Once in exile to escape threats and danger, journalists soon face a new set of challenges: how to sustain their careers, communities and reporting from afar. ICFJ’s International Journalists’ Network (IJNet), in collaboration with the Network of Exiled Media Outlets (NEMO), has expanded its Exiled Media Toolkit to include a comprehensive section on viability, produced by ICFJ Knight Fellow José J. Nieves. This section includes six in-depth resources:

• Commercial agencies as sustainability arms for independent media: Cases and lessons from exile
• When your audience sustains you: Membership and donations
• Fellowships and grants: Sustaining a calling in exile
• From t-shirts to strategic reports: Products as a path to sustainability
• Training as a revenue stream: Can we make a living by teaching others?
• Culture and community: Events as anchors in exile

These new resources, published in English and Spanish, are designed to assist journalists in sustaining their work and lives away from their home countries. They provide practical strategies, emphasizing the importance of creating alternative revenue streams.

The section features critical lessons learned from journalists in exile and their newsrooms on how to ensure monetary sustainability. These include diversifying revenue streams by developing specialized training courses and educational partnerships, implementing paid membership tiers for loyal audiences and creating original products like knowledge reports and items rooted in brand identity.

Not every solution works for every newsroom – membership and fundraising models can yield vastly different results depending on context. As detailed in the toolkit, media outlets partly run from exile like Confidencial (Nicaragua) and El Pitazo (Venezuela) have each experimented with these models, yielding contrasting results. Confidencial thrives on civic-driven support – contributions from readers who see funding independent journalism as a way to defend their right to information, rather than pay for exclusive content – while El Pitazo closed its membership program after low returns.

“We couldn’t keep pouring energy into something with so little return, but I wouldn’t trade what we learned for anything,” El Pitazo’s César Batiz said.

Nieves, the editor-in-chief of El Toque and an exiled journalist from Cuba, authored these latest resources as part of his ICFJ Knight Fellowship. In the toolkit, Nieves highlights the significance of fellowships and grants in funding investigations and providing access to new opportunities. However, he notes that while such support structures can be lifelines, they are rarely a complete solution. Nieves also discusses the challenges of establishing new creative or commercial agencies to diversify revenue, cautioning about potential operational overload, business infrastructure demands, ethical conflicts and scaling difficulties.

ICFJ Knight Fellow Luz Mely Reyes, the founder of Efecto Cocuyo who is in exile from Venezuela, has also contributed to the Exiled Media Toolkit. Explore the toolkit.