These five newspapers prove journalism can thrive without billionaire owners

The return of Donald Trump to the White House has put media ownership back on the spotlight. A few days before the 2024 presidential election, the Washington Post’s billionaire owner Jeff Bezos prevented his newspaper from endorsing Kamala Harris. As a result, up to 250,000 readers cancelled their subscriptions, making the company lose around 10% of its subscriber base. 

“When it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am not an ideal owner of The Post,” Bezos wrote in an essay in which he acknowledged the complexities of his role. “You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests. Only my own principles can tip the balance from one to the other.” 

Bezos, whose company donated $1 million to Donald Trump’s inauguration and signed a $40 million deal for a documentary about his wife Melania Trump’s life, is an extreme example of an issue that’s playing out in many other countries: the risk of powerful owners influencing editorial decisions. 

But this is not the only viable ownership model. Many digital news organisations are now owned by journalists and media workers in a way that protects their work from undue influence from politics and business alike. I spoke with editors from five of these outlets in Argentina, France, Scotland, Spain and Uruguay to explore how these models work and what are the challenges and opportunities they pose. 

Different structures, same goal 

According to a 2023 report by the Media Reform Coalition at Goldsmiths University, 90% of the UK’s national newspaper market is controlled by three companies. Similar reports have also pointed to media concentration in Spain, France and Argentina. 

Some media companies have decided to forge their own path in these countries, defying the traditional ownership structures of the news industry. But there is not a single model when it comes to journalist-owned media. 

The West Highland Free Press became an employee-owned newspaper in 2009. After the original owners retired, they gave their employees an opportunity to take control of the company. 

The Free Press is a small weekly hyperlocal newspaper covering the West Highlands of Scotland, with a print circulation of around 3,000 copies weekly. They have five employees and work with a few freelancers. Its current editor Keith MacKenzie, who’s worked there for two decades, is now one of the five shareholders of the company. 

“An employee trust was set up. The employees put some money in, and then there was some funding," explains MacKenzie. “So when you leave the company, your shares go with you, essentially, but any employee would be expected to become an owner as well as an employee.”

Other employee-owned outlets have scaled their operations to a national level. A good example is Argentinian newspaper Tiempo Argentino, which was left to its employees’ devices after it was shut down by its corporate owners in 2015. A few months later, its journalists formed a cooperative to keep the newsroom afloat. 

During a recent interview, the current president of the cooperative, Malena Winer, explained that employees learned how to establish and manage a cooperative from scratch in order to save the paper. She herself went from being head proof-reader to being the person in charge of the cooperative. 

“There is a tradition of cooperatives in Argentina which is more than 100 years old, but there’s also a tradition of companies supported by their workers,” said Winer. “We belong to those two traditions.”

In neighbouring Uruguay, one of the most widely-read newspapers in the country is La Diaria, a profitable outlet with more than 21,000 subscribers in a country with a population of three million people. With 170 employees, La Diaria operates within the same cooperative model. After three months of working for the newspaper, employees have the choice to join the cooperative or simply be only employees. 

When I asked editor-in-chief Natalia Uval why an employee would want to join the cooperative, she said that journalists are attracted to having decision-making power over the future of the newspaper. 

“We haven’t distributed any dividends and we are not planning to do it in the short term,” she said. “If we make a profit, we want to reinvest it, or maybe generate a fund to support journalism. So the real benefit of being a shareholder is to be able to make strategic decisions for the company.”

Two influential outlets in Spain and France

Another employee-owned outlet is elDiario.es, one of the most read and influential news outlets in Spain. Earlier this month they surpassed 100,000 subscribers, with 40% of its revenue coming from readers and most of the rest coming from ads. Its editor and co-founder Ignacio Escolar is the main shareholder of the company, with 40% of the shares. Most of the rest is spread amongst other journalists who work for the newspaper. 

elDiario.es was launched in 2012 in the midst of a deep recession at a time when some news organisations were shutting down. After the newspaper he worked for closed, Escolar decided to launch a new kind of outlet. “We wanted to start this project ourselves so no one else could control it,” said Escolar about the idea behind the newspaper, whose journalists have published hard-hitting investigations on politics and business over the past decade. 

French news site Mediapart was also launched by high-profile journalist Edwy Plenel and a few colleagues with a similar goal. Unlike elDiario.es, though, Mediapart created in 2019 a foundation where it placed “100% of its capital in a not-for-profit structure which will ring-fence it and ensure it cannot be bought or sold in the future.” 

Carine Fouteau, president and editor of Mediapart, told me that this arrangement allows them to be independent even from their four journalist co-founders. “This means that our capital and assets are owned by this foundation and that from this date we cannot be sold or bought by anyone anymore,” she said. “We have created this structure that allows us to be independent forever.”

Here’s how the structure works: Mediapart has started a special fund called FPL. This fund owns Mediapart through another structure, the Société pour la Protection de l’Indépendance de Mediapart (SPIM), so that no private company or investor can take over. This means that Mediapart is now owned 100% by this nonprofit and any money it makes goes back into the company. 

