media lab | Podcast Season: 1 - Episode: 4 / Release date: 18-10-2022

1:1 with Sebastian Esser
Krautreporter & Steady

Episode Highlights

00:00 Intro

01:18 Q1 - What does (protecting) media freedom mean to you?

09:37 Q2 - What should the EU legislators do or do better to protect media freedom?

16:45 Q3 - What are the pitfalls that EU legislators should avoid when trying to protect the media and its freedom?

24:45 You have 2 minutes to deliver a message to the powers that be in the EU: make your case.

27:33 Outro

Key Quotes

"Influence is not evenly distributed in Brussels."

1 / 6

"We're being squeezed between two usually influential pressure groups (...), and that is big media and big tech, and these dinosaurs are kind of fighting a fight among themselves."

2 / 6

"There's enormous political pressure, enormous political capital is being spent by the publishing industry (...) by big legacy media, on kind of forcing politics, or asking politics to put pressure on [Big Tech]."

3 / 6

"What's happening on a political level is that the fight of the legacy media to protect their income streams leads to an argument where they say: protect democracy by giving us money."

4 / 6

"When it comes to regulation and who gets preferential treatment, (...) subsidies, (...) kind of political power to put pressure on big platforms, it's the old media."

5 / 6

"Frau von der Leyen, (...) [do] not only talk to Axel Springer (...) also talk to small new media outlets."

6 / 6

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About Our Guest

Sebastian Esser | Founder - Krautreporter & Steady

Sebastian is a journalist and entrepreneur in Berlin, Germany, and the founder of member-funded digital magazine Krautreporter and of Steady, a membership platform for independent publishers. Krautreporter was crowdfunded in 2014 and publishes one story a day on politics and society. The cooperative specialises in ad-free, independent, engaged journalism. Krautreporter has 17,000 paying members today. Steady, founded in 2017, helps independent publishers easily launch membership programs. It has paid out more than 20 million Euros to 1,500 member-funded publications across Europe so far.

Relevant Resources

Krautreporter

Steady

Sebastian Esser

1:1 with Sebastian EsserKrautreporter & Steady