Media outlets in France and beyond are building shared infrastructure to regain their independence from big tech platforms.
On October 15, two independent French media organizations quietly launched what could become models for a more cooperative internet for journalism. Basta, an investigative outlet founded in 2008 with a focus on social and environmental issues, unveiled the Portail des médias indépendants (Independent Media Portal), an open-access aggregator featuring stories from more than eighty French and two hundred international outlets. That same day, La Presse libre (The Free Press), a coalition of progressive national and local publications, introduced a shared-subscription platform connecting eight publications under a single €19.90 ($23) monthly offer.
Both initiatives aim to rebuild a direct link with audiences in a media landscape increasingly dominated by conservative ownership and billionaire media empires. They also share a commitment to financial independence, relying on readers’ donations (for Basta) and subscriptions (for La Presse libre) rather than corporate shareholders or advertisers.
Their independence extends beyond how they fund themselves. It concerns how journalism reaches the public, and who controls that access. For years, independent outlets relied on platforms like Meta or Google to distribute their work. But as these companies reconfigured their algorithms, downranked news, and banned political, social, and electoral advertising in Europe, their objectives no longer aligned with those of journalism. Independent publishers are now working to reclaim the very tools of distribution and discovery, rebuilding their own infrastructure instead of depending on Silicon Valley’s. This shift is part of a broader European movement toward technological independence, as newsrooms develop open-source or in-house tools for their daily production to bring their technologies back in line with their editorial values. “We’ve gone from a cultural battle to a technological one,” Nicolas Camier, Basta’s head of development, says.
Over the past decade, traffic from social networks has collapsed. “We went from thirty-eight percent in 2017 to four percent in 2024 of our traffic coming from Facebook,” Camier says. Each algorithmic shift has made independent outlets more invisible. Yet the decline in traffic didn’t kill Basta’s model—it reshaped it. Today, the site attracts around a quarter of a million monthly visits and counts twenty-five thousand newsletter subscribers, a loyal base that underpins its donation-driven model. “We’ve seen ten to fifteen percent annual growth in donation revenue for about a decade,” Camier notes. As Basta’s reach shrank, its support base deepened. Better a small but engaged community that gives than a large audience that never will. Readers, Camier adds, are willing to fund the infrastructure that sustains independence.
Rather than try to revive social traffic, the team at the Portail designed a tool that gathers and highlights stories from other independent outlets. It’s essentially a human-curated Google News for the alternative press. The site is free to access and aims to rely entirely on reader donations, funded through a €160,000 crowdfunding campaign, a €40,000 loan from the Fonds pour une presse libre (Free Press Fund), and a €36,000 grant from Journalismfund Europe.
The Portail is modest in scale, with about fifteen hundred daily visits a month after launch, but the goal is not to keep readers inside Basta’s ecosystem but to circulate attention, trust, and visibility among peers. Its ambitions are to amplify the democratic impact of independent journalism; rebuild trust with audiences who have abandoned mainstream news; break information bubbles; and provide a safe, ad-free, tracker-free space for discovery. La Presse libre takes a similar stance: competing not for clicks but for meaning. “We’re not trying to re-create an economy of views,” says Jean-Marie Leforestier, La Presse libre’s director. “We’re building one based on trust, on readers who value journalism for what it brings to public debate.”
La Presse libre tackled another weak point of the independent ecosystem: subscription fatigue. Its eight founding outlets—including Rue89 Bordeaux, Rue89 Lyon, Arrêt sur images, Politis, and Mediacités—now share a single technical and payment infrastructure while maintaining their editorial autonomy. Subscribers gain access to all publications in one space, under one login.
“We recorded twenty-five hundred subscriptions in the first month, about forty percent of them before the official launch,” says Leforestier. “People subscribed not to the product itself, but to the promise behind it.” Describing the move as a response to growing media concentration, Leforestier says the goal is less about scale than about coherence. In France, legacy outlets like Le Monde count more than half a million paying subscribers; Mediapart, one of France’s major independent newsrooms, counts around two hundred and forty-five thousand paying subscribers. Individually, the eight outlets gathered under La Presse libre are smaller—but together, their fifty-five- to sixty thousand paying readers amounts to a national audience, proving that cooperation can rival scale. “When you put all these ‘small’ outlets together, you create an editorial density that makes sense,” Leforestier says. “Individually, some of them might look like niche complements; together they form a real service.”
The real gamble isn’t financial: it’s cooperation itself. Both initiatives are experiments in governance as much as in technology, testing whether independence can also mean working together. With the Portail, Basta built a tool that amplifies other outlets’ work while reinforcing its own mission: to make independent journalism more visible as a whole. Camier sees it as a transitional step. “The first milestone is early 2026: to create an advisory committee with representatives from other media, from civil society, from universities. And in five or six years, why not hand it over to a collective structure with shared governance?” La Presse libre goes a step further. Its eight publications are already united within an association created for the project, sharing decisions and visibility on an equitable footing. “It’s a bet on neutrality,” says Leforestier. “We’re not super–editors in chief, deciding what matters. Each newsroom remains fully sovereign. We just make their work visible together.”
Across the Atlantic, a similar approach to building collective, independent tools for journalism has emerged in Canada. Following Meta’s 2023 decision to block news links in the country, several independent outlets joined forces to create Unrigged, a platform aggregating articles, podcasts, and newsletters from partner newsrooms in a chronological, algorithm-free feed. The project, led by podcast producer André Goulet, came together in just five months. Whether in Montreal or Paris, the logic is the same: independent media are turning away from the platforms that once promised visibility and toward shared, community-owned infrastructure.
The quiet alliances forming between Basta’s Portail, La Presse libre, Unrigged, and others may not change the algorithm, but they might change the balance of power. By reclaiming their tools, these outlets are doing more than resisting the feed. They’re building the foundations of a different internet for journalism.
Pascal Lenoir