I asked Escolar why elDiario.es hasn’t adopted Mediapart’s new ownership structure as a way to guarantee its own independence. He doesn’t rule it out for the future. But he stressed they are already constrained in what they can and can’t do by a constitution that was approved by the newspaper’s subscribers in 2023. 

“Our new constitution says that any new editor-in-chief must be proposed by the board of directors and must be approved by a majority of the newsroom, and that is a binding vote,” he said. “This new editor-in-chief, if and when I leave my role, will have to be approved by our subscribers too.”

Without fear or favour

All the outlets I spoke to highlighted how an employee-owned structure has allowed them to be freed from the chains of potential conflicts of interest. At the end of the day, they are the ones calling the shots, rather than a powerful entity they have to respond to. 

Uval from Uruguay’s La Diaria said that their ownership model is the basis of their editorial independence. By being part of a collective of workers that actually have a stake in their journalism, workers are perhaps more aware that they are working towards a greater goal: protecting independent journalism from any external pressures. 

“What we are seeing globally, and particularly in Uruguay, is a concentration of media ownership,” says Uval. “This concentration leaves little room for independent journalism.”

La Diaria recently published an investigation into a scandal affecting cattle investments. Over 4,000 people put their money into the largest cattle investment fund in Uruguay which is now going bankrupt and refusing to refund the money. According to Uval, this is a company that puts a lot of money in advertising in many media outlets in the country. 

“Very respectable media outlets are not reporting on this subject or are covering it in a very biased way,” she says. “Without having any kind of ties with [that company], we have been able to report on this story without any kind of pressure.”

Argentina is also a country where the agribusiness sector is very important. Winer from Tiempo Argentino explained that the newspaper decided to shun tempting offers of advertising money from multinational agricultural companies so they would be able to tell stories of pollution and bad behaviour by these companies. 

She said that a fast food company offered to pay for a full-page ad in their paper to promote job opportunities for young people. 

“It would have meant the equivalent of two months’ salaries for every employee,” said Winer. “But we said no because we weren’t building a newspaper for that. We wanted to be the owners of our own words. We also believed we were going to be unfaithful to the kind of principles we were representing.”

Fouteau from France’s Mediapart describes a media environment where most of the news organisations in the country are owned by a handful of multimillionaires.

“They want to have more influence on politics and business,” says Fouteau. “Our main mission is to publish stories in the public interest, to hold powers into account, and to put our rulers face to face with their responsibilities. If we want to do that, we need to be very independent from anybody.”

Most of Mediapart’s revenue comes from its 220,000 subscribers. While Spain’s elDiario.es has more than 100,000 subscribers, they only represent 40% of its income, with most of the rest coming from advertising. No single advertiser provides more than 10% of the total revenue of the newspaper, Escolar said. When planning their annual budget, he added, they always allow for a 10% leeway so they can keep the outlet afloat even if their biggest advertiser withdraws. 

“We are growing more strongly in reader revenues than in advertising and other revenues,” Escolar said. “Of course, we have been able to do all this precisely because there is nothing we can’t investigate. We have strong standards and do our job rigorously. When there is information that we do not publish, it is never because one of our advertisers is involved.”

Be close to your community

The support of the audience has always been central to most of the employee-owned outlets I spoke with. When Tiempo Argentino first shut down in 2016, the new iteration of the newspaper would not have been possible without its readers. Without the money of their previous owners, journalists partnered with a printing co-operative who agreed to print 30,000 copies of the newspaper and pay them only once they sold them and collected the money. They sold all the copies they had printed. 

This experience inspired the staff to put in place a revenue model that relied heavily on the audience. Today the newspaper has 85 shareholders. While it used to be mostly financed by its own readers, Argentina’s economic situation has reduced its reader revenue to 35%. The rest of their revenue is being rounded up by advertisement (45%) and their savings pot (20%). 

For Scotland’s West Highland Free Press, the readers are a crucial aspect in its mission. Financially, the paper sustains itself through a combination of readers buying a physical copy every week, subscriptions, and local and national advertising. MacKenzie, the editor of the newspaper, said that their ownership model allows them to connect more closely to their local community. 

“The people who write for the newspaper and own it live in their local communities and are well invested in them,” explains MacKenzie. “Your ownership is not distant. Your ownership reacts to the demands of your community. You’ve got a very close relationship with your neighbours and know how the community works.”

La Diaria in Uruguay also relies heavily on reader revenue. Up to 86% of their revenue comes from their more than 21,000 subscribers, with the rest coming from ads. Echoing MacKenzie’s sentiments, Uval stressed the important connection between the journalists who owned the outlet and the community they are reporting on. She told me that they have begun discussions on changing their governance structure so that the readers themselves can also be shareholders. 

“This alliance between workers and communities, audiences and workers, seems to me to be the most viable way to guarantee that independent journalism continues to exist, and it’s also the way that journalism itself is sustainable,” Uval said.