{"id":49267,"date":"2026-08-21T13:28:37","date_gmt":"2026-08-21T11:28:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/?p=49267"},"modified":"2026-08-21T13:28:41","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T11:28:41","slug":"independent-media-sustainability-central-asia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/kyrgyzstan\/independent-media-sustainability-central-asia\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cFollow the invoices\u201d: Marius Dragomir on how money shapes independent journalism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Independent journalism cannot survive on good journalism alone. Marius Dragomir, director of the Media and Journalism Research Center,<\/strong> speaks to Novastan English Editor-in-Chief Mathieu Lemoine about media capture, donor dependence, the transition from volunteer initiatives to professional newsrooms, the particular economics of Central Asian and exiled media, and the growing threat AI poses to specialist publications.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why good journalism does not guarantee financial survival<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Novastan: To begin, could you introduce yourself and the Media and Journalism Research Center to our readers? What questions have guided your work on media ownership, funding, policy and editorial independence?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Marius Dragomir, director of the Media and Journalism Research Center<\/a><\/em>: I am a journalist by training who ended up spending most of his career studying the economics and politics of journalism rather than practising it. I spent over a decade at the Open Society Foundations, where I ran the research and policy portfolio of the Program on Independent Journalism and edited comparative projects such as Television Across Europe<\/a><\/em> and Mapping Digital Media<\/a><\/em>, which covered 56 countries. I then directed the Center for Media, Data and Society at Central European University until it closed in 2022, and I founded the Media and Journalism Research Center that same year to continue that body of work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MJRC is an independent research centre funded through a mix of research grants, philanthropic contributions and commercial revenue. All profits are reinvested in research, and we accept no government money of any kind. That last point is not a slogan, but a methodological necessity. It is difficult to publish credible research on how governments capture media while taking money from governments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our main projects follow the links between ownership, influence, money and journalism. The State Media Monitor<\/a>, for example, maps the funding, governance and editorial autonomy of state and public media worldwide: in the 2025 edition, 606 outlets across 170 countries. The Media Influence Matrix examines, country by country, who actually shapes journalism: government and regulators, funders, and technology companies. The Global Media Finances Map<\/a> tracks the financial performance of some 24,000 media companies in around 60 countries. We also run a Media Capture Monitoring Report <\/a>with IPI in Vienna.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The question that has guided all of it is deceptively simple: who pays for journalism, through which channel, and what does that money buy?<\/em> Ownership registries and press-freedom rankings tell you part of the story. But influence over journalism is usually exercised through the accounting department, not the newsroom: through an advertising contract, a licence renewal, a printing bill, a tax audit, a grant condition. If you want to understand editorial independence, it is important to follow the invoices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Independent media are often evaluated primarily through the quality and public value of their journalism. Why does strong editorial work so often fail to produce financial sustainability?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Because quality and revenue are produced by two different organisational capacities, and most independent outlets have only invested in one of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Journalism was never really sold to audiences at cost. For most of the twentieth century, readers paid a fraction of the price of producing news, and advertisers covered the rest, in most cases not because they valued journalism, but because they had no cheaper way to reach an audience. Once they found one, that subsidy left, and it left permanently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What remains is a market in which attention, not quality, is the priced commodity. Nothing in that market rewards the six months of work behind an investigation more than it rewards a piece of aggregation produced in 20 minutes. In captured markets, the distortion is even blunter: the biggest buyer of advertising is often the state, and it is not buying attention at all, but compliance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We also have to remember that independent newsrooms are usually founded by journalists, for good reasons. But journalistic culture treats commercial work as slightly disreputable, something to be done reluctantly and by whoever has least to do. An outlet can win awards for a decade while nobody ever owns the revenue line.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Excellent journalism does not fail to produce sustainability. It simply does not produce it by itself<\/em>: it has to be converted into money by someone whose job that is, and that conversion is a professional skill, not a moral consequence of doing good work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What are the main structural weaknesses of the traditional media business model today? Are these problems fundamentally different for small, nonprofit or specialist publications than for large national media organisations?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The traditional model rested on three pillars that have all been removed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First, bundling: a newspaper sold sport, classifieds, weather, obituaries and investigative reporting in one package, and the profitable parts paid for the unprofitable ones. Digital distribution unbundled all of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Second, control of distribution: a printing press and a licence were expensive, which created a barrier to entry and a local monopoly. That barrier is gone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Third, direct access to the audience: publishers now reach most readers through intermediaries – search engines, social platforms, and increasingly AI assistants – that own the relationship, set the terms, and can change them overnight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For small, nonprofit and specialist publications, the diagnosis differs in important ways. Their weakness is not the collapse of a legacy model they never had; it is a structural overhead problem. There is a floor of institutional cost – legal compliance, accounting, fundraising, editorial management, security, technology – that does not shrink in proportion to the size of the newsroom. A five-person outlet carries almost the same administrative burden as a 50-person one and has one-tenth of the capacity to absorb it. That is why so many small outlets are structurally condemned to under-invest in the very functions that would make them sustainable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their advantages are real but narrow. They have low fixed costs, no legacy print infrastructure, no unionised back office and, very importantly, a defined and identifiable audience, which is the precondition for any direct revenue model. A specialist publication covering Central Asia knows exactly who its readers are and why they need it, in a way a general national daily no longer does.