Resilience reports

Just weeks after the first cases of COVID-19 emerged, the European Journalism Centre — in partnership with Evens Foundation — launched Resilience Reports, a series of in-depth studies looking at how dozens of news organisations across Europe dealt with the pandemic. With limited information at that time about the impact of coronavirus on news media, the series aimed to address how smaller, independent organisations in particular were adapting their daily operations and business strategies to the new and challenging reality.

The economic blowback from the global downturn forced many news organisations, from the United Kingdom to Ukraine, to redevelop audience engagement strategies and rethink their already-strained business models. Each of our Resilience Reports — which were published online between June and September 2020 — explored how organisations, and the people within them, coped with these unimaginable circumstances.

In those few months, we reported on 24 important and innovative news organisations across 19 European countries: fact-checking news outlets from Spain, Croatia, Serbia and Turkey, investigative news outlets in Bulgaria, Hungary and Poland as well as local news outlets in France, Romania and Ireland. The series also shone a light on the early success of news organisations in Belgium, the UK, Spain and elsewhere that had pivoted to reader revenue.