We began this report by asking “Who in their right mind starts a media company in Europe?” and if you read through our study you should have a clear idea. But since we are primarily writing for people who control resources (investors, family offices, philanthropies, fund managers, policymakers), we should end with the mirror image of that first question: who in their right mind invests in a media business and are you potentially one of them?
Here is what we learned.
You need to be rich enough that parting with a few hundred thousand euros is not a life event. We did not map the personal assets of every investor in our cohort, but most appear comfortably wealthy, and some have nine-figure fortunes. This matters because while the tickets are modest, the holding periods are long. Many of the people we interviewed effectively wrote the money off when they invested it. This sector is usually not financed by people investing their pension and needing a return within a few years.
You also need to be civic-minded. That does not mean the investors in our sample were indifferent to financial returns; several made good ones. But it does mean the investments only made sense once financial return was combined with impact: supporting a newsroom producing public-interest journalism.
You need to be prepared to own a piece of a venture without controlling its most important decisions. Editorial independence was non-negotiable across this cohort. Investors could advise, sit on boards, ask difficult questions, maybe demand better financial discipline and occasionally rescue the company. But they could never decide what got published.
Which is why you should also have some tolerance for pain. While no self-respecting information venture will give you editorial control, plenty of politicians, businesspeople and angry readers will assume you have it anyway. You’ll get the calls, complaints and political pressure without having any power to make them stop.
If that does not sound like you, it does not mean you cannot participate. Pooled investment and funding vehicles now exist that did not when most of this cohort launched. They can spread risk, create distance between the underlying investor and the newsroom and provide professional governance around money that might otherwise be difficult to deploy.
You are betting on a person
A new newsroom has very little in terms of conventional collateral. It may have no assets, modest revenue and an uncertain market. What it often has is an editor its reporters trust, and journalists audiences already know and follow. That accumulated standing was enormously important in this cohort. Journalism is a trust business, and trust builds slowly, over time. You, the investor, are betting on a person, or a group of people, you believe can build the thing.
But you should also consider Khadija Patel’s contribution to this report pointing out that “known,” “proven” and “credible” are not neutral categories.
Money flows through relationships and relationships reflect existing hierarchies. If you always finance the founder who already resembles the previous generation of media owners and editors, you will reproduce the previous generation. Our own cohort is hardly a showcase of demographic diversity.
The first euro matters most until people become the bottleneck
If you are in a position to decide where in the lifecycle of news ventures to invest, our strongest argument would be for the beginning.
Institutional investors usually want evidence that the venture works, but the venture needs money to produce that evidence. The first check is often written personally, on very incomplete information, which makes early capital both the scarcest and potentially the most catalytic. Google’s DNI and the French FINP showed up multiple times in the study because they were willing to finance infrastructure and experimentation unusually early. There is much less of that money around today.
Crowdfunding has also become less reliable as a substitute. It can still validate demand and generate attention, but it increasingly behaves like an expensive acquisition campaign rather than dependable founding finance.
Later, however, money stops being the only constraint. If you are financing growth, ask whether the company can actually hire the people your capital is supposed to pay for. Audience-revenue specialists who understand retention, funnels, pricing and publishing remain scarce. Capital that cannot be converted into capability will not produce growth.
Match the capital to the ambition
Both founders and investors need to be honest about what they are trying to build.
You can launch a small, sustainable newsroom with very little money. Several companies in this study started with almost nothing, hired slowly, kept costs tied to revenue and reached break-even quickly. That is a perfectly legitimate strategy. If your ambition is to build a twelve-person boutique organization producing excellent work in a defined market, you may never need much external capital.
But if your ambition is to build a hundred- or two-hundred-person institution, enter new markets, develop product or technology seriously and swallow competitors, you will probably need outside money.
The larger companies in our study either started with substantial capital or raised outside money later. We found very little evidence for the magical pitch in which €50,000 somehow becomes a €10 million media company through retained cash flow alone.
So if you are asking for money, connect the amount to the ambition and if you are investing, do not congratulate yourself for funding a growth plan at a level that makes the growth impossible.
A newsroom meant to be lean is great, but a newsroom meant to scale usually needs to be financed, with millions of euros.
Look at capital efficiency
If you come from technology, recalibrate your expectations. While scale and growth in this sector may be limited, capital deployed tends to be very efficient.
Some have built businesses generating several million or tens of millions of euros in annual revenue without repeatedly returning to shareholders for another financing round and diluting ownership. Once mature, several companies financed investments, expansions, acquisitions and even shareholder exits from their own balance sheets.
While exits happen, the media sector is hardly a super liquid market. The eventual buyer was almost always the company itself, the founders or employees, not some mega strategic investor.
If you invest, put the boring machinery into the shareholder agreement: buyback rights, valuation mechanisms, processes for a founder or investor who eventually wants to leave. Because the holding period is usually “a very long time,” succession planning is critical; even inheritance provisions may be necessary.
