At Transitions’ 2025 Media Innovation Summit, Peter Erdelyi argued that journalism’s future won’t be powered by scale or institutions, but by precision, empathy, and deeply useful information that serves real people.
Nearly 80 journalists from 39 newsrooms across 25 countries gathered in Prague for the 2025 Media Innovation Summit, organized by Transitions in partnership with Journalismfund Europe, from 31 October to 1 November. Participants shared experiences, lessons learned, and practical ideas for using design thinking and innovation to strengthen their reporting and impact.
Among the standout moments was a keynote by Peter Erdelyi, founding director of the Center for Sustainable Media and a Budapest-based media executive with more than 25 years of experience.
Grounded in his work with dozens of newsrooms navigating transformation – from business model updates to new revenue experiments – Erdelyi’s talk examined what happens when the old assumptions about journalism no longer hold. Large institutions are retreating. Audiences follow people rather than mastheads.
In one of the summit’s most compelling reflections, he argued that journalism’s path forward may not be about scaling up but sharpening focus: building smaller, smarter operations that serve specific communities with clarity and real utility – because, he suggested, sustainability comes not from reaching everyone, but from mattering deeply to someone.
Twenty-four days ago, I became a father. I’m telling you this both to brag, but also to tell you that I’m sleep-deprived.
Life with a newborn – as I’m sure many of you have experienced – is quite a disorienting experience. Babies – they eat, they sleep, they process food quite often, and then they scream a lot.
Among the million things I have learned in the past three weeks, I have learned that babies, at the very beginning, cannot exactly cry yet. They are just really angry at you. They are like, “wah!” And you think to yourself, “What am I supposed to do? What am I doing?” And then it goes on for 20 minutes. And then for apparently no reason, the baby stops crying.
And she is incredibly cute, and she looks at you as if she’s ready to discuss the new Kathryn Bigelow movie on Netflix. And then you don’t know what’s happening. You don’t know what you’ve done.
And as any kind of normal, anxious beings would, my wife and I spent a lot of time reading stuff, watching videos, going to workshops, and trying to figure things out – because, if we read up, if we prepare, if we have good information, we will be in control. And one of the overarching experiences, at least for these first few weeks, is control – it doesn’t really work like that.
Things will just happen. And of course, it matters. These things matter.
But there’s very little that you can do to control things. And this is especially hard for me because I spent most of my adult life working under this thesis that I provide people with information, and I have them process information. Then they can make better decisions, and they will have more control over their lives. And this is still true to some extent.
But I’m starting to suspect that there is maybe a bigger gap between our ability to bring good information and then how that translates into control. You can read all you want about Vladimir Putin and geopolitics in the Middle East or climate change and global trade, but there is very little any individual can do to control those things. We inherited this thesis that information translates to control from a world that was a lot more predictable than the one that we are living in today.
And this world, it’s collapsing before our eyes. And a lot of our information ecosystem is collapsing with it. For decades, the largest institutions in the world – governments, big companies, and giant philanthropies – really believed that the information ecosystem was something that is worth investing in. And they invested money, including in Central and Eastern Europe.
Consensus has disappeared. Now, many of the world’s largest institutions no longer think journalism is something that is worth investing in. And this has a very direct effect on many of us. Their support was essential. They enabled a lot of public interest journalism in Central Eastern Europe for more than a decade.
But this system of institutional support also created dependencies. We all learned how to do projects – how to apply for grants – but maybe we didn’t learn enough about audiences.
I’m not trying to moralize here. This was a necessity. There was no alternative. But this age of institutions, it’s coming to an end.
I’m not entirely sure what’s replacing it, but it’s probably going to be something messier and something smaller – maybe something more alive. Maybe it’s an age of the individuals, like micro-publishers, solo creators, two-person teams with an audience of a few thousand people. But maybe it will be an age with an audience who actually cares a great deal. And this shift isn’t just about technology or algorithms.
It’s a little bit about that, but it’s also about trust. In the old mode, trust flew from the masthead to the individuals. For example, this person works for The New York Times, The Washington Post, or your local equivalent, so they must be a serious person because they are good, journalistic institutions.
That does not really apply anymore. Right now, people want to follow people. And if that person happens to work for a big institution, then great, then it lends some credibility to the institutions, but if that person leaves, then that credibility leaves with them.
Two weeks ago, there was an interesting chart that showed you the example of Dave Jorgensen. He worked for The Washington Post and ran their TikTok channel for quite a few years. And he was incredibly popular. He did these funny videos about politics, but then this June, he announced he was leaving.
And then he began to build his own TikTok – Local News International. By mid-July, Local News International surpassed The Washington Post in the number of YouTube views over time. The Washington Post is one of the strongest and best-established journalism organizations in the world, so you can imagine if losing one person affects them this much, how this translates into how people consume information.
