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A significant majority of the media in the Project Oasis directory were founded by journalists, and many start with small teams made up exclusively of journalists. As they grow, diversifying the skills of their teams is key to their continued survival.
Although the digital media featured in this report hire six times more journalists, editors and other content producers than any other skillset, we have noticed a trend over the last ten years of research. The percentages in the chart below demonstrate that media leaders are forming teams with more diverse skill sets than they have in the past.
We’ve consistently found that those who employ sales and business development staff, earn four to six times higher annual revenue than those who rely only on the founders for fundraising. Many complain they don’t have the money to hire sales staff, a classic chicken-and-egg challenge, but diversifying these mostly journalist-led teams to include business and sales people, clearly improves the bottom line.
The following graphic shows the impact of having a full-time sales and business development person on staff. In the regional section of the report, you’ll find similar comparisons for each.
Many of the media in this study can only afford a small staff, although many benefit from volunteers and freelancers. The media in the directory average 6 to 8 full-time employees, and 18% report they have no full time employees. (Note: When we analyzed the data without those that have 0 employees, the average rises from 6.3 to 8.)
Because most of the digital natives in this study were launched with little or no initial investment, it is fair to assume they rely on the sweat equity of their founders, especially their first few years.
Some of these journalists-turned-digital-media-entrepreneurs are so driven by their missions they are willing to work for little or no financial compensation for years at a stretch. Some even have second jobs or side hustles to help pay their teams.
The problem is that this means they also have no working capital, and they are more vulnerable to closure because of financial pressure and burnout.
Some sites operate for years with volunteers, before developing the audience, and the revenue that often comes with it, to support a bigger team. The investigative news site, El Faro, which launched in El Salvador in 1998, was started by a small team of journalists who worked part time for the first five years as volunteers. Today, they have a permanent team of 37, as well as a group of occasional collaborators, and receive revenue and grant funding from multiple sources.
When El Faro started publishing online, only 20% of the population of their Central American country could access the Internet. Over the years, their audience and team have grown, as have the number of awards they’ve won, including the DW Freedom of Speech Award in 2023. Some of their founders now live in exile because of threats, but they continue to produce important investigative journalism as they work to keep their organization sustainable in a challenging political and economic environment.
Media outlets with limited resources that start with no full-time employees, such as Guardiana in Bolivia, are often at a disadvantage. Founded in 2019 Guardiana aims “to provide independent, inclusive, clear, precise, honest, pluralistic, and in-depth reporting,” according to their website. One of their goals is to help reduce violence against women, girls, boys, youth, and the elderly by covering cases that often go unreported.
“We do not have full-time workers primarily due to economic reasons,” said Amparo Canedo, director of Guardiana, Bolivia. “In the future, there may be a combination of some full-time positions with individuals working on a project basis.”
Hybrid model refers to media outlets that developed two distinct organizations. Some form nonprofit and for-profit organizations to meet the legal and tax requirements of conducting social and business activities within the same venture.
For example, some of the innovative revenue models they use, such as selling tech or other consulting services, don’t comply with U.S. federal tax laws that require that nonprofits’ activities are consistent with the mission, so some nonprofits must spin off a for-profit to avoid risking losing their nonprofit status for their mission-driven activities. Others start as a for-profit and then start a nonprofit to conduct training or other nonprofit activities.
Others form a second organization out of necessity when the media leaders have had to go into exile and need to register a second organization in their new country to open a bank account so they can receive grants and other funding to continue operating. In this case they may operate two nonprofit organizations in different countries, or depending on their options (and time and expense it takes to form a nonprofit), some opt to create a for-profit business in the country where they live in exile.
These new hybrid models open opportunities for investment, as well as foreign support in countries where outside funding is prohibited or where political conditions make it impossible for the media outlet to receive support in the country where they publish news.
These models capitalize on the advantages of geographical diversification, leveraging resources and opportunities across multiple locations. By establishing branches or partnerships in host countries, media outlets can also tap into local knowledge, networks, and resources, enriching their reporting and engagement efforts. This collaboration strengthens the resilience of media organizations against external pressures.
