 I was promised that content was going to be king and I would be its queen. So why do I need to pay for it all of a sudden? I think each aspect of funding or sponsorship has its own price to pay. I've been following like the money flow. I mean, I think about it all the time. It's kind of a fun times at the moment for podcasters in the Balkans. Who becomes a podcaster? I can only speak for the Balkans, at least former Yugoslavia. Originally it was the kind of tech people. Did people actually want to listen to the tech bros? I guess the tech bros. You teach a lot of young people. Do you expect these upcoming generations, not the professionals, the media consumers, to sort of grow into the old-timey weekly and read these fantastic corridor jacket philosophy professors when they are of the right age, ready for that? Of course not. Oh, why? I think I love those guys. They are ready to write, but not really ready to read. That's an interesting phenomenon. Long-term donor funding. No dream of that. No dream, right? Business data. Welcome to Standard Time, a EuroZine production. This is a talk show with guests from all over Europe and beyond. And here we discuss issues that keep us up at night, from stock home to bag grade. I'm Mereika Kingapop, editor-in-chief of said EuroZine, the magazine presenting this show, and the co-founder of the Display Europe platform. Since this is a digital production, you get to watch it on your own time, your respective standard time. And today we're talking about why we need to pay for content now that it's more available than ever before. So, when I was in elementary school, I used to watch a lot of parliamentary broadcasts. I watched it with my granddad in the afternoons after school. I was seven, eight, nine-year-olds, and my grandpa would try and explain communism and fascism to me, which all those politicians were accusing each other of. Why did I watch parliamentary debates at that young age? Well, was it excitement over the newly minted Hungarian democracy that bewildered me? Was it the political machinery unfolding before my very eyes, or maybe I was some kind of a theoretical prodigy? Nah. I watched it because that was the only thing on TV at that time. Today it might be hard to recall for some, but that brief period of time only a few sources could define so much of our shared reality. In a post-socialist country, it was a few state-sanctioned TV stations, a couple of newspapers, some interesting journals, strictly streamlined radio programs, and, importantly, a lot of literature. Some of them had still been published illegally. In the early 90s, when sweatpants came in all colors of a proper bruise on top of a conventional media diet, he also had a sprinkling of some juicy gossip and a few conspiracy theories the neighbors told of a brunch. It was a simpler time. Not necessarily easier, don't get me wrong, but probably simpler. A few years later, commercial broadcast was the first to inundate my immature imagination with all-day programming, that is from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. or sometimes until midnight. It was the age of soap operas, German cop shows, and anime series imported in a bulk. I did struggle to fathom the amount of advertising on these programs, but didn't pay for access, so it kind of seemed like an agreeable deal. When I entered high school, I was confronted with the internet for the first time in my life. In the school computer room, we would go there on afternoons as surf the net. I played around with search engines and didn't quite understand how links worked, so I looked up a topic and immediately got flustered by the number of articles Alta Vista had showed me. So I did what I had been taught, I took a paper and a pencil and carefully copied the meter-long links thinking I would return to them later. Computers for us weren't personal, they were scarce and frankly quite mysterious, but the most mystifying part was that the things I found there almost entirely were freely available. I certainly didn't pay for them. Being for the internet access and for the equipment were burdens enough, and now I have a computer in my pocket that has hundreds of times the capacity of the machine from school on which I wrote my first ever prank email. Correspondingly, content is available now in droves. In volumes we cannot quite comprehend. If the scholars of the 17th century felt overwhelmed by the offering of a great library, we experienced that abundance on steroids and every second of our lives. It is true that online audiences have liberated journalism from the grip of a print publisher or a broadcast agency, but especially since the financial breakdown of 2008, much of the digital space has been monopolized by big market players and the internet of today is very far from free. Political propaganda has accommodated to this shift and it functions by diluting rather than dominating the uncensored informational space or, in Steve Bannon's memorable words, by flooding the zone with sh**. This method confuses the audience and makes it harder for the professional to sustain their work. Available content has exploded well beyond the growth of audiences and yet a handful of digital giants swallow the majority of advertiser money, leaving only a fraction of the income to professional journalists. Information, ultimately, is a public good and so is insight. But then again, this takes a lot of human work and this work cannot be sustained purely as a heroic mission. I cannot pay my rent by reciting to my landlady all the glorious articles I've commissioned this month. Believe me, I've tried. Or if you won't believe me, maybe you will trust the Polish-Lithuanian emigrate writer Czesław Milosz. He summarized this in 1951 when talking about his prospects in France, where he had just been granted political asylum. He says westerners like to dwell in the