How small EUobserver actually is

At a recent conference, I introduced myself as “Alejandro Tauber, publisher of a small EU affairs news site called EUobserver.”

People in the room laughed at me.

Not because of the linguistic incongruence of my name (I think), but because of the ‘small’ part — or so an attendee told me afterwards.

They thought I was being humorously modest. Until I told them how small the team actually making EUobserver is.

A recent interaction with a reader who had contacted our customer service email underlined this perception. The reader in question was – rightfully – annoyed by the fact that the gift link function doesn’t seem to work on mobile browsers.

I told them this, and that while our editorial production moves fast, I am currently juggling the ultimate slash role of publisher/sales director/columnist/customer service/social media manager/IT administrator/marketing/institutional memberships/and probably more things I forget — which makes it hard to keep up with everything and is simply how small organisations work.

But I do think that it highlights a fact that is hard to see from the outside: EUobserver is made by a very small number of people, operating on a severly constrained budget, in an environment that ranges from indifferent to quite openly hostile to small independent media outlets.

And I’d like for you, our reader, to understand the simple fact – even though it’s probably a dumb thing to do from a business perspective – how hard everyone in this tiny organisation works to appear way bigger than we are.

It’s a view we don’t share very often, mainly because of humility, but also because it often feels straight up awkward to toot your own horn. I’ll do it anyway.

First, our yearly operating budget. Over the past few years, we’ve operated on an average yearly budget of around €700,000 — a fraction of what our competitors run on. The revenue came for about one-third from subscriptions — from individuals, institutions and organisations — one-third from advertising sales and one-third from foundations.

It was always just enough to keep going. Basically until last year, when one of the foundations ran into trouble and could not fulfil their commitment, punching a 15-percent hole our budget quite unexpectedly.

This forced us to cut costs significantly earlier this year, axing our freelance budget, halving our office space and reducing some of our salaries. It was not fun, and yet, here we are.

As a non-profit, the only way we can grow is if we actually make or are given more money — being ineligible for either bank credit or equity investment.

In practice, that means we simply have to do more with the same resources if we want to provide more to our readers or attract new readers.

And even so, we break our heads over how we could possibly more productive, more useful, more efficient; how we can better serve readers; where we can improve; what we more can we do.

Second, our editorial team.

We publish on average around five to six articles per working day, plus a newsletter with a little intro from one of our journalists. We do this with an editorial team of 4.5 full time journalists (one of whom is editor-in-chief, which comes with its own responsibilities), one editor who both runs the opinion section and sub-edits every article we write, and two interns who astoundingly manage to produce an article a day.

'Investigative. Influential. Independent'

Apart from our in-house production, the journalists also work with other news media on investigations which can take months, their own investigations, features and interviews — and a separate yearly magazine.

This year, their reporting on subjects ranging from Gaza to Russian interference made headlines across the world. It helped inform debates in national and EU parliaments. It informed citizens of what is going on in political bodies that are covered mostly through national lenses.

I count our blessings that we have journalists so experienced, knowledgable and committed that they can devise, research, interview, write, check and publish an article of the highest standards every. single. day. And choose to stay with EUobserver, despite being literally the best reporters in the areas they specialise in.

It’s honestly incredible.

Third, we have our support team.

With on the one side someone who manages to combine accounting, comptrolling, invoicing, payments and everything that people call HR. And on the other EUobserver’s founder Lisbeth Kirk, who knows every bit of the business, excells at every bit of it, and picks up any task that goes untended, no matter how tedious or lowly.

Together, they somehow keep this 25-year-old ship not only afloat, but watertight and financially responsible — even during the most challenging times.

And last, but not least, our sales team of two, who go out every day to tell anyone who might be interested that we are a place so good that it’s worth paying for to communicate their message with us.

From embassies to institutions, from think tanks to universities, and from NGOs to corporations, they compete against media with bigger reach, more resources, sophisticated targeting and economies of scale, and still manage to sell.

And that’s without even mentioning that our coverage of transparency, lobbying and equality is regularly highly critical of the same organisations, institutions and companies they are trying to sell to — unlike some of our competition.

Together, this group of remarkable individuals manages to create and maintain a news publication that is so much more than the sum of its parts. It’s a place from which journalists have gone on to work for some of the biggest and most prestigious publications — and still, years later, say that EUobserver was the best place they ever worked.

It’s a privilege to work with a group of people who care so much about the work they do, far beyond the compensation they receive for doing so.

Back to the annoyed reader whose reaction was both heartening and prompted me to write this up: “I did not know it was such a tiny team! That makes EUobserver even more of a feat.”

That reaction stuck with me, because it neatly captures the paradox we live with.

EUobserver looks big. We sound established. We publish at a pace that suggests depth of bench and layers of redundancy. From the outside, it can easily seem like we are comfortably-resourced, professionally-buffered, and safely set up for the long term.

We are not.

What keeps EUobserver going is not scale, or reserves, or institutional backing. It is people doing more than their job descriptions, day after day, and readers who decide that this kind of journalism is worth supporting.

The risk of appearing bigger than we are is not just that people overestimate us. It is that they underestimate their own role in keeping this work possible. If you think an organisation is “all set”, there is little reason to step in.

EUobserver exists because a small group of people works very hard to make it exist — and because readers choose, consciously, to be part of that equation. If you are one of them, thank you. And if you have ever assumed we did not really need your support, now you know that we do.

Not because we are fragile.

But because independence, at this scale, is never automatic. Even if it looks different from the outside.

Every month, hundreds of thousands of people read the journalism and opinion published by EUobserver. With your support, millions of others will as well.

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