The big change in European media investing over the last few years is the end of venture funding. There were big bets in Europe—Brut, The News Movement, Freeda, Tortoise Media—which broadly haven’t played out. There were giant bets in the US—Vice, Vox, Buzzfeed—which were bloodbaths. And if the US continues to spend big—Puck taking investment at $250M, Semafor raising at $330M, the Free Press acquired for $150M in 2025—that trend is over on this side of the Atlantic. In Europe at least, the bets are off.
For ten years I worked at what we—North Base Media—thought was the premier venture firm for media. We invested around the world—South East Asia, Latin America, India, the Middle East—because there the media pie was growing. Growing middle classes, with better education, better information, and booming youth populations meant we could bet on building giant generational media businesses quickly.
Venture Capital has a peculiar financial model. Given so many of your investments fail, and because the best of your investments keep raising money and diluting your initial stake, it’s not enough to work towards moderate successes where you double or treble your investment. The way venture funds make money is by hitting home runs—where you return 50-100 times your original investment. It’s called the power law.
We never invested in Europe, because the media pie was shrinking: to build a big media business you would have to do it at the expense of someone else. That was a tough sell a decade ago, but today, it’s a non-starter. The market has shrunk so much that it’s almost inconceivable any media investment in Europe could return 50-100X. To run a venture capital model, you have to believe every one of your investments could be that unicorn. The power law, in other words, is inapplicable to European journalism.
But over a decade investing with North Base Media around the world, I kept on coming across fascinating European media startups—B2B biotech newsletters, Zillennial reimaginings of the Economist, feminist creator-economy social platforms—that were never going to become El País or Le Figaro, but were doing great work and growing towards sustainability and profit.
From time to time I made tiny ‘angel’ investments into those that seemed interesting. Amongst them, Message Heard, founded by an old Vice reporter—a podcast company doing great reporting work they funded by working for others like al-Jazeera and the Evening Standard. Checkstep, founded by a theoretical mathematician, which does content moderation at giant scale. Kessel—France’s answer to Substack. The Mill, which you’ve read about here, and is reinventing local journalism. I even tried to build a syndicate to invest in Zetland, but Bonnier offered a far better future for the company.
Two things strike me as I look at the full list of my investments in European journalism. Firstly, almost all the founders were friends, or friends of friends—which means there’s lots more work to do to connect founders and media angels. And the second is how much pure ‘tech’ I have in what’s supposed to be a ‘journalism’ portfolio. It’s because there is no longer a hard edge between those worlds. I’m working now, for example, with a team building AI tools to investigate political candidates at scale. The tools are becoming integral to the content.
I invest in journalism (and the tech I think also counts as journalism) because I think it’s exciting—like billionaires who invest in films so they can rub shoulders with Hollywood. But it’s not just the journalism I find exciting—all those undiscovered stories brought to light, those bad guys caught, those first drafts of history being written, those governments and companies being held to account, those voters being informed, that democracy being supported... Cheekily, I also find the prospect of returns exciting. Investing in journalism makes me feel worthy and not-too-worthy at the same time. Which is exciting.
Because while these companies aren’t necessarily the kind of companies a big VC would back (note the absence of VCs on the cap tables of all but one of the companies in this book), the maths for a private investor like me is excellent. VCs have high fees which means they’re investing about 20% less than they collect from their investors; and they have high hurdles which means they have to aim for a 3X return of the total capital they onboarded; all the while investing in companies that are constantly raising more money and therefore diluting the original investment.
As a private investor, I don’t have fees, and I don’t have hurdles, and the companies I invest in aren’t going to be raising dozens of new rounds, so the maths swings in my favour. If I go in early enough, know the founders well enough, and can spend time and attention (which I have to think brings value) with those founders, I can limit my downside risk to losing fewer companies, and I can increase my upside risk of success. I don’t need a 50X to make me whole: I need to ensure not too many of my investments die, and that the others become smallish but perfectly formed companies that triple, quadruple or more in value over my investment period.
I’m sharing the basics to entice you who are reading me to join me. And I am sharing them now because I think the opportunity for investors like us is about to pop.
The switch from search (Google) to chat (Claude / ChatGPT) means the web is heading for extinction. Advertising revenue in digital media will collapse with it. For most big publishers who haven’t fully made the transition to subscriptions, that’s a catastrophe, and some of the big beasts of European journalism will die. The amount of revenue available to media in Europe is shrinking dramatically. But there lies the opportunity—because it’s much easier to become a medium-sized company starting as a small one than starting as a large one.
The businesses that replace the big beasts will be podcasts, email newsletters, live events, creator networks, activist media, games, AI tools, print magazines, webinars and audio meetups, and clubs—online and off. Many of them are going to be cheap to build, and—if they’re truly able to represent their audiences (in both senses of the word—as a mirror and a flag)—they’ll be cheap to grow.
They need small funds like the Media Forward Fund to incubate and accelerate them, and to put their founders in touch with each other so they can share best practice and ideas, and they need big ones like Pluralis to support them when they grow. They probably need more government support, in the shape of startup grants, non-onerous loans, and fiscal benefits to investors. And they will need more independents like us who believe that journalism is exciting both for its content and for its returns.