An analysis of the finances fueling the Romanian media during the past decade reveals a highly imbalanced market, with independent media struggling to survive and the government pumping millions of euros into politically aligned nationwide media groups. The local media market seems to thrive, with hundreds of news portals and small broadcasters competing for audiences. However, most of them operate on shoestring budgets, primarily serving the interests of local politicians and their affiliated businesses.
Author: Adrian Anton
The combined income of all media companies in Romania reached a total of €797m in 2022, according to data collected in the Global Media Finances Map, a project run by the Media and Journalism Research Center (MJRC). This is an increase of about 7% compared to the previous year.
The study is based on data about the total income reported by media companies in the local trade registry. MJRC’s database covers 385 media entities, including nationwide, regional, and local broadcast groups, publishers, and news portals. For 367 of those, the MJRC has complete historical datasets.
The industry’s revenue grew by some 51% between 2013 and 2022. Overall, 68.6% of the media outlets in Romania, or 252 out of 367 outlets, recorded a higher turnover in 2022 than in 2013.
These figures include the state funding that the country’s public service broadcasters, TVR and SRR, receive annually from the government. Without TVR and SRR, the total income totaled €616m in 2022, showing just how much the government spends on the media: a whopping €181m.
Privately owned nationwide broadcasters are the most dominant, their revenue accounting for over 82% of the total income generated. Two media groups, Pro TV and Antena TV Group, had numbers accounting for over 50% of the total market turnover (public media excluded).
Pro TV leads the rankings, with an increase of more than €82m compared to 2013, followed by Antena TV Group (+€65m), Clever Media Network (+€45m), and Dogan Media International (+€34m).
National vs local: the government moving the goalposts
At first glance, Romanian national media may seem like a sustainable and lucrative industry. Most privately owned media finance themselves through advertising revenue, while a handful of media outlets generate healthy revenue from subscriptions.
At the same time, the government plays a significant role in the media sector. Besides the total subsidy of €181m awarded to the Romanian public service broadcasters, the government also uses public funds to finance privately run media. For example, according to data from the agency Initiative, reported by Pagina de Media, the advertising market in Romania was worth €657m in 2022. The difference of €40m reportedly came from the state budget, awarded through an ingenious funding scheme.
Political parties in Romania receive subsidies from the state budget under Law 334/2006, which provides them with public money to “ensure equal opportunities in political competition” and transparency in financing their activities.
According to an analysis by Romanian journalist Cristian Andrei, political parties received more than €40m in public funds in 2022, diligently channeled to the media through contracts that have not been made public. The report found that in the first five months of 2022, the budget allocated for the country’s three largest parties, the Social Democratic Party (PSD), National Liberal Party (PNL), and Union Save Romania (USR), doubled compared to the same period in the previous year.
Legal loopholes used to the detriment of the public interest foster this lack of transparency. Recorder, a leading investigative outlet in Romania, uncovered a financial circuit used to channel state funds to the media, involving political parties and an intermediary company designed to hide the paper trail.
The mechanism works as follows: the parties receive subsidies from public money, conclude contracts with an intermediary company, and the latter, in turn, sign other agreements with the media outlets. The intermediary in this set of transactions is needed to conceal the identity of the actual beneficiaries, as they can invoke the so-called “commercial secret” protection provided for by Law 11/1991, which does not allow the disclosure of information about activities or prices charged by traders. In this way, public money is essentially “privatized” along the financial circuit, and all traces of the original funds are lost.
Although political spending in the media represents only a tiny fraction of the total income generated, roughly 5%, this source of financing is essential for many media companies. If the nationwide outlets are removed from the calculation, the political ad spend is roughly 36% of the total income generated by all other players.
Government funding has also contributed to further market distortion. In 2020, the media industry was flooded with government funds to promote the anti-Covid campaign. Almost RON 200m (€41m) was pledged for this campaign at a time that coincided with the period before local and parliamentary elections in September and December 2020.
Although an information campaign during the Covid-19 pandemic was evident and necessary, some TV stations and websites peddling fake news also received significant financial support from the government. The distribution of funds was unbalanced, with the top 10 providers receiving half of the finances promised by the Romanian government. Most of the financing went to nationwide TV stations and online publications.
Government funding thus further widened the gap between independent and state-funded media publications. It’s become a race between a hare and a tortoise, where the former is running non-stop, and the latter is not only slow but also has obstacles put in its way to prevent it from catching up.
