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 our research 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.

We began our Global Project Oasis expansion in July 2024 by combining media directories from Europe, Latin America, the United States and Canada.

In June 2025, SembraMedia began leading the research in North America. LION Publishers will continue to be a supporting partner in Project Oasis but SembraMedia will now maintain the media directory for the U.S. and Canada. You can search all of the media profiles from North America in the Global Directory.

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 is to identify trends, opportunities, and challenges and to provide insights in our reports. The analysis is completed with the database of media profiles that include structured data and narrative descriptions.

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

• 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. Since then, the data was reviewed and some profiles were added or updated by the Project Oasis Regional Research Managers.

   

• 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.

   

• 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 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 2023 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 2024 global report. In June 2025, SembraMedia began leading the research in North America. LION Publishers will continue to be a supporting partner in Project Oasis but SembraMedia will now maintain the media directory for the U.S. and Canada.

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 our reports.  

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. 

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.