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Large national organisations face the opposite problem: they have the resources to build revenue capacity but are far more exposed to capture. They are big enough to be worth buying, worth pressuring and worth subsidising. Our financial analysis of Hungarian media companies, published in 2025, showed measurably how proximity to political power reshapes the financial outcomes of media firms<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Small outlets are rarely captured through acquisition: they are captured through starvation, or simply outlawed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Can readers and donors sustain independent media?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Your research has emphasised the importance of building a direct relationship between media outlets and their audiences. Under what conditions can memberships, subscriptions and reader donations provide a meaningful source of income? Why do these models succeed for some publications but fail for others?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Four conditions, in my experience, and the model tends to fail when any one of them is missing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One is a clearly bounded community. People do not pay for information, which is abundant. They pay for belonging, identity, or a service they cannot obtain elsewhere. Outlets serving a defined community – a profession, a diaspora, a region, a cause – convert far better than general-interest outlets, regardless of quality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Second is a market where paying is normal, safe and technically possible. This is the condition most often overlooked from Western Europe. In much of the world, small recurring online payments are unusual, card penetration is low, and, decisively, a domestic payment to an independent outlet leaves a traceable record. In an environment where an outlet may be declared extremist, asking readers to subscribe is asking them to accept a risk, not a price.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Third, an actual product. Membership is not a donation button. It is a set of obligations the outlet takes on: newsletters, events, access, data, community, a reason to renew. Many outlets adopt the vocabulary of membership without building the product, then conclude the model does not work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And finally, someone who owns it. The single strongest predictor is whether anybody is professionally responsible for the revenue relationship. For example, for-profit European digital natives derive their main revenue from advertising, website subscriptions and grants, in that order, while nonprofits rely on grants, individual donations and membership. Legal form shapes the achievable revenue mix more than most founders expect at the moment they register the organisation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where these models fail, it is usually for one of three reasons: the audience is large but poor or dispersed; the outlet asks for money without changing anything it offers in return; or it starts asking too late, after grant income has already collapsed, when there is no time left to build the habit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Audience revenue is a slow asset. It has to be built while you still have other money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many independent outlets rely heavily on grants and international donors. What are the principal benefits and risks of this model? Can donor dependence influence editorial priorities even when funders never directly interfere with content?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The benefit is straightforward and should not be minimised: donor money funds journalism that no market will pay for. Investigative reporting on corruption in an authoritarian state has, from a commercial standpoint, a negative expected return. Without philanthropy, most of the independent journalism produced in many countries in the Global South over the past 20 years would not exist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The risks became brutally visible in 2025. When the US government suspended most foreign assistance, roughly $150 million in annual support for journalism and the wider information ecosystem disappeared almost overnight. The consequences: closures, mass layoffs, abandoned investigations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The cut also taught another lesson: many organisations believed they had diversified, holding grants from several different agencies and implementing partners, only to discover that every one of those grants traced back to the same ultimate source, and all were cancelled simultaneously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the second half of your question: yes, donor dependence shapes editorial priorities even when no funder ever comments on content, and this is the more insidious mechanism precisely because nobody is doing anything wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Influence operates through anticipation. Editors learn which themes attract funding – this year climate, next year disinformation, then AI, then gender – and reporting drifts toward the fundable. Story selection begins to be justified internally by whether it fits a logframe. Impact is reported in metrics donors recognise, which are rarely the metrics that matter to the audience. Over several cycles, an outlet can end up producing journalism that is accountable primarily to institutions abroad rather than to readers at home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And there is a political cost that is now unavoidable in an increasing number of countries. Foreign funding has been converted into a legal weapon in countries that have adopted legislation on foreign-funded organisations. That makes the very funding that keeps an outlet alive a pretext to delegitimise it as a foreign instrument.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What do international donors and media-development organisations most frequently misunderstand about the needs of independent media? How do funding criteria, project cycles and reporting requirements shape the organisational behaviour and editorial priorities of the outlets they support?