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fter 438 days locked up in notorious Ethiopian jails on “terrorism” charges, award-winning Swedish reporter Martin Schibbye returned to freedom four years ago with the germ of an idea for a new


media organisation. “Tell the world what you have seen here,” a fellow prisoner


had whispered to him. The huge success of his book about the ordeal convinced Schibbye there was an audience for serious reporting of forgotten conflicts and neglected crises around the world.


In March his Blank Spot project marked its first year with a 40-page traditional broadsheet showcasing long- form journalism and photoreportage from Burundi, Peru, Syria, Thailand, Burma and elsewhere (https://www. blankspotproject.se/in-english).


Launched with SKr1.3m (£110,000) raised in thousands


of small donations, Blank Spot now has more than 3,000 subscribers paying 599Kr (£51) a year. While its journalism is free online, subscribers can contact journalists through a closed Facebook group and follow the reporting teams through their work, contributing ideas and suggestions The journalists at Blank Spot are not alone in noticing that established media outlets are struggling to hold onto paying audiences, and that there are gaps in the market where serious journalism can flourish based on novel business models and new relationships with readers. “The advertising model is one that destroys the value of


information, of public debate, of democracy, because the free model with advertising is linked to entertainment,” says Edwy Plenel, former editor of the French daily Le Monde, who quit to launch Mediapart, an investigative website that has broken big stories over the past six years (https://www.mediapart.fr). Mediapart was launched with 10,000 subscribers. It lost €6 million in its first three years but broke even in 2011 and posted a profit of €1.8m last year, boasting 120,000 subscribers paying €11 a month for exclusive access to the site. The revelation by Mediapart in early 2013 that the budget minister Jérôme Cahuzac, who was in charge of combating tax evasion, himself had a secret Swiss bank account was one of a string of scoops that have helped catapult Mediapart into the centre of French public debate. “We have to create value for information in all sectors, not just repeating information that is free,” Plenel told the


14 | theJournalist “ ”


Logan Symposium in Berlin in March (https://logancij.com/ recordings). When Rob Wijnberg was fired from his job as a senior editor


at Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad in 2012, he made an appeal on national television and, within an hour, 5,000 people had donated €60 or more each to launch De Correspondent. This online news platform offers journalism that “focuses on background, analysis, investigative reporting, and the kinds of stories that tend to escape the radar of the mainstream media because they do not conform to what is normally understood to be news” (https://decorrespondent.nl/en). Crowdfunding raised over €1 million in several days, and


now De Correspondent has 40,000 subscribers paying €6 a month. “We put a lot of time and effort into the conversations we


They give us money like they gave to charity before – they fear that, if they don’t, society will pay a high price in terms of not holding power to account


have with readers,” says Wijnberg, explaining the success of the model. “There are a lot of people out there who know stuff – getting people to share their knowledge on our platform is crucial to the future of journalism.” While many major newspapers have closed or curtailed their comments sections because they have been hijacked by conspiracy theorists, De Correspondent takes this form of reader engagement very seriously as a means of building loyalty. In Germany, Krautreporter has closely followed the model established by De Correspondent, and is intending to create a positive response to “the sad tale of loss that has been the consuming storyline of the news industry for more than a decade”. Krautreporter was launched in 2013 after crowdfunding raised €60 each from 17,000 people (https://krautreporter.de). These and other initiatives are challenging the advertising


versus paywall/eyeballs versus engagement debate about funding good-quality journalism. It is far from certain that all will survive – the pressures of


the market are intense. However, these ventures show that new audiences for high-quality journalism can be built. Blank Spot says it is finding people who want to invest in journalism because they are worried about the sort of world we would live in without it. “They give us money like they gave to charity before – they


fear that if they don’t, society will pay a high price in terms of not holding power to account,” Schibbye says.


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