Many people don’t trust media giants. That’s what we’ve been hearing in the past two months of interviews with a wide variety of European publishers with membership models. These upstart publishers represent different newsroom and audience sizes, focus areas and geographies. Yet they’re hearing similar complaints around information believability across the audiences they serve.
When a country’s most prominent media organizations have foreign backers, that frequently raises questions. Belgian publishing house De Persgroep controls the largest chunk of the market in Holland, and publishers like Rheinische Post Mediengruppe from Germany and Ringier Axel Springer Media from Switzerland have outsized influence in …read more