The Journalism Value Loop: Get to know Europe’s independent media

By Ricardo Esteves Ribeiro, journalist and co-founder, Fumaça

Over the last ten years, a wave of innovative new approaches to producing public interest journalism has swept across Europe. This has been crucial to address the decline of traditional media, and the rise of misinformation, increasingly divisive debates, and the problems these have had on democracy. But there are still too few of these newsrooms, and significant challenges for their sustainability.

To address this, 25 independent European newsrooms joined forces and founded Reference, a network where we collaborate to work on common challenges, and share knowledge and practices to build our collective sustainability.

To share these insights beyond the network, we are now interviewing each member of Reference in our new podcast series: The Loop, created by independent newsrooms Fumaça and Átlátszó Erdély. In this series we will explore challenges and successes for members of Reference, with each episode will focus on a different key topic for independent media, delving into real-life practices and experiences through in-depth interviews.

This is part of the Journalism Value Project, where we are investigating the state of independent media in Europe, and exploring what independent media needs to thrive.

We need to share the accumulated knowledge that is present in our newsrooms with the ones coming next.

The Journalism Value Project comes from that will to share what dozens of public interest media newsrooms have been learning that works and doesn’t work for them, mapping the techniques and strategies they use for their sustainability, in the hopes that by doing so, others can learn from them, and we can all learn from each other.