Navigating nonprofit journalism

Editor’s note: we are republishing a version of the note that previously appeared as a special edition of The Fix Media’s flagship newsletter. Subscribe to get everything you need to know about the European media market every Monday, along with monthly special reports.

As publishers are struggling to monetise news, there’s been growing interest in the nonprofit model. The idea is that high-quality journalism is a public good that either cannot be monetised commercially at all or would suffer under commercial incentives. 

For investigative outlets the incentive to embrace the nonprofit model is especially strong: investigative reporting takes a lot of resources and is hard to monetise on its own. The biggest publishers can afford to subsidise it thanks to more lucrative verticals, but investigative-only news organisations have a much harder time finding money.

Earlier this year I wrote for The Fix about Mother Jones, an American nonprofit magazine that found success as “the only reader-supported, investigative, national news outlet in America”. In Europe, Correctiv is one of the most successful nonprofit investigative newsrooms. 

In some countries embracing the nonprofit model is a necessity because the commercial market hardly exists. As Veronika Snoj reported for The Fix, independent Russian newsrooms in exile are increasingly morphing from companies to NGOs. Advertisers are few and far between, and crowdfunding among Russians would put the audiences at risk. “I think that independent Russian journalism has no other option now but to operate as non-commercial projects”, Lola Tagayeva, founder of independent outlet Verstka, told The Fix. 

There are a lot of problems that plague nonprofit outlets, even in peaceful democratic countries. Many European countries could use learning from the American experience in setting up a legal framework that would support nonprofit media.

One thing Europe is definitely better at is having robust public broadcasters – a separate category of media organisations that aren’t supposed to be driven by commercial incentives. Yet, they too are getting impacted by cost-cutting measures and populistic measures that risk defunding them or undermining their independence from the government. Inspiring successful examples exist, but there’s a lot of work to be done.

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