The Cuban digital media outlet, El Toque, provides an example of a hybrid organization that manages both for-profit and nonprofit organizations out of necessity. They also demonstrate how — even in exile — some media leaders are developing sustainable business models with diverse revenue streams.
El Toque covers economic, socio-political, and legal issues on the island, but by far the most popular part of the site is their coverage of the informal currency exchange rates of the Cuban peso. Featured on the front page of ElToque, the rates they report in their currency conversion tools are created by using machine learning to process data from a large number of public and private sources, including formal and informal currency exchanges, private messaging apps (such as WhatsApp, Telegram, or Signal), and other places where people offer to buy and sell pesos online, said José Jasán Nieves, founder and director of El Toque.
El Toque’s currency reports have revealed the dramatic difference between the official exchange rates published by the Cuban government and those that can be found on the black market, and so infuriated the Cuban government, they’ve denounced ElToque an “enemy of the state.”
Over the years, Nieves has received so many threats from the Cuban government, he created a timeline to track and share them, but the latest threat, which he received in June 2024, was so serious he reported it to the FBI. The message said: “We’ve tried to reach you every which way, but you’ve rejected us. Now we will have to come to you personally, and we know exactly where to find you.” It included a video recorded from a car driving past his home in Florida. The recent threats have also been covered by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), and the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR).
There has been no way for an independent news organization to form a legal organization in Cuba since the 1960s. To get around these restrictions when they launched ElToque in 2014, Nieves started a nonprofit organization in Poland, in part, because it was one of the few countries where they could find a bank that would enable them to transfer funds to the team in Cuba.
In 2019, threats to Nieves and his family forced them into exile and they settled in Florida. To open a bank account for the business in the U.S., Nieves started a for-profit organization, and recently received 501(c)3 nonprofit status.
Today, Nieves manages four organizations: nonprofits and for-profits in both Europe and the U.S. This structure helps them qualify for grants in both the U.S. and the European Union through the nonprofits, while managing their consulting clients through the for-profit organizations.
Managing so many organizations complicates their accounting, but they’ve developed such a strong financial team, they now provide accounting services to other media and nonprofits.
They use the revenue to further news-gathering and reporting in Cuba, where they rely on a team of reporters on the island who publish news without bylines. In authoritarian countries, like Cuba, many journalists hide their identities, and their profession, to avoid the risk of imprisonment, threats, and worse.
The hybrid strategy, and their increasingly diverse revenue model, has enabled ElToque to cover most of its operating costs while reducing its reliance on grants, but Nieve said it’s still a challenge.
In 2022, 90% of their funding came from private and public grants. In 2023, they were able to reduce that figure to 70% after launching an agency that provides design, finance and accounting services to clients, and they are working to earn more of their revenue through services. Nieves said they have 22 full-time employees and numerous freelancers.
They also earn revenue by offering consulting support to international funders that give grants to small organizations in Cuba, helping grantees complete required financial and narrative reports. And they provide a news monitoring or social media management service for clients, including multiple embassies.
Women were involved in starting 54% of the media in the directory in Latin America, 58% in Europe. (This data point is not included in the directory for the U.S and Canada.) Many of these ventures were started by mixed teams of founders, with about 20% started exclusively by women.
This finding suggests that women are taking advantage of the low barriers to entry in digital media startups to go around the glass ceilings of traditional media and build their own publishing companies.
In contrast, traditional news media has historically been primarily owned by men, and although there are few studies on the gender of media owners, based on what we’ve found, the majority of the owners of big media conglomerates, newspapers and broadcast news organizations are also men.
One of the few reports we have found is a 2014 study of Mexican media ownership. Aimée Vega Montiel of the Universidad Autónoma found that less than 1% of television station owners in Mexico were women and none of the country’s newspapers included a woman owner. (Read the full study in PDF.)
