ILLUSTRATION: ADAM MAIDA
HERE IS a fact that should embarrass an entire industry. Nepal Republic Media—the company behind Nagarik daily and My Republica, a firm that raised Rs435.3m from the public in a 2023 IPO, took Rs200m in concessional government Covid loans specifically earmarked for staff salaries, and posted a net profit last fiscal year—has had journalists go six months without regular pay. Meanwhile at Setopati, a digital news portal with nothing like that institutional backing, the money arrives the same day every month, like clockwork. “Our editor has been clear,” one Setopati journalist told Kantipur. “If we can’t pay salaries, we shut down. So ours is regular.”
That contrast is about who is making the spending decisions and what happens to them personally if those decisions go wrong.
Setopati was founded in 2013 by Ameet Dhakal, who had already worked at the Kathmandu Post, owned by Kantipur Media Group including Kantipur, and helped start Republica before deciding he didn’t want to work for anyone else’s mistakes again. From day one he kept the operation small and made an almost contrarian bet: skip the expensive multimedia arms race everyone assumed digital news required, and build the whole thing around serious long-form text journalism instead. “We want to earn our readers, not buy them,” he said at the time. A decade later, that discipline shows up where it matters: in whether the payroll clears.
A wider perspective shows that the industry’s strongest pockets follow the same trajectory. Baahrakhari.com gets cited alongside Setopati as reliably paying its staff. Online Khabar, founded by Dharma Raj Bhusal back in 2006 as a scrappy digital startup, grew organically—eventually expanding into broadcast through the acquisition of Himalaya TV—and weathered a roughly 50-day salary gap before clearing all its arrears entirely.
Compare that to Naya Patrika, where one journalist put it bluntly: “My friends have left. The ones who remain—I don’t know how much longer they’ll stay.” The difference is not which outlets have richer owners. It’s which outlets were ever built to actually match what they spend to what they earn.
That is about to matter enormously more than it already does. The government has cut off the river of public advertising money that smaller, politically-aligned outlets used to live on. The international donor funding that propped up parts of Nepal’s civil-society-adjacent media is shrinking fast. Political owners who treated newspapers and channels as instruments of influence rather than businesses are discovering that influence has gotten more expensive to buy just as their other revenue lines have dried up. Every one of those pressures lands hardest on institutions that grew large by attaching themselves to money that wasn’t really theirs.
It would be too neat to say founder-led automatically means surviving. Ukaalo is the counter-example worth taking seriously. Launched in November 2022 with a genuinely admirable commitment to running entirely on reader donations, no advertising at all, it produced the kind of journalism Nepal needs: exposés on land grabs, on corruption in the President’s Educational Reform Programme, on financial fraud inside Prabhu Bank. And it has still struggled badly enough that one of its own journalists said, flatly, “I chose the wrong profession.” Having a disciplined founder isn’t sufficient if the revenue model underneath that discipline asks more of Nepali readers than Nepali readers, in a country where per capita income is some $1,513, are actually willing to give.
What separates the newsrooms likely to still exist in 2030 from the ones that won’t is the combination: small enough that one person’s judgment still controls the cost base, paired with a revenue model sized honestly to what that judgment can actually collect. Setopati is already testing a subscription paywall while Online Khabar hesitates, worried about losing readers, and Annapurna Media Network is still “deliberating”—itself a small, telling sign of which kind of organisation moves first.
By 2030 the outlets standing will be the ones small enough to know, every single month, exactly what they can afford to pay—and disciplined enough to never spend past it: rather than the ones with the grandest staff lists or the closest political connections. ■
