Fumaça in Portugal is a newsroom that produces investigative podcasts. They started as a voluntary project in 2016 and since 2018 have been a professional newsroom, now with a staff of seven full-time and to part-time members.

Fumaça takes pride in long-form investigative stories and in using as much time as it takes for the investigations, which sometimes amounts to several years. The products are often serialized podcasts with multiple episodes on a specific topic.

The newsroom is based on three principles: Radical transparency, horizontal decision-making and ethical fundraising.

The radical transparency is applied both for the journalism and the administration. A journalist might start his podcast with a disclaimer, stating his or her own position towards the subject, to make that open and clear to the listener. On the administration side, it means that all expenses, even the smallest, are publicly available, and all contracts are on Fumaça’s website.

This is partly due to the fact that the newsroom receives half its funding from membership donations and owes it to the members to show how their money is being spent.

Fumaça operates without paywalls and relies on support from foundations for the rest of its budget. Ricardo Ribeiro also tells about losing a big funder and facing the threat of having to fire the whole newsroom. They were ‘saved by the bell’ but still are not sustainable on the membership donations alone. Listen to this episode to hear how they involve everyone in the newsroom in decisions and how they see the future.