Fumaça

Journalists Ricardo Ribeiro and Maria Almeida launched a podcast of interviews following the model of some North-American podcasts and independent media outlets they regularly listened to, such as Democracy Now. "We loved it and couldn't understand why there wasn't a similar podcast, well investigated and as in-depth in Portugal," its co-founder Maria Almeida says.

In 2016, Ricardo and Maria, together with journalists Bernardo Afonso, Tomás Pereira and Diana Carvalho, launched Fumaça, which disrupted the Portuguese media landscape by "focusing on people that didn't have a place in most traditional media and by turning their backs on breaking news and day-to-day coverage of events," Almeida explains.

The team is highly transparent about the outlet's finances: most funding comes from organisations and foundations, primarily Open Society Foundations grants. In 2021, Fumaça received its fourth journalistic grant from the Open Society Foundations to be distributed over two years. However, it aims to be entirely funded by its audience. Currently, some 1,900 paid members are part of the Fumaça community.

In 2022, a group of anonymous journalists published a spreadsheet containing a list of wages across the Portuguese media industry, showing the industry's low wages. Albeit, one unexpected aspect was that the journalists of Fumaça were paid higher than average wages.

"We could choose to pay lower wages and guarantee the functioning of our newsroom for longer, but we have decided to pay our team decently because we believe it doesn't make sense to investigate precariousness and then not practice what we preach," Almeida says.

Fumaça's podcast was downloaded more than 300,000 times in 2021 and listened to more than one million times since 2018. The team has won 14 journalism awards.