Every other chapter in this report was written for people who invest in, fund or run independent news ventures. This one is for the people who write the rules they operate under.
On 1 July 2019, Zetland’s recurring revenue rose by roughly a fifth, not because of a spectacular crowdfunding campaign or a groundbreaking investigation. Denmark had exempted digital news subscriptions from VAT, placing them on the same footing as print. Zetland, which had advocated for the change alongside other digital publishers, simply kept its prices.
Elsewhere, the same distinction cost publishers dearly. Mediapart lost millions and elDiario.es hundreds of thousands in disputes over the tax treatment of digital journalism. In Hungary, meanwhile, a digital news subscription can still carry 27 percent VAT while print benefits from rates between zero and five percent.
If you set VAT rates, company law, employment taxes, public financing schemes or legal protections, you help determine the conditions under which every news business in your jurisdiction operates. You may never invest a euro in a newsroom and still have more influence over its economics than many investors do.
Our starting point is not that governments should “save journalism.” Markets still finance a considerable amount of public-interest information, and the ventures in this report are evidence of that: audiences pay, advertisers still spend, founders build businesses and some become highly profitable.
But markets, to understate things ever so slightly, do not work perfectly. Some socially valuable information is difficult to finance commercially. New entrants may face long paths to sustainability. Investigative journalism creates benefits far beyond the people paying for it. And sometimes policy itself makes things worse: by taxing digital journalism more heavily than print, making formal employment prohibitively expensive or forcing founders to invent legal structures that the law does not provide.
So our policy question is simple: where is the production or distribution of public-interest information failing, and what is the least distortive intervention that could make it work better?
Rules the founders wrote for themselves
Unlike in most sectors, the ceiling on financial returns is often set by the company itself.
Recorder’s founders ensured that surpluses were either reinvested in journalism or transferred into a resilience reserve, now large enough to finance roughly two years of operations. Contexte operates under the French entreprise solidaire de presse d’information status, which allows it to receive tax-advantaged support while limiting dividend distributions to 30 percent of profits.
Where no suitable legal form exists, founders repeatedly recreate the same result themselves through reinvestment requirements, dividend caps and no-distribution pledges inside otherwise conventional commercial companies.
Sixteen of the twenty-one organizations in our cohort identify legally as for-profit businesses. Yet eighteen told us that founders or investors had never taken dividends. In practice, many look less like conventional profit-maximizing companies than social enterprises whose commercial activity serves a public-interest mission.
The parameters set by the state
VAT is only one example of a seemingly technical rule with a major effect on viability.
Another comes from Romania, Hungary and Poland, where taxpayers can direct part of their income tax to eligible nonprofits. Recorder receives the majority of its financial support through this mechanism. The money is public, but the state does not choose the recipient: individual citizens do. That makes it relatively cheap, decentralized and resistant to editorial interference.
Some jurisdictions also provide financing that behaves very differently from commercial debt. The Dutch Journalism Fund (SVDJ) has offered both grants and subsidized loans to media ventures, including outlets in our cohort. In France, IFCIC, a lender for cultural industries in which the state is a minority shareholder, has provided loans and guarantees to news businesses that conventional banks might consider too risky.
Public media policy should also include loans, guarantees and other patient financing alongside grants. A sensible public capital stack might combine grants for genuinely unfinanceable early risks, concessional debt once repayment becomes plausible and guarantees that encourage conventional lenders to enter the market.
The cost of employing people
Journalism is an intensely labour-heavy business. Across our cohort, people commonly account for 50 to 75 percent of costs.
Especially early on, many ventures therefore relied heavily on freelancers, sole traders and other contractual arrangements because conventional employment was simply too expensive. The pattern is so widespread that statutory accounts sometimes show implausibly low personnel expenses, while much of the real labour cost appears under external services.
Where governments helped reduce employment costs, founders used the opportunity. French apprenticeship support is one example; elsewhere, internships and subsidized training programmes became important talent pipelines.
Legal threats are an economic issue
Several Central and Eastern European outlets in our cohort created multiple legal entities partly to isolate valuable assets from potential claims.
Dossier experienced the danger directly when Austrian energy company OMV sued it. The organization successfully crowdfunded its defence and, remarkably, gained around 3,000 members in the process, roughly doubling its membership. It is a great survival story and a terrible policy model: not every newsroom threatened with ruin will turn the attack into a successful fundraising campaign.
The EU Anti-SLAPP Directive was due to be transposed into national law in May 2026, yet many member states missed the deadline and fourteen subsequently received infringement notices from the European Commission.
A publisher that must maintain cash reserves, multiple companies and permanent legal readiness because a single abusive case could destroy it operates in a fundamentally different market from one protected by effective procedural safeguards.