imperian of noble words about spirit and freedom, but it is not often that they ask someone if he has enough money for lunch. We can lie nice journalists all we want and we sometimes should, but we mustn't forget that media workers are, after all, doing work. It takes a lot of labor to produce good content and often even more to bring it before the potential audience. Look at me trying so hard. So the question remains, when Facebook and Google swallow promotion money and hedge funds exploit the bankrupt traditional media, who's going to pay for our journalism? I'm serious. Who's going to pay for my journalism? Well, you could, for instance, a Patreon, but until you feel convinced, let's ask a couple of media makers and a media scholar on the matter. Today's guests are Fiona Nzingo, a journalist from Kenya who currently serves as membership and engagement manager at the Global Forum for Media Development. She's based in Stockholm, Sweden. Dr. Gabor Poyak is the head of Elta Media, the School of Media Studies at Ötvörschlorian University, Budapest, Hungary. He's also the head of a think tank, Mayottec Media Monitor. Vladimir Rallinovich is the co-founder of Podcast.rs from Belgrade, Serbia. He is also on the board of directors for the Community Media Forum of Europe. We are hosted by this peculiar library of the School of English and American Studies at the Ötvörschlorian University, aka Elta, in the very heart of Budapest, Hungary. So, why don't we start with you, Gabor, because you brought numbers. It seems that donations have been gradually gaining a lot of traction in the past, say, what, ten years about that? Average figure of people who are ready to donate or subscribe for any news, paper, radio, or anything else, YouTube channel is 11%. Yeah, if we go into the details, 9% of the pro-government voters buy something. They mostly buy the traditional regional daily papers, you know, the most important product on the printed media market also nowadays, 55%. So, several households keep buying these regional outlets. They function as a propaganda paper for a lot of households. It is the minority, even the minority of the society, and I don't think that anyone can build a sustainable, good business plan on crowdfunding, on donations. So, it is every time risky, but the tendency in this term is positive in Hungary. It cannot be compared to the portion of people who used to pay for some kind of media. The 2000s, early 2010s were sort of about we're never going to pay for this anymore because it's always going to be, you know, content is going to be available all over the place, and we are relearning something very ancient, like people used to pay for their news or journalism or magazines. Fiona, how do you see what is the biggest or most impactful potential funding for independent journalism? I think each aspect of funding or sponsorship has its own price to pay and I would say it's up to the small organization to determine will I be willing to pay the price for this. For example, with donors, there is a certain rationale to working with donors where really you would have to sacrifice some level of independence just to make a donor happy, especially if you're on the verge of termination, if I could say. So, is that a price one is willing to pay? I personally, looking from an external viewpoint, I would say the aspect of audience sponsorship is a really good avenue. The only challenge I've seen building a relationship with your audience to the point where they would fund you is also something that needs to be considered because it's not as easy as just opening up, you know, a news outlet and saying could you fund us and everyone will be like, yeah, let's give out five euros, but you have to build this relationship to a point where your audience will say I'm willing to give you the money regardless of whether you will share content this month or not. If you also deal with an audience, you really have to try to not make them mad. If you deal with a donor, you also have to try and not step on some feet. So, I think investments need a lot of thinking through before diving into that avenue for funding. It's also the easiest way to politically interfere with an outlet. Gabbo just said an example. Yes. Just buy them up. Yes. Yes. So, there is that challenge that comes with investments, I would say. It's good that you brought that up. I mean, I think about it all the time. Vladimir, you work with a lot of media of a lot of sizes, especially with the podcasters, they tend to be quite small organizations. Yes. At least what we see is that there is more and more interest among the, let's say, grand tiers in order to fund content. Especially content that is nowadays deemed as kind of a new or cool or something that is fresh on the market and definitely in some countries, well, not in America, but in Serbia, podcasts are the new thing, so to say. When we started some, like, five, six years ago, there were around 15 of them and now there's more than 450 when I'm talking about, like, all the former Yugoslavian countries. And I've been following, like, the money flow, so to say. There's some commercial investments, of course, especially in the most popular ones. And it's a good kind of a business model for these podcasters to become self-sustainable. And, of course, they are trying to somehow keep this, to keep their integrity and saying, like, okay, you cannot interfere in the content whatsoever. You are here because we have created a good community, a community of listeners, people who like us, and they will trust us to advertise certain things to them. So you can sponsor, you can kind of hop on this train, but you cannot decide what happens within the podcast. On the other hand, especially the civil sector, is interested in, like, creating some new media formats and new content that they can reach the audience, they can tell the