At the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, a packed room gathered to confront one of the most urgent challenges facing global media today: What happens when traditional funding sources—particularly USAID’s—begin to fade, and no clear lifeline is in sight?
| 25. April 2025
The panel, titled “From Funding Crisis to Opportunity: Ideas and Solutions in a Post-USAID Landscape,” was held on 10 April 2025 at Hotel Brufani’s Sala Raffaello. Moderated by Lars Boering, Director of the European Journalism Centre (EJC), the session brought together leading voices in journalism development, including Mira Milosevic (Executive Director, Global Forum for Media Development), Sharon Moshavi (President, International Center for Journalists – ICFJ), Eliza Anyangwe (Editor-in-Chief, The Fuller Project), Peter Erdelyi (Founding Director, Center for Sustainable Media) and Alinda Vermeer (Director, Limelight Foundation).
The session was not just a diagnosis of journalism’s funding crisis but also a rallying call to rethink the infrastructure of public interest journalism—from collaboration and advocacy to audience engagement and tech equity.
Watch the full panel discussion:
Peter Erdelyi, Founding Director of the Center for Sustainable Media delivered a stark message: public sector funding for journalism has been gutted by nearly 50%.
“The coldest, hardest, and most important fact is that this money is not coming back,” he said bluntly.
He also noted that big tech companies—once enthusiastic supporters of journalism for reasons of influence and reputation—are now pulling back. Supporting journalism, he remarked, is “no longer fashionable.”
Erdelyi’s message was simple but unsettling: hoping for a saviour, whether public or private, is futile. His emphasis was that the journalism community must prepare for self-reliance and forge new alliances.
From left to right: Lars Boering (EJC), Sharon Moshavi (ICFJ), Eliza Anyangwe (The Fuller Project), Mira Milosevic (GFMD), Peter Erdelyi (Center for Sustainable Media) and Alinda Vermeer (Limelight Foundation).
Mira Milosevic, Executive Director of the Global Forum for Media Development (GFMD), opened with a sobering overview: a $5 billion annual shortfall in global journalism funding, compared to just $300 million currently provided by donors, philanthropy, and corporate giving.
“Around $150 million ends up supporting core functions of those small local medium-sized organisations. What we had even before all of this is the needs of communities, when the advertising disappeared, the support of local journalism. The gap was already somewhere around five billion for local journalism funding globally so the discrepancy is huge”, she said.
Milosevic also urged the audience to stop viewing journalism support as an isolated sector and instead understand it as part of a shared ecosystem. She highlighted the resilience of investigative and exile journalism networks, thriving not because of deep pockets but because of deep collaboration.
One promising initiative she cited was the Journalism Cloud Alliance, designed to provide affordable and secure cloud services to journalists working with sensitive data. As AI tools become more entrenched in journalism, data security is no longer a luxury but a necessity. However, many newsrooms simply cannot afford the digital infrastructure required to protect their work.
Mira Milosevic emphasised a crucial shift: moving from traditional development aid to a model based on mutual aid.
“It’s working together to see where we have power to join forces and how we can leverage little funding from donors and philanthropists to actually make that power significant in terms of creating parallel and new alternative tech and financial solutions”
Photo by Ascanio Pepe. Source: https://www.journalismfestival.com
Eliza Anyangwe, Editor-in-Chief of The Fuller Project, brought a searingly personal account of how vulnerable nonprofit journalism has become. She admitted that while donor-backed models had allowed them to do impactful work, these models were never built to survive a seismic funding collapse.
“We were never interested in thinking really about how we make the case for what we do to any other constituencies except from the philanthropic funders,” she stressed.
Anyangwe issued a strong call for radical collaboration, noting that journalism’s historically competitive nature must give way to solidarity. But such a cultural shift requires more than goodwill—it demands funding that prioritises long-term infrastructure, audience development, and internal capacity.
Alinda Vermeer, Director of the Limelight Foundation, brought a funder’s perspective to the conversation, speaking candidly about the philanthropic response to the shifting development landscape. She emphasised that whilst philanthropy has traditionally been associated with the arts, culture, or humanitarian causes, there is an urgent need to recognise journalism as a critical pillar of democracy — particularly in times of crisis.
Vermeer explained that Limelight’s approach is centred on providing stable, multi-year core support to public interest journalism, helping newsrooms weather uncertainty without the pressure of short-term funding cycles.
“At some point your budget is completely allocated to renewals, and if you were to take on any new grantees, that means ditching others — that is something that we’re not willing to do,” she said, acknowledging the challenge.
Sharon Moshavi, President of the International Centre for Journalists (ICFJ), spoke about how the current crisis in funding has merely accelerated long-standing challenges in the media sector — shrinking audiences, declining revenues, and a questioning of the value of news. One of the ICFJ’s strategic moves is to merge operations with Code for Africa, creating a joint venture that combines global networks with civic tech expertise.
Moshavi also reflected on the evolving language around their role, moving beyond “media development” to focus more directly on practical support for news creators, technologists, researchers, and civil society actors committed to journalistic ethics.
“We are trying to provide that foundational layer that makes doing the work so much easier, cheaper, quicker, and collaborative; the world does not need another intermediary — we are aiming to help people actually do the work,” she concluded.
Responding to questions from the audience, Mira Milosevic warned of a digital information system that has been effectively “captured” by big tech. These corporations dominate policy forums, invest hundreds of millions in lobbying, and shape the infrastructure and incentives that define the digital age.
“Our budgets are barely enough to exist and yet big tech companies spend more on lobbying than the entire journalism support ecosystem combined,” she emphasised.
Content creators with ethics, credibility, and trusted names must be recognised and empowered within the tech ecosystem. Without such recognition, no amount of funding will solve journalism’s deeper systemic challenges.
Despite the uncertainties of a post-USAID world, the message from the discussion was clear: journalism’s survival—and its evolution—will depend on its willingness to band together, build smarter, and resist harder.