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Five things, in descending order of damage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They fund projects when organisations need institutions. Donors buy outputs: an investigation series, a training programme, a podcast. What outlets need is the capacity to exist: a business manager, a lawyer, an accountant, a security budget, a functioning CMS. These are usually classified as overhead and capped at some arbitrary percentage. The result is systemic under-investment in exactly the functions that would end donor dependence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Secondly, project cycles do not match institutional time. Building an audience-revenue base takes three to five years. Grants run twelve to eighteen months. An outlet is therefore asked to become sustainable on a timetable that makes sustainability structurally impossible, and instead spends its senior editorial time writing applications. In small newsrooms, fundraising and reporting compete for the same person, usually the editor-in-chief, who is also the best reporter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thirdly, reporting requirements consume the capacity they are meant to safeguard. A five-person outlet managing four grants with different reporting formats, currencies, audit standards and impact frameworks is running a compliance department disguised as a newsroom. Donors underestimate this because each individually imposes a reasonable burden; nobody counts the aggregate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fourth, impact is measured in the wrong units. Reach and output are easy to count and largely meaningless. What a captured environment requires is different: did a procurement decision change, did a public debate shift, did an official resign, did the audience trust you enough to send documents? Those outcomes are slow, irregular and unsuited to quarterly reporting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And finally, exits are unmanaged. Funders enter loudly and leave quietly. There is rarely a wind-down plan, a transition fund or an endowment mechanism. If 2025 taught the sector anything, it is that responsible donors should be building reserve and endowment structures – including pooled, multi-donor vehicles insulated from any single government’s foreign policy – rather than annual grant cycles that transfer all volatility onto the weakest party in the chain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From volunteer initiative to professional newsroom<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Some media organisations begin as volunteer initiatives but later seek to establish professional structures and remunerate editors, journalists and contributors. What determines whether that transition succeeds? What mistakes should volunteer-founded publications avoid?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

This transition kills more promising publications than censorship does, and the causes are almost always internal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What determines success, in the cases I have observed, is that the organisation formalises its governance before<\/em> significant money arrives, not after. It decides who decides – who can hire, who can spend, who appoints the editor – while the stakes are still low enough that the conversation is not personal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It defines roles rather than distributing tasks. Volunteer organisations run on generalists; professional ones need someone who owns revenue, someone who owns editorial, someone who owns operations, and these should not be the same person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And it accepts that the founding culture must end. A volunteer collective runs on consensus, goodwill and unlimited discussion. That is not a management system, and it does not survive payroll.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The mistakes to avoid are consistent. One is paying everyone a little. Spreading a small budget across 15 contributors produces 15 people who are underpaid and still treat the outlet as a side project. Two properly paid full-time roles change an organisation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another is not paying the founders. Founder self-sacrifice looks noble and creates a hidden subsidy that masks the real cost base, and an organisation that cannot survive the day its founder burns out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another is choosing the legal form by accident. The structure you register determines which revenue you can access: whether you can take tax-deductible donations, sell advertising, receive foundation grants. Many outlets discover this three years too late.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And finally, professionalising editorial while leaving management voluntary is a major error. The business side is the side that most needs a paid professional, and it is invariably the last to get one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Diversification is frequently presented as the solution to media sustainability. In practice, how many sources of revenue can a small organisation realistically manage without diverting excessive time and energy away from journalism?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

There is no given formula. But from experience, I can say that between two and six revenue sources appears optimal, and that more sources do not correlate with greater success. Outlets with fewer than two sources are likely to fall in the bottom third of revenue earners in their markets. So there is a floor and there is a ceiling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The reason there is a ceiling is that every revenue stream has a fixed management cost that has nothing to do with how much it earns. Advertising needs a salesperson and an ad server. Membership needs a payment system, a CRM, retention work and a product. Events need logistics and risk. Grants need proposals and audits. Consultancy and training pull your best journalists out of the newsroom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Each one is a small business, and a five-person organisation cannot operate six small businesses without ceasing to be a newsroom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The practical rule I would offer: no revenue line without an owner. If nobody’s name is against it, it is not a revenue stream; it is an aspiration that consumes attention. Three streams that someone actively manages will out-earn seven that everyone manages occasionally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would add one refinement about diversification that the 2025 funding shock made obvious: what matters is not the number of sources but their correlation<\/em>. Four grants from four organisations ultimately funded by the same government are a single point of failure. One grant, one advertising base, one membership programme and one licensing deal is genuinely diversified, because no single political or economic event removes all four at once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How money becomes a tool of media capture<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Media capture is often associated with censorship or direct political control. How does capture operate more subtly through ownership, government advertising, subsidies, commercial dependency, regulatory decisions or access to distribution?