Fewer digital news outlets launched last year, according to a new global report

The number of digital news startup launches has been slowing since 2022 in Europe, Latin America, and North America, according to the new Global Project Oasis report. Global Project Oasis, a research project funded by the Google News Initiative that maps digital-native news startups globally, cited economic challenges, slow growth, and political conflicts as potential reasons for the drop.

“This decline in digital news startups may also be an indication that markets are approaching a saturation point in some places, especially in big cities, where the majority start,” the report’s authors write, “but it also may be due to the fact that many of the media in the directory started informally, which can make them hard to identify in the first year or two of operation.”

Project Oasis launched in the United States and Canada in 2020 and is led by  LION Publishers and the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media. SembraMedia, which has been conducting this sort of research in Latin America since 2015, launched Project Oasis Europe in 2022 with the European Journalism Centre, the Global Forum for Media Development, the Media and Journalism Research Center , and International Media Support.

The Global Project Oasis report published Tuesday analyzed more than 3,000 outlets from 68 countries across Europe, Latin America, and North America. The report includes 892 outlets from Latin America, 633 from Europe, and 1,533 from the United States and Canada.

The overall findings include:

• More than 60% percent of the outlets studied are for-profit organizations while 32% are nonprofits, 5% are operating informally, and 3% are hybrid organizations that combine nonprofits and for-profits.
• The average annual revenue for outlets in Europe was $649,951; the average revenue in North America was $602,821; and in Latin America: $159,825.
• In Latin America and Europe, 68% of nonprofits reported grants as their primary source of income, while 59% of for-profits said advertising is their main revenue stream. Just 13% of for-profits and 16% of non-profits said audience support was their main source of revenue. (Comparable data was not available for outlets in North America).
• Diversifying staff to include business and sales professionals can boost revenue dramatically, the study found. In Latin America and Europe, outlets with business staff earned an average of $401,000 in revenue compared to the average of $87,000 earned by outlets with no business staff.
• The report found more than 50 cases of media leaders or team members who were forced into exile. In Nicaragua, for example, 20 out of 21 outlets reported at least one team member has had to leave the country and now works for their respective organization in exile.

Regional findings include:

• More digital news organizations in the Latin American directory have stopped operating in the last year than in any of the previous nine years since SembraMedia started tracking them. As of May, 678 profiles had been removed from the Latin American directory because they’d stopped publishing, and nearly a third of those were removed in the last year.
• Grant funding has decreased, according to media outlets and journalism support organizations, as some donors shift their focus or reduce their support for Latin American media outlets. “Emergency grants helped many media survive the pandemic, but as those funds dried up, many were left with a financial hangover that has made them even more vulnerable to new threats,” the report’s authors write.
• More than 40% of European outlets studied said that said human rights issues like migration, refugees, and gender and feminism were key coverage issues for their audiences.
• In North America, the number of new outlets launched peaked in 2020 and 2021. In 2022, only 46 new organizations were launched, according to the report.
• Many North American outlets heavily rely on a single revenue source, usually local advertising. Sixty percent of publishers said locally sold advertising is a major revenue source, though the study found that outlets with multiple sources were more likely to be profitable.

Read the full report here.