This story is part of the Transition Accelerator 2024 cohort series.
Meet Solomon, an award-winning investigative outlet founded in Greece in 2016. Covering refugee and migration rights, accountability, the environment, civic society, and food systems, Solomon combines field reporting with innovative visual storytelling and cross-border collaborations. The team sees its mission as addressing issues that matter to citizens in Greece, while placing them within a wider European and global context to hold power to account.
After years dedicated almost exclusively to publishing impactful investigations, Solomon joined the Transition Accelerator with a new focus: strengthening its relationship with the audience. IPI’s innovation team spoke with reporter and editor Stavros Malichudis about how the organization is working to build trust in journalism, reader support, and, in the process, solidify its revenue model.
From investigations to audience focus
The Solomon team works in a challenging environment: Greece consistently ranks near the bottom of the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Reports for citizens’ trust in news. The team believed their work could buck that trend. With growing readership and donations, they felt that what they needed most was less reliance on algorithms and more direct communication with their audience, a goal that became their guiding focus during the Transition Accelerator.
The most important pillar of this work was revamping Solomon’s newsletter. Although the team had experimented with it in the past, regularity was an issue. “It was supposed to be monthly. Then we stopped doing it. Then we sent it twice per month. But we weren’t consistent and promotion for it was virtually non-existent”, Stavros recalls.
During the programme, Solomon rethought the product almost from scratch. Today, their newsletters are bylined by individual team members: “Our readers like to feel that they are receiving an email from a journalist they read and trust, not just an anonymous outlet”, Stavros explains. The team also created different subscriber journeys for different subscriber categories: new readers are gradually introduced to Solomon’s work, while long-time subscribers receive impact stories and calls for support more quickly.
“For a long time, we had a donation link on our website, but we were hesitant to promote it because we thought asking for money was a bad thing. Now we see it differently: our community is generous, and there is nothing wrong with asking for their support.”
Alongside the newsletter, Solomon systematized social media promotion and established publication schedules. The subsequent metrics speak for themselves: newsletter subscribers grew by 28.9% during the Accelerator, reaching nearly 4,000. This engagement translated into donations too: €5,700 in December 2024, shortly after the revamp began, and €10,000 in the first quarter of 2025, a significant increase compared with €21,000 received over the entire 2024.
“The audience is there and ready to support you”, Stavros concludes. “But in previous years, we just didn’t reach out to them.”
None of this is easy to achieve overnight. Building processes and developing strategies takes time. “We are a small team, so some of us have had to focus less on journalism and more on organizational work”, Stavros admits, saying that that includes himself. But now they have a more solid foundation to build on.
Building trust through participation and crowdsourcing
To take engagement further, Solomon has been experimenting with ways to involve readers directly in their storytelling. During their collaboration with Correctiv on a cross-border series about the energy crisis, they invited their audience to share personal experiences through a simple Google form. More than 400 people responded in the first week. “It was incredible,” says Stavros. “Four hundred people took ten or twenty minutes of their time to share their stories with us!” The team made sure to follow up on many of these contributions, showing readers that their voices matter.
A few months after the Accelerator, Solomon is taking this participatory approach a step further through crowdsourcing. In their latest project with Correctiv, Demolition Atlas, citizens across Europe are invited to contribute to an interactive map by documenting buildings at risk of demolition or recently demolished. The collective database allows journalists to uncover systemic problems and calculate the real cost of demolitions. Surveys have also become an important tool: a recent cross-country investigation into postpartum experiences in Greece, Italy, Hungary, and the UK, and another focused on insurance policies related to climate disasters, show how citizen input can directly shape in-depth reporting.
“People need to be seen and listened to”, Stavros reflects. “When we sit down for our editorial plan, we want to focus even more on these kinds of contributions.”
The Transition Accelerator is part of the Media Innovation Europe programme (MIE), made possible with the support of the European Union.
