The goal of this project is to provide insights and recommendations for:

• Current and future media leaders, and their teams, with the aim of helping them learn from each other, identify potential partners, and surface business models, trends, best practices and techniques that can help them strengthen their own organizations.

   

• Funders, investors and media support organizations, to better understand benchmarks and trends across the three regions and individual countries, with the goal of helping them to implement initiatives, tools and resources that better support the sustainability of independent digital native media.

   

• Academics, to increase their access to information about this media sector, as well as related issues such as media pluralism, media freedom, business model disruption, media markets, media consumption, women in media and media entrepreneurship.

   

• Policymakers and other key stakeholders, who will be able to call upon these insights to ensure that the needs of these relatively new forms of media are considered as they shape and influence policies at national and international levels.

   

• Everyone else who cares about freedom of the press and shares our interest in supporting independent digital news organizations.
  

In 2015, we began an ongoing research project at SembraMedia focused on independent digital native media that publish news and information in Spanish in Latin America, the United States, Canada, and Spain. We also include media that publish in Catalan, and a variety of indigenous languages such as Quechua, Guaraní, and Aimara.

Our first language is Spanish and most of our core team is Latin American, but we work with professionals from more than 60 countries to conduct research and other projects. This international diversity enables us to recognize global trends and build partnerships. 

To better understand global trends, in 2021, we expanded our research to include media in Southeast Asia and Africa, producing the International Inflection Point report, thanks to support from Luminate Group and Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA). 

In 2023, we expanded to Europe, hiring a team of researchers to map and study independent digital media in more than 40 countries and create a Project Oasis directory there. 

With this launch in July 2024, we begin our Global Project Oasis expansion by combining media directories from Europe, Latin America, the United States and Canada. 

Our first (and ongoing) research project started in Latin America and continuing to this day, has taught us valuable lessons. After years of working with digital media leaders, we’ve learned that simply sending out surveys rarely elicits valuable replies. Without local experts to vet candidates for the directory, it can be difficult to distinguish innovative new media players from fake news and propaganda sites. To address this, we count on an international team of researchers, journalists, and academics with local knowledge and connections to the journalism communities in each of their countries. Together, we work on the public-facing SembraMedia directory to share our research and make these new media players more visible.

The goal of our research was to identify trends, opportunities, and challenges and to provide insights in the report. The analysis was completed with a database of more than 3,000 media profiles that included structured data and narrative descriptions.

 The media profiles were collected from databases created by our research partners:

1. 1. In Europe, the research team and various partners conducted fieldwork during the second half of 2022 identifying candidates for the directory and conducting interviews. Initially, they identified over 1,000 participating native media outlets, of which more than 650 were selected based on inclusion criteria. Subsequently, interviews were conducted with media leaders, and after reviewing the available information, a database of 633 outlets across 44 countries was compiled. In 2023 and 2024, the data was reviewed and some profiles were added or updated.
2. In Brazil, between September 2023 and February 2024, the team at Digital Journalism Association (AJOR, in Portuguese) conducted 164 interviews with media leaders, adding responses to structured questions to their database. Their work brings together over 164 innovative and independent digital media outlets committed to diversity and democracy. The interviews included a diversity of regions, with approximately 40% of the organizations interviewed located outside the south-southeast axis. In total, there were 57 declines to participate—17 of which were AJOR associates—due to lack of interest or time.
3. In Latin America, the SembraMedia’s Media Directory has been developed over nearly 10 years by a team of ambassadors who continue to map, update, and curate media profiles. In preparation for the translation and analysis completed for the Global Project Oasis report, the ambassador team updated the database between December 2023 and February 2024. During that time, media that were no longer publishing were removed and profiles were updated. The database of profiles that was translated for the global directory included 868 media outlets.

4. In the United States and Canada, the media profiles were created using information provided by LION Publishers. They started their research in 2022 when they created the first Project Oasis media directory, which they have since updated in 2033 and 2024. They provided 1,606 media profiles from the U.S. and Canada that are included in the global directory and were analyzed for the report.

SembraMedia’s researchers, editors, and data analysts worked together to process the data and developed the findings and insights included in this report. 

The analysts spent several weeks exploring, normalizing and anonymizing the data (where applicable). Regarding currency, all values were standardized in US dollars ($) to make them comparable, using the following exchange rates as of April 15, 2024: 1 EUR = 1.0656 USD and 1 BRL = 0.195333 USD.

