Digital was a very new thing, when EUobserver launched almost 25 years ago. It was so new that newspapers would print stories about companies setting up a homepage.
EU member states had already pooled a good deal of their powers through EU integration since the 1950s, but the media were still trapped in national structures and print.
With the Internet it was suddenly possible to match the European power structures with European press and publish for a Europe-wide readership.
We didn’t ask any money from our readers before 2015, when the second version of EUobserver launched.
We had realised that payment for our content would be the only business model securing independent journalism long-term. But we suffered a near-death experience when becoming one of the first news outlets to raise a paywall.
The media business has been disrupted over and over again since 2015. Should all our journalists run a blog? A podcast? Not to mention updating social media accounts constantly to harvest clicks? And what about GDPR?
Our financial resources were always scarce and we could not afford to try out all the wonderful new ideas and technologies. One wrong investment – and we would be out of the game.
Without a very competent data scientist on board, we would not have been able to make the right decisions. Thanks to his clear mind EUobserver has remained a simple but very solid machine. It has been possible to operate it without a huge budget, while impossible for Russian trolls and fraudsters to break it.
Fair winds and following seas.