Local press: the Cinderella of Romanian media
Of the 116 local publications analyzed, 77 increased their total revenue between 2013 and 2022. In most cases, the difference is several tens or hundreds of thousands of euros, much lower than the figures for national publications.
Local publications generally suffer financially compared to the national average, and the figures agree. The funding mechanism for these media outlets is explained by local journalist Cătălin Moraru, in a 2024 report published by the Center for Independent Journalism (CIJ), a media watchdog in Romania. The report indicates that money from party subsidies almost always stays in Bucharest.
“Local money comes through various institutions, through various party companies, because it’s not expensive,” claims Moraru in Monitorul de Botoșani, a publication based in Botosani, a town in northeastern Romania. Sometimes, these institutions pay a local journalist up to €100 monthly for various services. “Small change” by Moraru’s estimation; however, he implies that journalists with more access and influence can “collect good money.”
This pattern is also found in Tulcea, a city in eastern Romania at the mouth of the Danube Delta. According to an investigation published on PressOne, several online publications in Tulcea receive public funding based on personal relationships between journalists and local politicians. The “goodwill” sponsorship from parties is disguised as an offer of services. However, the money that reaches the local press via state institutions is very little in the grand scheme of things; a payment to a media outlet usually consists of a mere €300-€400.
Nor has regional media, the financially vulnerable middle child, received its due. Just like the local press, regional media outlets face shortcomings, and a lack of sustainability across the board, and their decline can be seen in the figures. Despite the inflation rate, the aggregate turnover of regional publications in Romania has fallen from €2.6m in 2013 to just €2.1m in 2022.
The picture seems a little brighter when it comes to local broadcasting, as 104 of the 144 local radio and TV stations in Romania had a higher turnover in 2022 than a decade ago. Still, the turnover gap between national and local TV is visibly wide.
An unfair fight for independent media
Generalist independent online publications recorded higher turnovers than ten years ago, an overall increase of €2.6m to €15.8m. This is an important category as most of the independent media outlets in Romania, meaning those not controlled by government bodies, political parties, and businesses or individuals with political links, can be found in this category. Examples of the few independent media in Romania include Recorder, G4 Media, Dela0, and PressOne.
However, comparing these numbers with those of the big media companies shows a significant discrepancy between independent media outlets and the mighty nationwide media groups.
Print publications in sharp decline
The 2008 economic crisis that hit Romania in full force was felt harshly by print newspapers, which faced daunting financial problems. Paper became more expensive, the big newspaper publishers failed to meet their advertising targets, and people could no longer afford to buy access to print news.
After 2008, many print publications were forced to adapt to the crisis and convert their format to digital to conserve costs. The decline in print publications is felt in the total turnover, with a loss of €7m across the category, from €37.6m in 2013 to around €31m in 2022.
Niche, thematic online publications on the rise
Niche publications have gained a lot of ground in the last decade. The popularity of sports and business newspapers has visibly increased over time.
As a category, online sports publications made €1.7m in 2022, well above the 2013 total of just over €36,000. However, this success is mainly due to a single publication, Fanatik, which has experienced explosive growth over the past decade, reaching around €1.5m alone. This sports powerhouse accounts for more than 97% of the total turnover in this category.
Business newspapers, too, have enjoyed success, almost doubling their total turnover compared to the last decade, from €4.5m to €8.4m in combined figures.
In contrast, while sports and business publications have grown significantly in recent years, the same cannot be said for Romanian cultural magazines. The largest cultural publication by turnover, Observator Cultural, had a total income of about €80,000 in 2022.
Hungarian language press: an Orban mouthpiece?
Hungarians are the largest ethnic minority in Romania, comprising over 1.1 million people, and Budapest funds many Hungarian-language publications in Romania.
One of these is the Transylvanian Media Space Association (Asociatia Pentru Spatiul Media Transilvan in Romanian), which received grants of HUF 7.45bn (equivalent to €20m) from the Hungarian government of Viktor Orbán between 2019-2021, according to the independent investigative portal Átlátszó Erdély.
Although at first sight, one might expect publications financed by Hungary to be a mouthpiece for the Orbán regime, in reality, this is not the case. According to Átlátszó Erdély, “what is important is not what can be written, but rather what cannot: no voice critical of the Hungarian government can appear in the publications of the [Hungarian government-funded] press trust.”
Author
Adrian Anton is a journalist based in Constanta, Romania. In 2022, he won the Best Local Press award and was nominated in the same year for the Best Debut category in the Superscrieri journalist competition. He has a degree in Journalism from the Ovidius University in Constanta.
Photo by Jakub Żerdzicki on Unsplash