audience what they're doing. So the podcasts are really kind of a new fresh way to do this and to kind of explain people what you're doing without using all the boring, like, legal terms and we have done this and this, but actually tell your story through a fine narrative. And I think it's kind of a fun time at the moment for podcasters in the Balkans. New startups that are very much looking into the ecological matters, that are trying to have the sustainable business models and so on, work with them because they need this content, you can produce it, and not necessarily these companies would like to have their branding all over the place. Sometimes they just want to support something cool. This could potentially be the way to kind of fix your financial problems in the future. But to me, that seems like reinventing advertising in a little bit different form, like using the CSR budget, the corporate social responsibility budget. Oh, it's called ESG now. MSG, all things, yeah. Basically, communications budgets, but it is, in essence, sponsorship or advertising, isn't it? From a journalist's point of view, which you are, and quite an accomplished one, what is the type of funding that is most preferable for you? Just talking as an individual professional, what is the type of funding situation that you would most prefer to work in when reporting or creating any type of content? I would honestly say, honestly, donor funding and long-term donor funding. We all agree with that. Yeah, right? Business data. That would be the realistic answer for me. I think because there's so much uncertainty with how media is evolving, just having that piece of mind knowing I have this three-year project funded or five- or 10-year project funded gives you peace of mind. I think the challenge with reinventing the wheel, as you've said, is that can also take time off your work trying to sit and figure out what are we going to do next? How are we going to produce this content in a way that we're getting to 15, 16-year-olds and at the same time getting to 60, 70-year-olds? So I think that time-consuming aspect, that time could be used for something else. Smaller organizations from smaller communities, the challenge they have is trying to figure out how do I approach a donor? Who should I approach? How do I write a proposal? And that's one of the things that motivated us as GFMD to create a fundraising guide to help such organizations to get to know the different type of donor profiles, to get to know how best they should write a proposal, when they should write, who exactly they should reach out to, just as a way of helping the media sector to be more independent from, as you've said, the public funding. I think that is one important aspect. And I think another important aspect, as we're talking about sustainability, is investment. It's really important for these outlets to invest in a money person. I think it's very a utopian way, kind of thinking to say, we need to get money, we need to get money, without actually bringing in someone who's an expert on fundraising or someone who's an expert on writing proposals or a grant manager. So that's something that's also very important to invest in as a team, to bring in an expert to help with that aspect of getting money and being sustainable. And now a word from today's sponsor. This program is supported by my aunt, Koti. She provides me with pickles and bacon, which keep me going through a long working day. Thanks aunt Koti. Please come visit me in Vienna sometime. You can also become a supporter of the show and you don't even have to feed me. All you need to do is pledge your support at patreon.com slash eurozine. That is eurozine, the magazine presenting this program. You can pledge as little as 3 euros a month or whatever you can afford and I promise we won't buy pickles from it. Instead, you'll get access to bonus materials, invitations to the taping of the show and even get to suggest topics and questions. I also feel like this type of core funding, especially longer term foreseeable funding has diminished very significantly. We don't create the same type of content for age groups and we don't have what is a significant and important change. Okay, not completely unprecedented, but not on the scale, is that we don't expect upcoming generations to grow into existing genres, right? Or at least, I don't know, do we? You teach a lot of young people. Do you expect these upcoming generations, not the professionals, the media consumers, to sort of grow into the old-timey weekly and read these fantastic corridor jacket philosophy professors when they are of the right age, ready for that? Of course not. Oh, why? I love those guys. So I'm not really optimistic. You know, you say that I am working with young people, but these young people are not the average young people. They want to be somehow involved into the whole media proceedings. With podcasts, you can reach people who are also ready to read, but they don't have the time because they have to work, and therefore they can listen to podcasts in the car during walking and so on. But that's basically the function of old-timey public service radio or like literature programs or radio. Yeah, but the main issue is that it is not a very promising way to reach the new generation. So I don't have any idea how to reach the new generation with journalism and with high-quality journalistic products. Every year began with, yeah, that's not a survey, just a question for the students. Please raise your hand if you have subscription for Netflix and HBO Max and so on. Everyone is raising their hands. And now please, who is paying for news? No one. Do you ask them whether they pay for the subscriptions or their parents still? No, I ask if they or the family. Okay, okay. I wouldn't necessarily expect people to only reduce in attention span, but maybe fragment