Audiences no longer believe in this monolithic value of journalism. Someone telling someone else that he or she is a journalist does not have quite the same ring as it used to have. People believe in people.
They follow people whom they know or whom they feel like they know, and they support people who are useful for them and who make them feel something. And this is where solutions-oriented newsrooms actually have an advantage. You already start from a human scale.
You start with people’s problems and not abstractions. You face questions like what’s working and what could help – not just whom to blame. And that instinct to be constructive and to be of use is what a lot of large institutions in the world are losing and what many of the audiences are craving.
A lot of journalism still carries this old moralizing vocabulary. We tell ourselves we serve society: it’s for democracy, it’s for the public good.
All of this may be true, but these things are incredibly abstract. And honestly, I don’t think they are very helpful.
Society doesn’t read your newsletter, just like the public doesn’t listen to your podcast. Democracy is not going to give you 5 euros for your little thing that you’re doing. People will. Real, individual human beings with their messy lives, limited time, and their own hierarchies of need that may not line up with what journalism schools tell us is important. They are not looking for journalism to save the world. They’re looking for journalism that can help them to live in the world that they have.
They are not looking for people to tell them what’s important. People are looking for journalism that gives them information about the things that are already important for them.
Journalism becomes sustainable when it serves someone and not society, when it’s useful, when it makes someone’s day a little clearer, a choice a little smarter, and their community a little easier to navigate. Through these things, there is a benefit to society, but it shouldn’t be optimized for this abstraction of society. Meaningful utility for a small group of people is a lot better than marginal benefit for hundreds of thousands.
Utility creates value, and then this value creates the willingness to pay – or at least the willingness to stay. I know this sounds a little bit transactional, but I don’t think it is. This is the most sincere form of service because you really want to help someone.
We have to prove that our work actually matters in the lives of people and not just in grant reports. The question should not be: “How do we strengthen democracy?” It should be really simple, like: “Whose life gets better because we exist?” or “Whose life gets better because of our work?”
Some newsrooms have a very strange relationship with money, which I find hard to understand.
I am very much in favor of having money. I’m pro-money, if you will. I know it’s a controversial position. I’m pro-having your money. But there’s a lot of embarrassment about this topic. It’s like money is somehow tainting the purity of journalism – like it’s something for which we must apologize. And some of it is in the language: We are not commercial. We are non-profit. We are independent.
And don’t get me wrong, these things are perfectly fine things to be, but often they are like proxies. They are a way of saying, “We’re not like those people who sell things.” But money is not dirty.
Money is proof of value. It’s evidence that someone thought that what you made was worth something to them. Money is not the enemy of purpose.
Money is a receipt for purpose delivered. I have a newsletter that’s read by maybe 2,000 people. And as of this morning, 79 people are paying for it. I’m incredibly proud of this number. There are 79 people who decide to pay for what I do.
And I really want this number to go up to 100, maybe 200 someday. I’ve worked with a lot of newsrooms and publishers over the years. The difference between the ones that grow and the ones that are struggling is that in the successful ones, there’s someone inside the organization who gets a kick out of making money.
Someone who looks at a product and says, “Can we charge 5 euros for this somehow?” And then that person goes and tries it. And too often, we work in environments where that person who wants to experiment, to pitch, to sell, or to commercialize is treated like an intruder. But every subscription, every donation, every ad, every workshop you sell, is not a transaction. That is an act of trust. It is someone saying, “What you are doing is valuable. I want you to keep going.”
That’s not dirty, if you ask me. But again, I’m pro-money. But creating content, community, benefits, and services that people actually pay for is very hard.
I’ll be honest with you – I don’t think you are in an easy position to deliver it, because many of you are stuck in this strange limbo somewhere in the middle because you are not small enough to be very fast. You are not small enough to be one person, with one voice, with one super-specific niche. But then you are not large enough to have the advantages of the scale, the security, or the stability of operations of a bigger organization.
There are editors, beats, and hierarchies. And when you are five people and maybe part-time, it’s just a way to burn yourself out. There are some things that you can do in that modality, but you cannot mimic legacy media.
And so since we should not ask: “How do we grow into something bigger?” We should ask: “How do we shrink into something smarter?” To build a system that fits your size, to stop imitating legacy media, and to start designing something that is your own. I don’t know for how long the idea of a newsroom will be with us or how useful it will continue to be as a conceptual frame. Maybe it’s not a newsroom, maybe it’s a network, a studio, a collective, or a cooperative.
It can be a great many things. Most likely, it will publish less content. And that’s fine because with less content, it will matter more.
