Welcome to our January 2026 newsletter!
A year ago Europe’s independent media was hit by a perfect storm.
An industry already facing a funding crisis was pushed closer to the brink by USAID’s demise.
The agency’s sudden closure exposed an inconvenient truth, ignored far too long: the extent to which public interest journalism in Europe’s democracies depended on funding from the United States for its survival.
The USAID cuts were a hammer blow to outlets already reeling from underfunding, a broken financial model and legal and political attacks on their independence. As staff were laid off, new funding strategies had to be devised almost overnight. Civitates and other funders responded by mobilising an emergency fund to support those most at risk.
But this kind of improvisation isn’t sustainable, and our grantees and other independent media are finding longer term solutions: developing new ways to target fresh audiences to generate income.
Innovation and resilience
For example, the award-winning investigative outlet investigace.cz has started a podcast series, Protagonista, in which some of Europe’s top investigative journalists narrate the stories behind their investigations. One aim of the series is to showcase their stories for pitching to filmmakers and TV producers.
Reporters are also trying to take the destinies of their outlets into their own hands. Journalists from the Portuguese magazine Visão raised more than €230,000 via crowdfunding to keep the publication alive after it went into liquidation. The vast support shows that the appetite for “independent, high-quality journalism” free from the “dictatorship of algorithms” is undimmed. (The crowdfunder is still open.)
Yet while Europe’s independent media is showing its resilience and ability to innovate, sustained, strategic philanthropic funding is essential to protect and strengthen our fragile independent media ecosystem. Our report, Beyond the Headlines, laid out a blueprint for how philanthropy can and should step up to the challenge.
The immediate shockwaves from the dismantling of USAID a year ago have subsided, but the crisis in Europe’s public interest media remains.
Independent, fearless journalism which holds power to account is a crucial cog in the wheel of a functioning democracy, and it must be safeguarded at all costs.
In solidarity,
ELISA PETER
Director, Civitates
Democracy defenders. Polish nonprofit and Civitates’ grantee partner CEE Digital Democracy Watch was only founded two years ago, but they’re already offering solutions to the challenges that tech poses for democracy, explains its founder Jakub Szymik in this month’s feature. Read the full article here.
Portuguese digital outlet Divergente continues taking their reporting out of the newsroom, using innovative formats and collaborations to find new audiences. Case in point: their live conversation with the rapper Xullaji at the MIL Lisboa Convention in October. This led to a screening of Divergente’s film ‘For you, Portugal, I swear!’ with theatre collective ‘Peles Negras, Máscaras Negras’ in January. See future events here.
AI Forensics’ have published important research on the surge of AI slop, deceptive synthetic videos and images flooding our feeds, and how this is largely driven by Agentic AI Accounts (AAAs). Read their analysis here.
The benefits of building alliances is also clear in #aufstehn’s collaboration with Grazer Frauenrat and their campaign to combat verbal sexual harassment, which resulted in a meeting with the Minister for Women’s Affairs: major milestone in this pilot campaign.
Fundación Maldita.es published an investigation on TikTok accounts that use AI-generated sexualized images of minors to lure paedophiles who can then buy real child pornography on Telegram. They reported a selection of the worst 15 accounts to TikTok. Shockingly the platform decided to keep those accounts up in likely automated decisions.
In January, PressOne published an investigation revealing how Romania’s Minister of Justice plagiarised 140 pages of his doctoral thesis. The Minister didn’t resign. Instead a smear campaign was launched against the journalist who wrote the story, Emilia Șercan, which the International Press Institute demanded an inquiry into.
Poland’s President, Karol Nawrocki, has vetoed the Digital Services Act (DSA), emphasising ‘the danger of censorship’. Grantee partner Panoptykon has analysed the situation and what comes next.
French nonprofit Point de Contact’s 2025 report on online hate speech reveals that the most frequently reported grounds of discrimination were origin (57%), religion (28%) and sexual orientation and gender identity (13%). The report also highlights civil society’s role in identifying illegal content and supporting its victims.
The Portuguese Journalists’ Union have highlighted the dangers of the Público newspaper’s intention to evaluate their journalists through a model which will fuel clickbait. Under the model, 15% of the journalist’s score will be based on metrics such as clicks to subscribe to the newspaper and page views of articles, which will inevitably subvert the drive towards quality journalism.
Ravni BG, a coalition led by Bulgarian Fund for Women (BFW), has expanded with 18 new member organisations. This signifies an important moment of growth for the network, as it diversifies and strengthens in its efforts to protect human rights, equality, and social inclusion. Read about it here.
André Wilkens, European Culture Foundation (ECF) director, draws links between culture, democracy and the next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF), in an op-ed for EU Observer. “Culture is not a luxury,” he writes. “It is a compass… strengthening belonging, and shaping the future we aspire to.”
Wikipedia, the world’s largest online information resource, turned 25 on January 15, marking a quarter century of making trustworthy, accessible, human-powered knowledge. Its journey over the last 25 years is documented here.
24/02/26 – Conference on Information Integrity & Wikipedia: How community-governed platforms can inform future policy-making
Location: European Parliament, Brussels, Room SPAAK 7C50, 10-12 am.
Wikimedia Europe, the University of Amsterdam, and Eurecat discuss the evidence-based policy recommendations of their DEM-Debate project which draws insights from community-led practices to increase resilience in the online information ecosystem. For more information, email: office@wikimedia-europe.eu
Calls:
- Upcoming calls from the EU Commission can be found here.
- The Culture of Solidarity (CoS) Fund empowers Ukrainian arts and cultural professionals to sustain creativity, resilience, and community connection during and after the war. The first of two calls for proposals for collaboration grants is open. Proposals must be submitted by 31 March, 2026, at 13.00 CET. Details are here.
Jobs & opportunities:
- The Knowledge & Impact Centre (KIC) at the King Baudouin Foundation, are looking for a Data & Impact Scientist to join our Knowledge & Impact – Strategy Team. Applications close February 10, 2026. Job and application details are here.
- Barrow Cadbury Trust, an independent London-based social justice charity, has two vacancies. They are looking for a Head of Migration to manage an established grants programme supporting a more just immigration system. Applications close February 13, 2026. They are also looking for a Head of Communications. Applications for this post close January 30. Further details here.
We Recommend:
- How to Better Protect and Support Civil Society in the EU? – Illiberal Challenges to Civil Society, the Freedom of Association, and Civic Activism in the European Union, is a paper by Daniel Hegedüs of The German Marshall Fund of the United States, that outlines how to strategically recalibrate EU civil society policy to meet its present challenges.
- Grok Unleashed. This report by AI Forensics revealed how Grok’s weak guardrails enable mass sexualized images (women, some minors) plus illegal Nazi/ISIS content. The findings generated global publicity and caused widespread outcry.
- The Human Guide to Detecting AI Imagery. AI Forensics have also published their invaluable expert guide for detecting AI slop across social media. (According to their findings, 25% of posts on TikTok are AI-generated.)
- AUTHLIB. Neo-Authoritarianisms in Europe and the Liberal Democratic Response. The Horizon project AUTHLIB investigates the sources and implications of the normative divergence from the model of liberal democracy in Europe.
