Making lemonade: When Journalists And Publishers Are Confronted With The Reality Of Declining Revenue Streams, They Had To Become Creative In Finding Solutions | Visegrad Insight

"This article comes from The Buzz Around the Ballot edition of Visegrad Insight 2/2017 devoted do media landscapes and disinformation in Central Europe. Read full contents page here.

The journalists of SME Daily, the biggest broadsheet Slovak newspaper, for years did their best to cover the corruption scandals in their country. One of them involved an alleged link between the country’s government and Penta Investment, a financial group operating throughout Central Eastern (CE) Europe – a charge that the company denies. What was to the journalists surprise was when, in 2014, they found out that Penta had bought 45% of the stocks in the Petit Press publishing house which owns their newspaper. In an act of protest, 50 journalists, including the editorial board, left the paper. “People from this company [Penta] were open about the fact that this acquisition was their ‘nuclear suitcase’. They did it to protect their interests,” says Tomaš Bella, one of the deputy editors of SME who left. “We did not want to work for them”. Those leaving SME, which counted Mr Bella as one of the leaders, decided to set up their own publication – Dennik.N, where “N” stands for “nezavislost”, “independence”. To maintain it, they decided not to rely on funding from advertising and base their revenues on crowdfunding and subscriptions. Three years later, in the relatively tiny Slovakia (5.3 m inhabitants), they have 23,000 active subscribers who pay a nominal monthly rate for the content they produce. In July, they made their first small profit...."