Dear reader,
Trump, Orbán, and Putin’s war on the media has entered a new era. When they failed to destroy us with their big lies, accusations in the mirror, or false balances, they struck where we are most vulnerable — our near-total dependency on philanthropy.
My favourite part of founding OC Media was feeling connected to all the brave, uncompromising journalists in the Caucasus. I loved brainstorming stories with our Daghestani journalists, refining conflict-sensitive terminology, or travelling across Armenia and Azerbaijan to meet our reporters and recruit new contributors.
Fundraising was a new world I was unexpectedly thrown into. I had to learn how to network and sell our journalism to people not always interested in or understanding media. It’s been a rollercoaster — I have navigated OC Media through three major funding crises, yet under my financial management, our team has grown to almost twenty staff.
Georgia’s sudden democratic breakdown put eight years of my team’s hard work at risk. Between the ‘foreign agents’ law and the proposed law to completely outlaw foreign funding, the US funding freeze was a sudden calamity — another in what feels like a series of plagues. The ‘Stop Work’ order impacted three of our projects and our core funding, for which we had largely spent money upfront and were supposed to receive reimbursements. At this point, I have little hope this money will ever be realised.
We’re talking about a quarter of a million dollars — approximately 80% of our already heavily trimmed 2025 budget.
Right now, we can afford two more months of existence, with salary cuts and a total halt to all programmes except news reporting.
There is only one way to survive this crisis — the path we’ve already embarked on: developing non-donor revenue streams, such as Membership.
Starting today, we are launching a bold campaign to raise awareness among our readers about media funding and sustainability. This debate has been taken over by enemies of the media, and it’s time to take it back.
In the coming weeks, I will make our funding even more transparent than before, sharing my honest experience of navigating independent media through a sea of foundations, embassies, businesses, and hostile governments.
I do this as OC Media’s last resort to stay afloat — to make our readers aware that if they don’t think supporting us with even $5 a month is worth it, another reality awaits them: a barren media landscape filled with AI-generated rubbish and authoritarian propaganda seeping through their browsers and billionaire-owned social media feeds.
Last year, our website had over 450,000 active users. We need just 4,000 members to stay afloat. Impossible? Join us in proving that independent media in the Caucasus doesn’t have to rely on donor funding — or simply out of spite for the fascists trying to reshape the world in their image, with us standing in their way.