and have like a compensatory effect, but we'll see over time I guess. Yeah, but the competition for the attention is much higher than even before. There are several students who wants to be journalists, who wants to work for the good Hungarian independent newspapers and editorial teams. And I don't know why. So if they are not reading, why won't they writing? But they are much more ready to write but not really ready to read. That's an interesting phenomenon. So podcasters, where do they come from? Okay, there's a lot of journalists doing their exodus from some kind of bigger or more traditional setting and starting a podcast for themselves. Is that like the majority of the field? Who becomes a podcaster? Well, I can only speak for the Balkans, at least like former Yugoslavia. So originally it was the kind of a tech people because they saw this in America. All the tech people had the podcast, so why not have a podcast as well here? It's cool. So it was like tech and business people who wanted to become some kind of a business gurus or something like that. Did people actually want to listen to the tech bros? You wouldn't believe, unfortunately, yes. But then I'd like to kind of... I mean, I hope we had something to do with this. I mean, we worked quite a lot and motivated quite a lot of people from the civil society to start working with the podcast because our idea was like, okay, this scene is going to grow and grow. It doesn't matter what we do. It will become bigger. It's a bit like the blogosphere of the early 2000s. So if we are there at the beginning and somehow cultivate it, then it will become a good media sphere. If we just let it grow in whatever direction, then it potentially can become like a right-wing outlet or something like that. So nowadays, I mean, in the case of the former Yugoslavian countries, it's mostly civil society organizations, also independent media, so people who don't have the FM licenses anymore or lost their access to public channels and some stuff like that, former journalists and also former sports person talking about sports and so on. But nowadays, it is becoming more and more available to everybody. At the beginning, of course, I'm still a bit afraid, like, okay, what should I buy? How do I do this and so on? But now it's very clear to everybody that it's quite easy to do it. So we have more and more amateurs, but then throughout some time with experience, they are actually producing some really good content and at least in our case, it is kind of going in a good direction. I'm still very happy about it. The reason why we decided to create the aggregator platform was that the big services or big tech services completely ignored us. It was like, if you go to Spotify, Google Podcast, Apple Podcast, whatever, and you say that you're from Serbia, you'll still get recommendations from America. So if you don't know each and every podcast or their name by heart, there's no way you could find them. So then we said, okay, we then become kind of a discovery to both the local audience and the local podcasters, kind of a hub where people can find the local content because otherwise it's almost impossible to find it on the big platforms. This talk show is a creation of Display Europe, a new content sharing platform that respects your user data. We cover politics, culture and more, so keep an eye out for that across 15 languages. Okay, so we're back, and I want to address the obvious question as a consumer, I mean, of course we're professionals, but we also consume media, is what happens with the people who can't afford to contribute? I believe that the sponsorship option is specifically for this reason. So we want to provide content for free and you contribute if you can, but it still does create some kind of a threshold. So what should the people who can't afford to subscribe, contribute, make an effort, buy another equipment? How will they access reliable information? I don't know, ideas? Because it's not just about news. Good question. I would say, in the end, it comes to the producer of the information. So I think that's why it's really important to diversify the media and find a way to reach everyone. If your audience is that special to you, you will find a way to get to them. And because social media platforms, although not considered traditional journalism, are also becoming avenues where people are seeking information. So if you find a way to make a quick YouTube short or a quick TikTok video or there's an example, I heard once from Zimbabwe where they were making music videos of a news story just to make impact and they would just share that on a WhatsApp status or on their YouTube channel and they measured the impact they changed in their audience because they were targeting youth between 18 to 30 year olds who were watching this video about climate change and it actually caused a change in their society. So in the end, it is the news outlets, the news producers who have to find a way to reach to this audience who have been faithful, although not through financial aspects but through constant viewing. And I think it could go both ways where if I produce news for you and you view, I can still get money from your view. So monetizing views is also another way where a consumer who can't produce money to the subscription or to funding can help their beloved news outlets. It's also a very conservative way of conveying news isn't it? It's like, you know, the boards walking around and telling tall tales of heroic deeds et cetera, but just with very modern technology. And then when we talk about technology there's one thing that we kind of, we have to keep some of the old technology still available for the public such as the FM frequency. And this is something that we are as a CMFE we're definitely dealing with this on a kind of European level especially seeing that more and more countries