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Capture is what happens when direct censorship becomes unnecessary. I defined it in a paper in 2019 as a situation in which most or all news media operate as part of a government-business cartel that controls the flow of information in order to protect its unrestricted access to public resources. The key point is that capture is an economic arrangement, not an editorial one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It works through four levers: media regulation, state-owned outlets, government financing, and private ownership. Within financing, governments use four recognisable tactics: direct funding, state advertising, subsidies, and deliberate market disruption. What unifies them is that none requires anyone to tell a journalist what to write.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

State advertising is the cleanest instrument. It is legal, discretionary, unaudited and enormous relative to these markets. When the state is the largest buyer of advertising, media outlets are not operating in a market; they are competing for patronage. No instruction is needed, because every editor can calculate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read more on Novastan<\/strong>: Leaving the island: Japarov\u2019s campaign to silence independent media<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then there are the less visible mechanisms. One is informal payments: payments to outlets from politicians and officials – prime ministers, mayors, MPs, sitting and former presidents. This money never appears in any accounts, which is precisely the point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another is opacity: companies are not obliged to disclose revenues, so basic market data simply do not exist. Where nobody can see the finances, capture cannot be proven.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Regulation and administrative friction also contribute to building capture: accreditation rules, registration requirements for online publications, licensing, tax inspections, “false information” statutes. Ownership transfer, when companies close to the government buy media outlets, is the most efficient method of all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And, of course, distribution and infrastructure: printing, kiosks, cable carriage, app stores, domain blocking all matter in how content is controlled. Control of the pipe is control of the publication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read more on Novastan<\/strong>: Pressure from Russia increases on Central Asian media outlets<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Can private or philanthropic ownership protect editorial independence, or does dependence on wealthy individuals and foundations simply create different forms of vulnerability? What governance safeguards are most effective in protecting editorial decision-making?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

It can, but it substitutes one dependency for another, and the honest answer is that ownership form matters far less than governance design.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Private ownership by a wealthy owner, for example, can truly insulate a newsroom from state pressure: a patron with independent wealth can absorb losses and ignore the withdrawal of state advertising. But it creates a different exposure: to that individual’s business interests, political ambitions, mortality and change of mind. Central and Eastern Europe offers an abundant record of proprietors who bought outlets as instruments rather than businesses. Our State Media Matrix includes a whole category, captured private media, precisely because privately owned outlets can be as editorially captured as state ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Philanthropic ownership avoids the profit motive but not the dependency. A foundation-owned outlet is subject to strategic shifts, board politics and the thematic fashions of the philanthropic sector. It is more stable and more transparent than an oligarch, but it is not a guarantee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What actually protects editorial decision-making is a set of structural safeguards, and I would rank them roughly in this order.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First, structural separation of funding from appointment: whoever provides the money must not control who is appointed editor. This is the single most important rule.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Second, appointment rules: fixed, non-renewable terms, supermajority or qualified appointment procedures, and a formal role for the newsroom in the selection or veto of the editor-in-chief.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Third, a capital structure that outlasts the donor: endowments, trusts and foundation-ownership models remove annual renewal as an instrument of pressure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fourth, radical transparency of funding: publishing every source above a threshold as a form of protection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And finally, self-imposed concentration limits. An internal rule that no single source may exceed, say, 40% of revenue is worth more than any editorial charter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The sustainability challenge for Central Asian media<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Your Media Influence Matrix studies of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan examined how state financing, ownership, political influence, informal payments and foreign donor support shape journalism. Looking back at those findings, how do you think the two media systems have evolved since 2019, and which developments most urgently merit renewed research today?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

