"Independent journalism faces converging pressures from media capture, volatile donor priorities, and platform-driven markets accelerated by generative AI. This article presents 5 years (2020–2025) of first-hand evidence from a donor-funded program to support journalism in Hungary that combined co ... re funding, mentoring, and organizational development for independent local outlets. A longitudinal mixed-methods design disaggregates sustainability into money (revenue diversity, cash flow), management (absorptive capacity, governance, leadership), and market position (audience growth, brand trust, sales capability). Findings show that philanthropic funding is only conditionally conducive to sustainability under capture. Grants enabled survival, professionalization, and audience gains, but rarely produced durable revenue diversity in markets distorted by politicized state advertising, advertiser risk-aversion, and low willingness to pay for news. The program’s clearest contributions were transitional: financing operational and managerial upgrades, supporting product and audience experiments, and providing temporary insulation from hostile conditions. These gains materialized primarily where absorptive capacity and leadership were already strong. Donor-backed networking delivered only partial results, and abrupt donor exit exposed the fragility of post-grant trajectories. The overarching lesson is that donor intervention must be understood as a long-term investment in a difficult-to-visualize public good, namely democratic resistance and opposition, that yields indirect civic returns and, over time, creates the preconditions for impact." (Abstract) more

"The CEU Democracy Institute's Center for Media, Data and Society (CMDS) embarked in November 2020 on a one-year project aimed at mapping and analyzing the work of the world's fact-checking groups, with a focus on their challenges, needs and successes. The project started with a survey of 30 fact-ch ... ecking organizations worldwide, which were asked to indicate the importance of certain impact-related challenges. Based on the survey's results and research, CMDS identified four areas of interest, and also groups that have been successful in addressing these challenges. These fact-checking organizations, some of them lesser-known groups established in the past few years, and their modus operandi have been showcased in four articles covering audience outreach, methods to tackle misinformation on social media, fact-checking misinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic and fact-checking for teenagers, which were published over the course of the past year. This booklet collects all these papers in one place, presenting the results of the survey and the articles produced as part of the project, as well as an additional, fifth piece that looks into the future of fact-checking." (Introduction) more

"One of the main challenges for fact-checkers seems to be to better and more effectively reach their audience. That means, on the one hand, improved skills and capacity to reach out to a specific group of followers, but also techniques to more efficiently use social media as an audience generation t ... ool. Effective use of social media turns out to be a challenge of high importance for African fact-checking organizations in our sample in particular, which have thus far been slow in building a strong follower base on social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Credibility has also been mentioned as a major challenge for factchecking groups, with 22 out of 30 groups that responded in our poll saying that the challenge of gaining or maintaining credibility is “very important” or “fairly important.” Achieving a higher impact is an important challenge for many factchecking organizations as they seek methods that would help them to both measure and increase their impact. All African fact-checking groups included in our research indicated the challenge of impact to be “very important.” Impact of fact-checking remains a research gap as there is no solid evidence to understand how effective fact-checking is." (Key findings) more