Data was processed using Power BI, an interactive data visualization software product developed by Microsoft. Once prepared, data was uploaded into Google Sheets for further calculations using pivot tables, and general comparisons. More complex analysis was done in Power BI.

The analysts took a multiple-step approach towards data review and analysis, which included a primary exploratory analysis and a hypothesis validation step. First, they collected questions from the research team and tested them against the data available. In the cases where data pointed us towards a significant finding, we followed up with a hypothesis verification test.

In regard to data relating to annual revenue, participants were asked to provide revenue information for the latest full financial year applicable to their organization for which they had complete financial data. Most of the profiles with financial data were updated in 2023 or 2024, but some annual revenue numbers analyzed may have been from  2020 or 2022. For analysis purposes, we reviewed these to try to ensure the difference in years  did not have a disproportionate impact on the data. All financial data was collected privately and only aggregated and anonymized figures are shared in the report.

To create the data visualizations in the report, we used Flourish, a free, web-based data visualization tool which helps build customized dashboards, graphics and reports.

To provide other points of comparison and benchmarks to the data we collected, we also included data from other sources. For example, to get a more complete picture of the challenges faced by digital media entrepreneurs in terms of risks and threats, we rely on findings from the Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters Without Borders, which defines press freedom as the ability of journalists, both individually and collectively, to select, produce, and disseminate news of public interest independently, free from political, economic, legal, and social interference, and in the absence of threats to their physical and mental security.

To classify media coverage in the study, the following definitions were used:

• Hyperlocal journalism: Covers news in small areas, such as neighborhoods or communities. Example: information about school events or activities in a specific neighborhood.
  
  
• Local journalism: Covers news that occurs within a city or municipality. May include several communities and neighborhoods within that area. Example: news about local politics, community events and neighborhood problems in a given city.
  
  
• Regional journalism: Covers news that affects a region, which can include several cities or a considerable geographic area within a country. Example: reports on public policies that affect an entire province or zone, or major cultural events in several cities within the same area.
  
  
• National journalism: News coverage in the same country. Example: news about government decisions, national events and economic issues that affect the entire population of a country.
  
  
• International journalism: Coverage of news occurring outside the media organization’s country of origin, covering global issues. Example: reports on conflicts in other countries, diplomatic relations, humanitarian crises and international events.

We rely on local researchers to help us build trusted relationships with media leaders, and we know that we are asking a lot of them when we ask them to make time for our interviews. We also understand that not all of them are comfortable answering all of our questions. 

In some cases, founders requested that their names not be shared publicly due to safety or legal concerns. In many of these cases, it was because members of their teams were operating in countries where press freedom is extremely limited, or were living in exile. 

Although some of these media publish their annual budgets on their websites to demonstrate their transparency, we do not share any of the identifiable financial data we collect. Instead, we aggregate and analyze this data privately, and share our findings in the report. 

Despite assurances that we take many precautions to keep financial data private, we understand that not all participants feel comfortable answering our questions, especially those related to annual revenue, annual expenses, and starting capital for the organization. As a result, the data analysis and insights in the report are based on the representative sample that we’ve collected in this research project. Here are the number of media organizations that answered our financial questions in each of the three regions: In Europe: 378 media profiles include financial data; in Latin America: 291 of the media profiles include financial data, and in the U.S. and Canada: 333 include financial data. 

In some countries the data is limited, because we found so few media outlets that qualified based on our criteria. Where the data was not consistent among all research partners, we were not able to provide the same level of insights for all three regions. In a few cases, where there was considerable information publicly available about media that are especially important in their countries, we used desk research to create some of the profiles in the directory.

The Project Oasis questionnaire for Latin America, Europe and Brazil consists of 66 questions, across six different sections including 1) general organizational information, 2) content production and distribution, 3) audience and reach, 4) management and team, 5) business structure, finance and revenue sources, and 6) private data and information.

It is important to note that participant responses that encompassed business-sensitive and identifiable personal data –especially pertaining to section 6– have been incorporated into this report as aggregated and anonymized data. Such data, however, has not been included in the directory.

In the U.S. and Canada, LION Publishers used a different questionnaire. You can find it here.