The Wake-Up Call Europe Can’t Afford to Hit Snooze On

When journalists expose environmental harms, climate funders get the data they need to push for reform. When reporters track the spread of false health information, public health campaigns can respond before trust erodes. When local media follow how EU funds are spent, corruption is likely prevented. Every foundation’s goals depend on this kind of reporting: the steady work that keeps facts in public view.

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Last year, when the US cut its funding of independent media overnight, Europe learned how fragile that foundation really is.

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In Cyprus, when the newsroom CIReN discovered that every one of its funders was indirectly tied to USAID, the shock was quiet but devastating. Four different European grants looked, on paper, like a healthy mix. In reality, they all drew from a single pipeline. When that pipeline closed, the newsroom was days away from shutting down.

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Across the continent, the pattern repeated. Many independent not-for-profit newsrooms investigating corruption or exposing abuse found that part of their survival rested on U.S. taxpayers. The scramble that followed was about more than keeping reporters paid; it made visible a dependency we’d long ignored. How had European democracies come to rely on a foreign government to sustain their own public interest journalism?

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The answer had been building for years. Public investment in civic media shrank. Digital markets rewarded attention, not accuracy. Philanthropy stepped in, but support across Europe was never built with a clear plan. Some regions drew attention and resources; others were barely on the map. What looked like a sturdy network was, in truth, a single beam. When it cracked, a lot of quality journalism felt the weight.

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A Year of Improvisation

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The months that followed tested not only the media organisations we support, but philanthropy itself. None of us had a plan for what to do when the main funding artery of an entire field closed overnight. We had committees and review cycles, but no emergency switch. Even funders who wanted to help struggled to move quickly because their systems weren’t built for emergency response.

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Out of that vacuum came the coordinated emergency response for public interest media in Europe. It began with a few of us comparing notes; phone calls turned into a shared spreadsheet; the spreadsheet turned into a common picture of what needed to be done: at least one public interest newsroom in every affected country must survive.

Within weeks, others joined, helped by the timing of the Journalism Funders Forum meeting that April, where the plan was first presented to a room of funders already asking what could be done. The meeting became the moment that turned a handful of conversations into a shared effort.

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Several foundations made funding available for three-year core grants and development support for over sixteen newsrooms. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we used what already worked. Some funded newsrooms directly, others through Civitates; while OCCRP’s network enabled us to identify affected newsrooms and pair grants with development support, investing in the long-term financial resilience of public-interest journalism.

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We focused on national, independent, not-for-profit outlets, those most exposed to the cuts and essential for holding power to account within their own countries. They’re also the connective tissue in cross-border investigations, making their survival critical to Europe’s wider reporting networks.

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Beyond the Emergency

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The crisis proved that collaboration matters more than perfection. What worked in 2025 wasn’t an established mechanism, but a small group of funders coordinating quickly, sharing information, and trusting each other’s judgment. The turning point came when two funders committed some funding to the plan, creating room for the rest to follow. As one colleague put it, “The risk of doing nothing was greater than the risk of doing it imperfectly.”

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“The risk of doing nothing was greater than the risk of doing it imperfectly.”

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Now the collective effort keeps at least sixteen newsrooms alive over the next three years and helps them become more sustainable. More than 300 million people are guaranteed to have access to independent information. In a moment when many believed the gap was impossible to close, it proved that joint action could still make a difference. Rebuilding an independent journalism sector once it’s gone would have been far harder, and far more expensive, than keeping these newsrooms afloat.

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The experience also made one truth impossible to ignore: if we value independent information and wish to have access to it in the coming years, we need sustained investment from a broader circle of funders. The emergency grants are too small to guarantee long-term stability. And one newsroom per country does not make a healthy media landscape. The health of our democracies, and of the issues every foundation cares about, relies on the integrity of information. When that collapses, every mission loses its grounding in reality.

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The experience also revealed a deeper issue: too few foundations see journalism as part of their own mission. Yet every cause, from climate to justice to health, depends on the same foundation of trusted information.

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“The health of our democracies, and of the issues every foundation cares about, relies on the integrity of information”

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Europe’s Blind Spot

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The work is far from done. Not all affected newsrooms received support, and even those that did will need continued investment to build stability beyond 2028. The US funding cuts forced Europe to see what it had quietly outsourced. Depending on non-European public funding to guarantee the flow of reliable information within EU borders is neither sustainable nor defensible.

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Europe needs its own civic infrastructure: transparent, politically independent funding for public interest journalism, protected under the same logic that supports culture or science. Market regulation must also catch up with reality. Platforms that profit from news must contribute to its production, and AI companies that harvest journalistic work should compensate those who create it.

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Foundations that work on climate, health, education, or migration all depend on the same information environment. Protecting it should be a shared responsibility, not an optional extra.

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The next shock will come. When it does, our response cannot rely on improvisation and goodwill alone. What’s needed is budget flexibility and the authority for programme teams to act when speed matters more than process. Some duplication or inefficiency is the price of speed; the greater danger is paralysis. But most of all, protecting journalism should be a shared responsibility, not an optional extra, and it will take collective, long-term investment to keep that foundation intact.

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