In the era of digital transformation, the media landscape is changing in profound ways. New technologies are impacting the production, distribution and financing of journalistic media offerings. But what are the most influential innovations in journalism with regard to the financing and commercialisation of journalistic offerings? Project participants José María Valero Pastor, Mirco Saner, Renée Lugschitz, Giulia Ferri and Korbinian Klinghardt addressed this question and presented their findings at emma2021 in October at Jönjöping University in Sweden.

The raw material for the data analysis was the 20 expert interviews conducted in each of the five countries involved in the research project. From the number of innovations mentioned, those were filtered out which, according to the experts, were explicitly related to the financing of journalistic media offerings.

The central finding was that paywalls, crowdfunding projects and membership models were considered innovative by the experts across the countries. The experts see these as effective ways of financing journalism in the long term – especially in times of dwindling advertising revenues.