Media68·
Africa Desk
28 stringers · 19 countries
Politics, climate adaptation, pan-African trade, and the Sahel security file. Flagship coverage: Lagos cross-border smuggling routes and Nairobi's climate-finance negotiations.
Read the desk →About Media68
The independent newsroom where 68 countries meet one conversation.
Media68 is an independent, reader-funded newsroom covering politics, culture, climate, and conflict from reporters embedded in 68 countries. We publish what local outlets can't and what global desks skip — original, on-the-ground stories translated and contextualized for an English-reading global audience. We are not a content platform. We are not advertiser-supported. We are a newsroom that answers to the people who read us, and only to them.
The founding dispatch
Berlin, Mexico City, 2017. Three correspondents, one shared complaint.
Media68 was founded in 2017 by a three-person team of former BBC, Al Jazeera, and EFE correspondents based in Berlin and Mexico City. The premise was simple, and remains simple: a cross-border story that touched Lagos, Beirut, and Quito was being broken into three single-country desks, each edited by a different outlet, and never read in full by anyone.
We set out to fix two things at once. First, the gap between local reporting and global desks — underreported cross-border stories that no single newsroom had the budget or mandate to cover. Second, the slow drift of editorial judgment under advertiser pressure, where stories that threatened a sponsor got softened, and stories that no sponsor cared about never got assigned at all.
The remedy we chose was structural. We took no advertising, took no government or party funding, and built the newsroom on a flat-rate membership paid by readers. Eight years on, that structure still holds. The masthead has grown to a 22-person editorial board and more than 140 contracted stringers across 68 countries, but the founding complaint — and the founding remedy — has not changed.
— The founding editors, March 2017
The correspondent network
Reporters on contract across 68 countries.
The largest independent non-ANNGO international correspondent network outside Reuters and AFP. Six regional desks, 140+ contracted stringers, one editorial standard. Every story that ships carries a stringer byline and a downloadable primary-source dossier.
Americas Desk
24 stringers · 14 countries
Latin American politics, U.S. foreign policy from the south, Amazon deforestation, and the Caribbean climate file. Run jointly from Mexico City and Bogotá.
Read the desk →Asia-Pacific Desk
31 stringers · 17 countries
South-east Asia politics, Pacific island climate displacement, Korean peninsula, and the China file. Largest single desk by stringer count.
Read the desk →Europe Desk
18 stringers · 9 countries
EU policy, eastern European security, migration, and the UK political file. Anchored in Berlin with senior correspondents in Brussels, Warsaw, and London.
Read the desk →Middle East Desk
22 stringers · 7 countries
Conflict reporting, energy markets, and cultural coverage. Stringers based in Beirut, Amman, Cairo, Istanbul, and the Gulf.
Read the desk →Central & South Asia Desk
19 stringers · 6 countries
Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal. Politics, climate, and the long-form conflict file.
Read the desk →Every long-form piece published by Media68 ships with a downloadable primary-source dossier — a PDF of court filings, leaked documents, datasets, or interview transcripts that readers can verify themselves.
By the numbers
The numbers behind a reader-funded newsroom.
Independent journalism's value is in the work, not the metrics. But readers asking "who are you and why should I pay?" deserve a straight answer in figures. These are the verified facts, audited where indicated.
4,180
Original reported pieces published in 2024, across the politics, climate, culture, conflict, and science desks.
41,200
Paying members as of Q1 2025, spanning 132 countries. Reader-funded, no advertiser relationships.
41 hrs
Average ship time from filing to publish, verified by the 2024 Reuters Institute editorial-speed benchmark.
87%
Member retention rate after year one, audited by the Membership Puzzle Project.
6.8 min
Average dwell time per article — 2.4× the industry benchmark for digital news sites.
ONA 2024
Awarded "Best Small Newsroom" by the Online News Association at the 2024 Online Journalism Awards.
The revenue promise
How we are funded. How we are not.
Media68 has operated under a published No-Ad revenue policy since the day we incorporated in 2017. We accept no paid placements, no sponsored content, no native advertising, and no advertiser briefing on editorial coverage. We accept no government, political-party, or NGO funding of any kind. The newsroom is funded by reader memberships — annual subscriptions paid by the people who read the work.
This is not a marketing line. It is a structural choice that determines which stories we can assign, which ones we can hold, and which sources we can protect. It is also the reason we ask readers to pay.
— The Media68 editorial board, March 2025
An offer, not a sales pitch
Read Media68 free for 30 days. Then $5 a month, or walk away.
The full newsroom — every desk, every region, the weekly translated edition — open to you for a month. No card tricks, no auto-renewal traps. At day 30 you decide whether to continue at $5/month or $50/year, and you can cancel in two clicks.
Independent since 2017 · Reader-funded · No advertiser relationships