I have to be honest here because we have not conducted updated fieldwork in Central Asia since those studies, and I would not want to offer an assessment of how the two systems have evolved based on third-party sources. Our method depends on locally sourced financial and regulatory data collected by researchers in the country, and without that I would be speculating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I can restate is the baseline we established in 2019, because it defines what would have to be re-measured.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The two countries presented distinct configurations. Kazakhstan<\/a> was a system of financial dominance: an overwhelming state presence in media funding combined with no obligation on companies to disclose their finances, and marginal donor money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read more on Novastan<\/strong>: In Central Asia, the Freedom of Press is in Decline<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kyrgyzstan<\/a> was a system of informal dependence: a weak advertising market, media instrumentalised by politicians and businessmen who treated outlets as tools rather than businesses, and widespread undisclosed payments from officials, but alongside a rather plural space, a significant donor presence, and a handful of outlets that funded themselves from grants and advertising and could therefore set their own editorial line.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On what most urgently merits renewed research, I would name four things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First, the actual flow of state media financing since 2019: amounts, recipients and the conditions attached. This is the single most consequential and least documented lever in both countries, and it is precisely the kind of figure that cannot be estimated from outside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Second, the economics of exile: what it costs to run a Kyrgyz or Kazakh newsroom from abroad, how it is financed, and whether any of it is sustainable beyond the current funding cycle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read more on Novastan<\/strong>: When Freedom of Speech Is a Joke: Author of\u00a0a Satirical News Outlet Detained in Kazakhstan<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Third, the migration of journalism to YouTube and Telegram, where a substantial part of independent reporting now appears. We know very little about who funds these projects, what they earn, or how exposed they are to platform decisions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fourth, the effect of the 2025 collapse in US media assistance, which I suspect hit this region harder than the global headline figures suggest, and which will have reshaped the funding structure we described in 2019 more thoroughly than any legal change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Independent Central Asian media often operate across borders or from exile, while attempting to reach audiences exposed to state-controlled information and increasingly restrictive legislation. Does this require a different sustainability model from that used by independent media in Western Europe?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Yes, fundamentally, and the standard Western sustainability playbook is close to useless for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The reason is a structural mismatch: for an exiled outlet, the audience and the revenue base are in different countries. A German or French independent outlet builds a virtuous circle: it serves a local audience, that audience pays, local advertisers want to reach it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An exiled Central Asian or Azeri or Iranian outlet has an audience it cannot legally monetise, in a jurisdiction where its brand may be criminalised, reached through channels that can be blocked, while its costs are incurred in euros in a European capital. Every link in the Western circle is broken.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read more on Novastan<\/strong>: Closure of Radio Azattyk sparks discontent from civil society and international human rights activists<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their cost structure is also different in kind, not degree: legal defence, digital security, physical security, relocation and visas for staff and their families, trauma support, redundant infrastructure, translation, and the permanent overhead of operating under two legal systems. These are not luxuries, yet they are rarely funded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And there is a distinctive risk absent in Western Europe: asking the audience for money can endanger the audience. A domestic bank transfer to an outlet designated extremist is evidence, making reader revenue – the model everyone recommends – not merely difficult but ethically fraught.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So what does work? In practice, based on my experience, a different portfolio is needed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First, revenue raised outside the audience’s jurisdiction: diaspora communities in Europe, North America and other relevant countries who can pay safely and often have strong motivation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, institutional and B2B income needs to be considered: syndication, content licensing to international outlets, translation, research and consultancy for organisations that need country expertise they cannot generate themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Increasingly, we have found that shared services are becoming important for such media. The most realistic efficiency for small exile media is not individual growth but pooled infrastructure: shared legal counsel, shared security, shared accounting, shared fiscal hosting in an EU jurisdiction, joint fundraising vehicles, and so on. Myanmar’s exiled outlets moved towards exactly this kind of cooperation after 2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

AI poses a new threat to independent journalism<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Artificial intelligence and automated information systems are increasingly determining which sources people encounter and how information is summarised. What risks does this create for smaller independent publications, particularly those covering countries or regions that receive limited international attention? Could their reporting become essential to AI systems while bringing them little traffic, recognition or revenue?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Your question contains a sharp formulation of the problem, and the answer is: yes, exactly that. Their reporting can become essential to AI systems while returning almost nothing in traffic, recognition or revenue. This is the defining economic asymmetry of the coming period, and small outlets covering under-reported regions are its most exposed victims.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are various aspects of that. Let me refer to a few that I consider important.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One is what I call referral collapse: the distribution model that publishers built for 20 years assumed intermediaries would send readers onward. Answer engines are designed not to. When a summary satisfies the query, the visit never happens. For a small outlet whose advertising, membership conversion and reputational visibility all depend on that visit, the loss is not just a decline in traffic; it is the removal of the mechanism by which reporting converts into anything at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another aspect is extraction asymmetry, concentrated on the specialists. Precisely because you are the only detailed English-language source on, say, Kyrgyz media legislation or Tajik labour migration, your reporting is disproportionately load-bearing in any system generating answers about the region.