ILLUSTRATION: KATMANDU JOURNAL
IN MARCH 2025 Suresh Rajak, a cameraperson for Avenues Television, went to the top floor of a building in Tinkune, Kathmandu, to film a pro-monarchy demonstration below. The crowd set the building on fire. Rajak could not escape. His body was recovered from the fourth floor, burned beyond recognition. His employer settled his outstanding wages only after the killing triggered public outrage. He had not received a paycheck in ten months.
Rajak was killed by a political mob, not by the media’s financial crisis. But the two facts sit next to each other in the same story: a journalist burned alive while doing his job, whose employer had for ten months not considered paying him a priority. The Federation of Nepali Journalists recorded 18 formal complaints about professional insecurity such as unpaid wages and unlawful dismissal in 2025, up from 11 two years earlier. At Nepal Republic Media Limited, which publishes Nagarik Daily, Republica and the myRepublica, journalists had been enduring pandemic-era pay cuts of between 50-75% for 43 consecutive months as of early 2026, according to the International Federation of Journalists. Prime TV journalists reported three months of unpaid salaries. Mountain Television’s staff described similar arrears. “There’s nowhere to leave for,” one Mountain Television journalist told Kantipur in April. “Every place is the same. Who do you even complain to?”
The answer to that question is systemic. Nepal’s Department of Information and Broadcasting recorded, as of September 2025, 8,000 registered newspapers, 5,135 online media outlets, some 700 radio stations and 250 television channels for a population of 30m: one of the most crowded media sectors in South Asia relative to the size of the economy it serves. Most of these outlets compete for a domestic advertising market that MediaLandscapes, a media industry database, estimates at some €40m a year. That works out to around $43m spread across more than 14,000 registered media entities. The mathematics of the industry is evident from that single calculation.
Digital advertising is growing but the growth does not help newsrooms. Nepal’s total digital advertising spend reached some $71m in 2024, according to some estimates. The beneficiaries are Meta, Google and ByteDance. Advertisers targeting young, smartphone-using Nepalis (internet penetration has reached 82%) can reach them on Instagram or TikTok at a fraction of the cost of a newspaper placement. The platforms take the revenue that audiences generate; the newsrooms that produced the journalism those audiences originally valued collect almost nothing.
What kept many smaller outlets solvent was government advertising. The state and its agencies spent around Rs1bn a year placing procurement notices and public information campaigns across private media. For rural radio stations and mid-sized newspapers outside Kathmandu, this was the operating model. This year the government issued a circular directing all such spending exclusively to state-owned media: Gorkhapatra, Radio Nepal and Nepal Television. Private outlets were cut out entirely. Federation of Nepali Journalists president Nirmala Sharma called it an attack on private media during a period of economic hardship.
Kantipur Media Group, Nepal’s largest and most commercially viable media house, took a different view. It welcomed the move, calling it the end of a corrupt system. What Kantipur meant was that government advertising had long functioned as a patronage mechanism: ministries placed notices with sympathetic outlets and withdrew them from those that reported critically. Small papers dependent on that money were, in practice, dependent on not offending the government. What the directive ended was, as well as a revenue stream, a structured system of editorial compromise. That this arrangement had passed for a viable business model explains more about the industry’s condition than the order itself does.
Political ownership sits underneath all of this. A big portion of Nepal’s outlets are owned by politicians, political parties or businesspeople who treat their newspaper or channel as an instrument of influence rather than a commercial operation. These outlets are not meant to generate returns. They are funded by access to contracts and political proximity and run at a loss that serves other purposes. In that model, journalist salaries are the last item in a budget whose first priority is the owner’s leverage. When access dries up, the salaries stop.
An attempt at a different model has struggled to find ground. Ukaalo, launched in 2022 with a commitment to running entirely on reader donations and no advertising, produced celebrated investigative work—exposés on land grabs and billion-rupee corruption—before encountering the ceiling every reader-funded outlet in a low-income market eventually meets. Nepalis do not have a strong culture of paying for news, and a per capita income of some $1,658 a year leaves limited margin for subscriptions.
Nepal’s media crisis is not explained by digital disruption alone. It is the consequence of building an industry on three foundations—ie: political patronage, government advertising and the assumption that audiences would remain captive—all of which have now failed together. The outlets that survive will be those with commercial discipline or a proprietor wealthy enough to absorb the losses indefinitely. Neither of those conditions reliably produces the journalism a democracy needs. ■
