Sustaining reader-funded journalism in a world of fear, indifference and news avoidance

The year 2025 was devastating for the independent media market all over the world. Back in April, here in Perugia, many conversations revolved around the same urgent questions: how can independent media survive and where can it find funding? At the time, there weren’t many clear answers.
Drawing on Meduza’s experience in 2025 as the world’s largest independent Russian-language media outlet, this session will explore how a newsroom operating in exile and under constant pressure, whose main audience can’t safely support it financially, can find new ways to fund its work. In particular, the session will focus on our crowdfunding and the development of Meduza’s publishing house and online shop to generate revenue through books and merchandise.
Crowdfunding has been a core part of Meduza’s budget for more than four years, and it seemed as though we had already tried every possible way of engaging readers in supporting our work. Given global trends towards news avoidance and growing fatigue with Russia-related coverage, 2025 looked like the wrong time for a big crowdfunding push. Not to mention the fact that our readers inside Russia, who still make up more than half of Meduza’s audience, are unable to support our newsroom financially due to the risk of imprisonment. But desperate times call for desperate measures.
In the autumn of 2025, Meduza launched an emergency crowdfunding campaign which brought in 6,000 new monthly supporters, raising our total number of recurring donors to 15,000. In this session, we will share how the campaign was conceived and launched step by step, how interactive design solutions helped amplify it, and how we managed to engage the entire newsroom in our crowdfunding drive. All these cumulative efforts allowed us to reach readers who had remained disengaged for years, overcoming indifference and mobilizing new support.
The development of Meduza’s own publishing house and online shop has become the second pillar of the newsroom’s financial sustainability and survival. What began as a small startup publishing books banned in Russia has grown into a fully fledged commercial revenue stream. In 2026, publishing revenue is expected to cover up to 10% of the newsroom’s expenses, while merchandise has become an important tool for community building. During the second part of the session, we will share our experience integrating publishing and sales into the newsroom’s workflow, including resources, promotion, and future plans.
The fact that Meduza is completely outlawed in Russia and faces constant pressure from the Kremlin always complicates our newsroom’s efforts to survive. So if a reader-funded model works for us, this experience can be valuable for other media outlets in exile — and for newsrooms operating in far more favorable conditions.
Organised in association with Meduza.