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Large publishers can negotiate licensing deals; a specialist outlet with four staff has no leverage, no legal capacity and no realistic path to individual negotiation. Thus, we expect a situation where the most essential sources have the least bargaining power. That is an inversion of how markets are supposed to work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And finally, relevant to your question is the language problem, which worries me most. Models are trained on what exists in a language. For some languages – and here I would guess most of the Central Asian ones – the available corpus is dominated by state and state-aligned media, simply because they publish more. Independent reporting is a rounding error by volume.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So the statistical baseline for what is “normally said” about these countries is likely to be drawn overwhelmingly from captured sources, and it is then reproduced fluently, in the user’s own language, with no visible provenance and none of the contextual cues that would once have signalled a state outlet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Media capture can thus be laundered into apparently neutral infrastructure. This is a new distribution channel for propaganda that requires no propagandist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MJRC has begun mapping this terrain: our study on how AI is changing media and journalism in Central Europe, Control Beyond Code<\/a><\/em>, which examines the ownership and financial structures behind the AI systems newsrooms are adopting, and the AI Information Map, which maps the sources of information the largest LLMs use to give answers in various languages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What can small publishers actually do? Three things, none sufficient alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Build channels that do not pass through an intermediary – newsletters, events, direct communities, Telegram – because owned relationships are the only assets not subject to unilateral repricing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Negotiate collectively. Licensing is only viable for small publishers through consortia, and this is where regional and thematic associations should be putting their effort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And push for provenance and attribution requirements in regulation, because if summarisation is going to become the default interface for information, the minimum acceptable standard is that the source is visible, attributed and linkable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What does sustainable independent media look like?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Looking ahead, what would a genuinely healthy and sustainable independent-media organisation look like? Which combination of revenue, governance, audience engagement and institutional support offers the best prospect of editorial independence over the long term?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

This is very difficult to answer, as there is no ideal model and local context and factors matter immensely. But generally, I would describe it in five dimensions, and I would insist that no one of them substitutes for another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Revenue first: between two and six streams, with no single source above roughly 40% and no two major sources sharing an ultimate political principal. At least one stream should come directly from the audience, however small, because it is the only income that is also a measure of whether anyone needs you. And at least one person must be professionally responsible for revenue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, governance. A structural firewall between whoever funds the organisation and whoever appoints its editor. Fixed terms, transparent appointment procedures, a formal newsroom role in editorial leadership decisions, and published funding down to a low threshold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, audience. A defined community rather than a general public, and a relationship the outlet owns rather than rents from a platform. In a period when intermediaries are actively removing referral traffic, direct audience relationships have shifted from a marketing asset to a survival asset.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Institutional support next. This is the part that cannot be solved by any individual newsroom, and where policy has to do the work: multi-year unrestricted core funding rather than project grants; pooled and endowed funding vehicles insulated from any single government’s foreign policy; favourable tax treatment for nonprofit journalism; shared back-office and legal infrastructure; and enforceable transparency in state advertising allocation, which remains the most powerful and least regulated instrument of capture worldwide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, reserves and realism about scale. Six to twelve months of unrestricted reserves, and an accurate sense of the size the organisation can sustainably be. A great many outlets have destroyed themselves by growing into a grant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A healthy independent outlet is one that could survive losing its largest funder, its largest platform and its most prominent journalist – not comfortably, but survivably.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Interview by Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief for Novastan English.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Independent journalism cannot survive on good journalism alone. Marius Dragomir, director of the Media and Journalism Research Center, speaks to Novastan English Editor-in-Chief Mathieu Lemoine about media capture, donor dependence, the transition from volunteer initiatives to professional newsrooms, the particular economics of Central Asian and exiled media, and the growing threat AI poses to specialist […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":358,"featured_media":49277,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4666,4939,4,3],"tags":[4087,5012,5014],"coauthors":[358],"class_list":["post-49267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economics","category-interview","category-kazakhstan","category-kyrgyzstan","tag-central-asia","tag-independent-journalism","tag-media-and-journalism-research-center"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/358"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49267"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49267\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49275,"href":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49267\/revisions\/49275"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49267"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=49267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}