Independent publishers showcasing different business models in Portugal

Portugal is a small country, but it has three journalism platforms as part of Reference – the European Independent Media Circle. They give hope to all journalists and everyone who wants to see a different way of doing information. What are they? What have been their achievements? What have they done that was successful?

There is a point in common to these three platforms. All the representatives mention the fact that in Portugal there is no robust system of structured public or philanthropic funding for journalism, even though they have been encouraging and requesting its creation. There are no national grants, no structural support grants, no public funding.

With the absence of this support, platforms have had difficulties in raising financing that allows them to consider themselves sustainable. Sustainability is still a path that each one is taking – but in very different ways. From structural grants, to hundreds of contributors, and even business groups, let’s look at the three in more detail.

Mensagem, for local stories

Mensagem is a news outlet dedicated to the city of Lisbon, born out of the interest in local journalism on the part of a group of journalists in 2020. The outlet is owned by a group of partners, one of the partners – the outlet’s largest financier – being a business group from the city of Lisbon. This group is not part of any other media, but “wanted to invest in the sustainability of a journalism that is different and more connected to the city”, explains Catarina Carvalho – co-founder, director, and journalist of Mensagem – to The Fix Media.

In addition, the outlet seeks funding from a variety of other sources. On the one hand, it has already received several grants, namely from the project LocalMedia4Democracy, EEA Grants, Facebook Journalism Project, and Google News Initiative. On the other hand, it has also managed to arrange financing through projects with companies and public and cultural institutions from the city.

“This idea of having a journalism that can be sustainable through its communities – not just people, also through companies and associations that live in the city – is important. Journalism having an audience is a concern we have.”: Carvalho states, while critiquing foundations. She considers that there are few foundations supporting local journalism, “because they think it doesn’t have an international impact”. Yet, she believes that this idea is likely to be softened in the near future, taking into account that it is increasingly clear that people are making a divorce from journalism, as they need another type of stories and impact on their lives. “There are many foundations still very focused on the pure and hard investigation, and the truth is that there is a large mass of the population for whom it does not mean much, because it continues to be an elitist journalism, on political, economic, the great finance etc. issues – valid and important, but other media already do this, and the stories that no one tells about underprivileged communities remain in the shadows. So, Mensagem decided to do another type of journalism, more focused on people and the base of society.”

Local journalism is severely lacking in Portugal. In addition to the difficulty of not having public funding dedicated to journalism in Portugal, the large media outlets (which are based in Lisbon, the capital) also do not cover local events, Carvalho regrets. Sheis pleased that in Mensagem they “have proved that there are so many local stories that are universal, because there are issues that connect to each other, especially in urban life”.

With a team of seven full-time and three part-time people, Mensagem’s website, publishing an average of one story per day, reaches between 200 and 400 thousand readers per month. There are around 500 people contributing financially currently.

Fumaça, for long investigations

Fumaça is an investigative journalism newsroom that mainly publishes narrative works in audio, started in 2016. It is independent and non-profit, seeking to be financed by the recurring monthly contributions from its audience – which currently cover 39% of its total monthly budget of €22,720. The community – those who contribute monthly – is made up of around 1,900 people.

The rest of the budget has been covered mostly by structural support grants, which is precisely the type of grants that the organisation looks for, Maria Almeida – co-founder and journalist of Fumaça – tells The Fix Media, as they are the sources that finance much of the newsroom and operations. So far the organisation has received a total of six structural grants to support independent journalism.

The platform currently has a team of seven full-time and two part-time people, with a newsletter with 12,500 subscribers, and between 15 and 20 thousand plays per episode. The last investigative series they published was released in November 2022, and they are working on three series to be released. Therefore, when launching series, they try to “capitalise as much as possible” to increase the number of contributors – and this has happened with great success. Almeida explains that public events and exclusive offers to the community (such as the series premiere and listening parties) – taking into account that all journalism itself is free for everyone – worked very well.

Furthermore, it is equally important to know how to keep people in the community during periods when new content is not released. To this end they have developed some strategies, particularly exclusive events for the community (such as question sessions with experts, and discussion clubs), with which the team realised they can make people get along with each other – “to be a community, it needs to survive without us”, she says. Thus the team has managed to maintain the vast majority of the community. “But the main reason people contribute is still because they want our journalism to continue.”

With the structural grant Fumaça obtained in 2023 from the philanthropic foundation Limelight, the organisation will have a secure budget probably until the end of 2025. But even without grants, the project would not die, because of the contributions, which would enable them to survive by switching to part time. And we can all know the budget numbers because Fumaça is radically transparent in its management: budgets and contracts are free to consult. “What started as a value has also become a good marketing tool, because you establish a very trusting relationship with people, it is a policy that we have nothing to hide. Every time we make a post about our radical transparency, we garner a lot of contributions,” Almeida reveals.

Divergente, for deep stories

Divergente is a digital magazine of narrative, long-form, multimedia journalism created in 2014. It is a nonprofit that does not accept advertisements, financing themselves mainly through funds that support independent journalism. With the help of a big structural grant they got in 2021 from the philanthropic initiative Civitates, they managed to grow into a professional newsroom with four people working full-time.

In these ten years, the organisation developed ten big projects with the support of many non-governmental organisations, of universities, investigative journalism grants, and of the European Data Journalism Network as well.

Diogo Cardoso and Sofia da Palma Rodrigues, the co-founders, appeared on the podcast The Journalism Value Loop, from Reference, where they explained the hard work it has been to obtain financing to develop their reports. “This kind of journalism is only possible if there is philanthropy and grants that go beyond direct support from the public, especially in Portugal, where the audience is very small”. They are indeed “still highly dependent on structural and reporting grants”, however, since these are not easily available, they have been trying other approaches to diversify the sources of revenue, from public presentations of the subjects they cover, in association with cultural centres, to partnerships with universities (giving classes, and adapting PhD thesis to journalism features).

In 2023, Divergente had 3,493 subscribers to its newsletter, an average of 1,412 unique visitors to the website per month, and a total of 172 donors, with an annual budget of 203,000€. This year is a challenging one for the organisation, since they do not have a budget assured for the whole year yet. If they do not find more revenue, they will have to reduce their activity. However, they say that the main thing they have learned from all this process is to “not go after revenue as a goal to support your project, because you could probably end up doing stuff you do not want to”. They suggest first to define what you wish to do and only then to direct your efforts to find revenue for that. At this moment, Cardoso and Rodrigues say they are focused on doing good journalism, and then they will work a lot to find support for that work.

This article looked at three projects that have produced a lot of information and have strong prospects of continuing to do so. As we saw, the majority of the money that supports the work of these creators comes from outside Portugal. Therefore, they argue that it would be important for the country to implement, once and for all, support for independent journalism, so that all professionals could diversify their sources of income.

“Nowadays, most of the big mainstream media in Portugal are owned by private companies, which are applying cuts and strategies to the newsrooms that have a high impact on the information. How do you guarantee your independence when you depend on advertisements, companies, paid articles etc.? So [the issue of state funding threatening independence] is an outdated question, we can guarantee independence [while getting state funds]”, Divergente‘s co-founders say. They argue the state must have a direct social responsibility to support that journalism is a guarantee of accountability for power structures – “if journalism is a pillar of democracy, that has probably never been more at stake than it is nowadays”.In reality, they instance that in Europe there are state-funded reference newspapers, and examples of advanced democracies where journalism is receiving money from the state. “We need to decide, to push for structural changes of policies to implement state-funded grants.” This applies even more so in a country whose market is pronounced by extreme resistance to paying for digital news on the part of consumers.

Source of the cover photo: Fumaça’s newsroom by Fumaça

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