are in Europe are thinking of just simply shutting down the FM completely Norway already did it. France is mentioning something Switzerland is saying like next year and there's like talks in some other countries as well. And then you basically kind of, okay, they're saying you don't worry we will move the community media and the independent media to DAB plus and so on. It's like, yeah, but what if the audience does not have a DAB plus or any kind of a digital access then it's a very exclusive type of thing. So we still need FM licenses because the FM is especially in cases of catastrophes of floods and so on. This is then the only kind of a place you can get information from. That's actually like one of the catastrophe like go bag components that you're told early on in case of like an earthquake or something have FM radio with batteries on you because your internet access is going to die and this is the one thing that's going to remain for you. Exactly, we actually witnessed this in Serbia in 2003 with the floods in Vojvodina the FM radio was kind of the only resource for people in certain areas because of course there's no electricity. We've also seen this in Ukraine where music radios converted into the psych source of quick information about whether your house has been bombed or not. Yeah, true. I mean even we, I was running a small community radio at the time it wasn't available on FM unfortunately like no single community radio in Serbia but we were like internet streaming and then these emergency rescue teams were using just the basic radio communication the radio amateurs as well and then we broadcasted that over our station as well. So I mean I think like I think the FM is definitely something that we still need to kind of keep available to everybody. I know that there's like some technical issues in terms of like advancement of technology and we need to like free some frequencies and the FM is kind of a problem there but I mean until we figure out another way of having this information in the air available to anyone we shouldn't be so fast and just pulling the plug and saying no, no, no we don't need FM frequencies anymore. We had a situation with the COVID and moving the schools completely online and there was a situation in Serbia where the underprivileged communities such as Roma communities were then very much affected by this because they simply don't have smartphones and all of a sudden they were taken to court because their kids could not participate in school. But public funding and public broadcast or public service as a concept was invented to cover specifically this and now it seems that it's very vulnerable to interference. Can you like safeguard this somehow so that the consumer who can't pay for this can still rely on something? The problem is that they will get the information that is paid by public money and in Hungary we are not speaking about the public media it is a huge organization with a huge amount of money in the back but in Hungary it's absolutely destroyed media markets we have several formerly private media players something of course you know this situation but what is really unique is the amount of the public money what is used to fund this group of private owners and they don't have to compete with anyone because they are not market players and they will remain available for anyone who cannot pay for the good quality information so I'm afraid that now we know that public media is some western issue it was not made for Eastern Europe for Balkan it's a question of culture and it's a question of history I cannot imagine a time in Hungary or in Serbia I'm sorry to say that we will have something similar to BBC of course it's a huge tool in the hand of anyone to speak in a normal way about important issues but not in our country so unfortunately it not only can be misused it was misused again and again we use billions of euros for running these pro-government media outlets pro-government influencers on YouTube and Facebook and we have the independents who wants to survive who wants to have somehow the money from the consumers so this competition is absolutely unfair and this is a very big risk from the point of view of being informed and also to answer your question further if you want to control public funding you have to have a functional judicial system which is usually not happening in these authoritarian countries because that's the first thing they would put their hands on and then after that what are you going to do? Sue them? the only thing you can rely on is either your audience or some kind of a crowdfunding or try to find a company that likes what you're doing and would like to support what you're doing and then create a partnership with them not necessarily a client-based relationship but rather a partnership where you're like ok we are doing this and you know this is important you are also kind of our audience but you simply have the means to support it more than the others and you also want to see the society to go to in a better place so why not do something about it? this program is brought to you by Eurazine your go-to place for engaging rates from over a hundred partner publications across dozens of languages to support our work and enjoy special benefits visit patreon.com slash Eurazine and become a supporter starting at 3 euros a month this talk show is a creation of Display Europe a new content sharing platform that respects your user data we cover politics, culture and more so keep an eye out for that across 15 languages this program is co-funded by the European Cultural Foundation and the Creative Europe Program of the European Union please note that the views expressed here are those of the authors and the speakers they do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the European Union or their European Education and Culture Executive Agency