Media grew from one city to seven, with the older titles individually profitable. Tsüri is also attempting to transplant its own model in Switzerland and helped launch WNTI, the Winterthur city magazine.
Many in this cohort have tried to build a software business adjacent to journalism, and most did not succeed. The exceptions share one feature: separation from the newsroom.
Denník N’s engagement / CRM platform REMP runs under other publishers, but to make it genuinely commercial the company bought into a software company, FatChilli, rather than productizing in-house. Zetland built a transcription tool for its own journalists, spun it off as Good Tape, and sold the company. And Steady grew out of Krautreporter’s need for membership infrastructure that simply did not exist when it launched, built by co-founder Sebastian Esser and Philipp Schwörbel as a separate company from the start, convinced it could never work inside a newsroom. What technology did and did not do for this cohort has a dedicated section of its own in the report.
Acquisitions are largely missing, at least at scale. Perhaps that reflects the sector, the cohort’s relative youth or its focus on sustainability rather than sheer size: profitable though many are, few have become large enough to make headline-grabbing purchases. Contexte has made two acquisitions, together costing roughly €100,000: an EU-politics site bought mainly for its email database, and a software company acquired for its media-monitoring product.
Mediapart, characteristically, has deployed its surplus in the opposite direction, financially supporting its foundation (around €100,000 a year) that helps other outlets launch, without seeking any financial return (€600,000 will be distributed in 2026). Others are experimenting with physical spaces: El Orden Mundial is renovating a Madrid bookstore as an events venue, while CORRECTIV is considering a chain of local coffee shops.
Across all these vectors, the bets remain small and have so far been financed largely from cash flow. It may take much of the next fifteen years to discover which of them will deliver.