IMAGE: KATMANDU JOURNAL
UKAALO LAUNCHED in 2022 with a proposition that was, for Nepal, radical: no advertising, ever, funded entirely by reader donations. Co-founder Amod Pyakuryal put the bet plainly at the time: “Public supported media have worked elsewhere, so why not in Nepal?” For roughly three years, the answer looked like it might be yes. Ukaalo’s reporters exposed land grabs in Bansbari; irregularities at the Balmandir orphanage; billion-rupee corruption inside the President’s Educational Reform Programme; and financial fraud involving senior Prabhu Bank executives. The stories won major journalism awards. They got assigned in classrooms as examples of what serious Nepali reporting could look like. It was, by every editorial measure, a success.
Since December Ukaalo’s journalists say they have not been paid at all. At least ten newsroom staff have resigned. “I chose the wrong profession,” one of them told the Kathmandu Post. The prestige did not evaporate. The donations just never reached the volume that prestige is supposed to convert into.
This is not, on its own, evidence that reader-funded journalism cannot work, anywhere. It is evidence of something narrower and more specific to Nepal’s media market: a “boutique” outlet built on editorial reputation rather than mass reach runs into a ceiling that has nothing to do with the quality of its journalism and everything to do with the size and habits of the audience willing to pay for it.
The Record Nepal, an English-language independent investigative outlet, hit the same wall earlier and closed its active newsroom operations entirely. Its founder, Pranaya Rana, was candid about why: “The idea was to get the grant and eventually move on to the membership model, but we failed. Maybe Nepal is not ready for it yet, and the fact that we are an English publication didn’t help matters.” Both outlets did the hard part—from building credibility and breaking real stories to earning the kind of trust that takes years to accumulate. Neither could convert that trust into a subscriber or donor base big enough to run a payroll.
What makes this more than a story about two outlets is the comparison sitting right next to it. Setopati and Baahrakhari, both built on advertising rather than donations, are cited by their own journalists as the most reliable payers in the entire Nepali digital landscape. “Our editor has been clear: if we can’t pay salaries, we shut down,” one Setopati journalist said. “So ours is regular. Same day every month, the money arrives.” Online Khabar had a roughly 50-day payment gap at one point but has since cleared its arrears. These are not glamorous outlets in the prestige sense; nobody is teaching their business model in a journalism school case study the way Ukaalo’s reporting once was held up as an example.
They are, however, the outlets that have actually solved the problem the boutique model has not: matching costs to a revenue source large enough to cover them, repeatedly, on a predictable schedule.
The most thorny data point cuts against an easy reading of all this as simply “donations don’t work, advertising does”. Nepal Republic Media—publisher of Nagarik, My Republica and Nagariknetwork, and the only publicly listed media company in the country, having raised Rs435.3m from 361,000 shareholders through a 2023 IPO—reported a net profit last fiscal year. Some of its journalists have gone six months without regular pay regardless. A profitable, publicly listed, advertising-and-subscription company has the same payment dysfunction as a donation-dependent boutique with no revenue cushion at all. The Federation of Nepali Journalists has recorded 18 professional-insecurity complaints in 2025, up from 11 two years earlier, spread across business models that look nothing alike on a balance sheet.
What this suggests is that Nepal’s media crisis has two separate problems wearing the same symptoms. One is a revenue problem: boutique, donation-funded journalism has not found an audience willing to pay at the scale required, a pattern Setopati’s own founders discovered when an earlier 2013 attempt at a paid premium subscription model failed.
The other is a governance problem: even outlets with money sometimes choose not to pay it to the people who earned it, on schedule, as a matter of management discipline rather than financial necessity. Prestige alone solves neither. It has never been a substitute for a functioning business model, and in Nepal’s case it is increasingly clear that a functioning business model is not, by itself, a substitute for an employer who actually intends to pay. ■