If you know exactly whom you are serving and how you’re helping them, you don’t need to reach hundreds of thousands. You will need maybe a few thousand people and a few hundred of them will pay. And in many contexts, this will be enough to keep you alive.
Constructive or solution journalism was born as a reaction to something. For decades, journalism defined itself through the constant negativity bias of traditional news and through exposure of a scandal or corruption to show what is broken. And that’s noble work, that’s important work.
But audiences got exhausted. And this was even before the current round of disruption. And it just left people feeling helpless.
Constructive journalism began as an antidote. It said, showing the problems is not enough. We also need to show how people are responding to them.
It does not sugarcoat reality, but people also need to see what works, not just what goes wrong. And chronicling the collapse but also the response to some collapse is already the first step toward utility. And that is closer to bringing journalism to a service.
It asks what could help instead of what has failed. And that is a real opportunity. This mindset, this response orientation is exactly what separates content and services that people are tolerating and consuming to one that they love – the things that audiences are really willing to pay for. That is the mindset of what turns journalism into a tool and a service. Let me give you two examples, both pregnancy-related.
First of all, there is this service in Hungary called Gyerunk Anyuka, which translates to, “Come on mama.” And it started as this community of women that wanted to take care of their bodies and heal after their children were born, since most of the time the focus is on the child’s wellbeing – as it should be – but the mothers become a little bit of an afterthought.
Over time, this exercise community of women became an information service for mothers that had shared this feeling. And now they offer various services. And my wife and I enrolled in one of their courses.
Every week of the last trimester, it gave us four videos about pregnancy, delivery, breastfeeding, and life with an infant. And it’s sequenced to match the rhythm of the last trimester. You have to pay to get access, and it’s incredibly useful.
The people behind this don’t think of themselves as journalists. I don’t think that the world thinks of them as journalists, but this is one of the most effective information products that I have ever seen. It meets a real urgent need exactly at the right moment.
It’s relevant, it’s actionable, it’s emotionally intelligent, and it’s paid. And people pay for it gladly because it’s useful.
The second example, it’s not even a service – it’s a spreadsheet. I learned from our social circle that there is a Google document that women pass around when they reach the final stage of pregnancy. And this spreadsheet has product reviews, information about doctors, warnings, hospitals, and what to look out for.
It’s a recommendation. It’s collective. It’s lived knowledge that makes you feel somewhat less alone in a time that is very chaotic. And it’s continually updated. You receive it, you use it, and you update it with your own insight.
And again, this is not journalism by the textbook definition, but it is a useful information product that serves an audience a lot better than many professional media outlets ever could. What connects these examples is their empathy and specificity. They start with the real person and what their problem is, and then they work from there.
They solve for something. Now imagine combining that practical utility with journalism values of verification, fairness, accountability, and transparency. Imagine work that is as responsive and as human as these communities, but as rigorous as a newsroom.
That is maybe something that journalism can become – not just stories about solutions, but solutions themselves. Information products that work for individuals while serving the public interest. Journalism that people do not just respect in the abstract, but journalism that they actually use.
This utility has an impact. And being genuinely useful is how journalism will earn its relevance back – if it will ever earn its relevance back. Small does not mean insignificant.
I’m speaking from recent lived experience when I tell you that serving one person can be more transformative than broadcasting to hundreds of thousands of people. Attention and care doesn’t scale infinitely, and maybe it should not. When the baby arrived, our world shrank to a few square meters – to a crib, a couch, and a half-eaten sandwich smeared against a blanket somewhere.
It’s a very small space, but everything suddenly matters more. Every tiny signal, every movement, and every sound carries meaning. And life got smaller, but its resolution got a lot sharper.
Some of this may be happening to journalism too. We keep thinking that our goal is to scale more people, donors, clicks, and stories, but maybe our task is just to see our audience in a higher resolution. Maybe sustainability comes not from expansion, but from precision – knowing exactly whom you serve, what they need, and why they’re coming back.
Solutions journalism was always about this instinct: to look closely, to pay attention, and to ask what is working and why. What gives me hope for this moment? In a time when institutions are collapsing – not just in journalism, but in every part of society – everyone feels a little powerless. People need examples of agency, care, and things that are still working. So yes, the age of institutions might be ending.
Money is scarce. The landscape is messy and unfair. And maybe this new age, this is where journalism finally discovers that what it always meant to do is to help people make sense of their lives, to remind them that they are not alone, and to offer them information that actually helps them.
Peter Erdelyi is the founding director of the Center for Sustainable Media and a media executive from Budapest with over 25 years of experience in journalism and media management. He publishes the weekly newsletter, Media Finance Monitor. As a mentor in the PluPro Project, Peter has worked closely with independent newsrooms navigating change.