Optimize for self-sufficiency, not growth
There is another adjustment you may need to make if you come from conventional startup investing: most of these ventures are not optimizing for maximum growth followed by an exit. They are optimizing for self-sufficiency, independence and the ability to keep publishing indefinitely. Break-even is not an intermediate milestone on the way to something more exciting; it is often the very thing being built.
That also explains why founders took surprisingly little capital and surrendered surprisingly little control. They generally raised what they needed to get to sustainability, not whatever the market was willing to give them. Where the initial capital requirement was very high, it was usually because the founders wanted a substantial newsroom on day one, not because journalism inherently requires millions before it can break even.
You’ll need to gate some content
If you are running an audience-funded information venture, we would also encourage you to get over some of your discomfort with paywalls, gating and exclusivity.
Nathan J. Robinson captured the strongest objection in the title of his 2020 essay: The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free. Tradeoffs exist: public-interest journalism creates value far beyond the people who can pay for it, and restricting access can reduce reach.
But you should not turn that real tension into a false choice between impact and revenue.
Look at some of the most influential journalistic institutions in the world. The New York Times and Financial Times charge for access and still shape public debate far beyond their subscriber bases. The same is true, at a smaller scale, across this cohort.
That does not mean you need to put every article behind a hard wall. Your mission, audience and market should determine the tactics, and this report is not a manual for deciding whether article number four or article number seven should trigger the barrier. But if paying you gives a reader exactly the same thing as not paying you, you are making the revenue problem unnecessarily difficult. Create a transaction somewhere; it will not destroy the impact of your journalism.
Shielding ventures from the market
If you sit on the board of a foundation or run a public funding program, there is another lesson we hope you take from these companies: grants can work extraordinarily well. They launched several businesses in this study, bought runway, financed technology, paid for audience infrastructure and absorbed risks that commercial capital would not touch.
You should absolutely do more of that. But remember that every grant shields its recipient from the market to some extent.
Sometimes that is exactly what society needs. A Belarusian newsroom in exile cannot be told to find product-market fit with an audience whose country it cannot safely operate in. Some journalism is structurally uncommercial and should be subsidized if we want it to exist.
But if you are supporting a publisher operating in a (semi-)functioning European market with a plausible path toward revenue, think carefully about what your funding encourages.
If six-figure core support arrives every year regardless of whether the product improves, audiences grow, prices make sense or the organization becomes better managed, you can end up financing insulation rather than independence. You can protect an organization not only from failure but from the essential feedback that might have made it stronger.
Civic returns on investment
In 2024, 444 published the story of a presidential pardon that Hungary’s government had hoped nobody would find. The president resigned, then the former justice minister, and the affair arguably began the unraveling of a government voted out of office in 2026. Mediapart’s investigations have ended ministerial careers and put a former president on trial. CORRECTIV’s reporting on a secret deportation plan put hundreds of thousands of Germans in the streets. Dossier, Recorder and the rest have done, in their own markets, the work that is the reason the phrase “public-interest journalism” exists.
This report is very intentionally focused on the money, but you should not leave it without the other half. We cannot put a clean euro value on the civic return, but it is certainly not zero.
If you are maximizing financial return and nothing else, this is probably not your sector. There are opportunities far less messy. But if you are a family office, an impact investor, an entrepreneur who has already made more money than you are likely to spend, or a foundation willing to use different forms of capital for different problems, you are in the right place.
On financial and civic return together, these are among the most successful ventures we can think of: they built durable institutions, paid their backers back, and changed their countries on the way.
The dictionary that is Capital Stacks
The last thing we have come to believe is that much of what stands between this sector and money is shared vocabulary.
Journalists have their jargon and inherited assumptions; some are essential, some artifacts of an industry that no longer exists. Investors have theirs: runway, dilution, CAC, LTV, margins, multiples, exits. Some become misleading when applied mechanically to a business deliberately not trying to become a unicorn.
That translation was one of the reasons we started Capital Stacks of Journalism. People with resources kept telling us journalism was confusing, economically hopeless or simply not something they had ever thought about as requiring capital. Journalists, meanwhile, were often describing perfectly viable companies in the language of permanent crisis.
We began with an investor in Vienna telling us that they had never really thought about journalism costing money. We began, too, with our slightly flippant line that investing in journalism is not always like setting your money on fire. After spending eight months and more than 1,500 hours on the topic we can make the claim a little more confidently.
Sometimes the money comes back, several times over. Sometimes the company uses the money to buy the investor out and goes on existing without them. And in the meantime, the investment has helped create an institution that employs people, informs the public, investigates power and can survive without returning every year to ask for another check.
Who in their right mind would invest in that?
Hopefully you, and generally a lot more people than currently do.