We have found studies on the gender of media employees, editors, and directors, but no others on media ownership. We believe this area warrants further study.
“Women are also playing a significant role in the executive and management teams of these digital native media,” said Florencia Aza, SembraMedia’s Director of Media Acceleration who has also run the Metis women’s leadership program. “After interviewing with hundreds of digital media entrepreneurs, there is considerable evidence that women-led media organizations are more cooperative, more likely to form partnerships and share resources, and they are producing some of the more important coverage of underserved communities.”
When we compared the revenues of these media based on the gender of their founders in Europe, we found that teams with both male and female founders report higher revenues.
In Latin America, women-led media reported slightly higher revenue than those founded by men. Of the top 10 that reported annual revenue over $1 million are an almost equal mix of male, female, and both founders.
The women media founders featured in this study have created news organizations that cover a wide range of topics, from award-winning fact-checking sites, to investigative reporting collaboratives, to sites that focus on underserved communities.
The Czech media outlet Investigace.cz was started by investigative journalist Pavla Holcová because she wanted to do cross-border investigative reporting. When she launched the news site in 2013, it was clear that corruption and crime were happening across borders, but there were no cross-border teams of journalists covering these stories, she said.
Holcová founded Investigace.cz as an Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) partner organization in the Czech Republic, and by 2022 her newsroom had grown to include 10 members and contributors. The information on the website is partly original investigative stories produced by the outlet’s own team, and partly reports from other OCCRP partners. Investigace.cz also produces a podcast, which covers crime and corruption cases in greater depth.
Covering economics with a gender perspective
inGenere is an editorially independent project developed by the think-tank Fondazione Giacomo Brodolini in Italy. It was founded in 2009 by a group of women economists who felt unheard by the mainstream media despite their high-profile curricula as external policy advisors for the European Commission.
inGenere aims to bring a feminist view to the public discourse and to get the voice of experts out of academia. It covers economics with a gender perspective, and strives to give visibility to the opinions of high-profile female academics who are “ignored by mainstream media”, as the outlet’s editor-in-chief, Barbara Leda Kenny, explained.
The newsroom consists of three people working part-time. Most of the articles are written by unpaid external contributors from academia, media sector and civil society, with 90% of the authors being women. Before publishing, every article is submitted for peer review and fact-checking. inGenere does not publish opinion pieces but data-grounded analysis.
Over the years, it has succeeded in achieving its reputational goal, and its articles are often quoted or used as sources by mainstream media. Also, its political proposals are debated. Editor-in-chief Barbara Leda Kenny said: “During the pandemic, we doubled the content production due to the multiple impacts of the situation on gender equality. The audience has grown accordingly. However, we are proud of being a niche publication.”
“All news organizations manage products, but not all do it intentionally,” said Felicitas Carrique, Director of the News Product Alliance (NPA). Her point is that many journalists don’t think of news as a “product,” or consider how they can develop products around their journalistic expertise.
In NPA’s recent community survey, over 70% of respondents said that news organizations do not provide sufficient resources and support for news product initiatives.
The majority of these digital media in the Project Oasis directory do not even have dedicated team members working strategically on product development, which could help them take better advantage of opportunities to build sustainability – and better serve their communities, she added.
“The future of the news industry hinges on its ability to develop engaging, trustworthy products that yield measurable business results,” said Carrique. “This requires leaders with empathy and skills to build resilient organizations capable of navigating persistent change. News product thinkers play a crucial role in aligning organizations toward business outcomes by introducing processes, tools, and connections that address the needs of diverse audiences and can guide organizations through shifting consumer behaviors and technological trends. This approach is also vital for rebuilding trust and truly serving our communities,” Carrique added.
Expanding and improving product development operations can increase news organization’s ability to enhance new and existing products quickly and efficiently, guided by a deep understanding and connection with their audience and strategic business sense.
However, equally important is the willingness of organizational leaders to embrace these change agents and empower them to drive necessary transformations. There is a need for more institutional support and understanding of product management as a discipline to implement transformation effectively.
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