The co-founder and Managing Partner of North Base Media, creator of the first global investment fund for independent media, will be one of the keynote speakers at Media Party Buenos Aires 2026. He arrives with a question that has stayed with him for more than 30 years: how do you fund a news outlet without depending on anyone?
In the early 1990s, in Belgrade, an independent radio station was reporting under the regime of Slobodan Milošević. Its general manager had two jobs: running the newsroom and making the numbers add up. That general manager was Saša Vučinić. From that experience came an idea that changed the way independent journalism is funded around the world.
From B92 to a bank for the free press
Vučinić is a lawyer, a graduate of the University of Belgrade. He started in journalism as a reporter for Non, an independent political weekly, where he went on to become editor-in-chief. Between 1990 and 1993 he was editor-in-chief and general manager of Radio B92, one of the few independent news outlets in Milošević’s Yugoslavia. B92 became a symbol, but its story did not end well. After the fall of the regime, the privatization of the media gradually pushed it aside until it lost its central place. “B92 is not a happy end story,” he once said.
What did survive was the lesson. After B92, Vučinić worked in Prague as a media consultant for the Soros Foundations network. In 1995, together with Washington Post journalist Stuart Auerbach, he founded the Media Development Loan Fund, now the Media Development Investment Fund (MDIF).
The idea was to create a “media bank”. Instead of donations, the fund offered low-cost loans and investments. The goal was for journalists in countries with a history of repression to build sustainable businesses, independent of governments, political parties and oligarchs. They did it a decade before the term “impact investor” existed.
Vučinić was its CEO for 16 years, until 2011. During that period, the fund provided around $100 million to independent media. Today MDIF has provided more than $325 million in financing and has supported more than 154 news outlets.
Investing in journalism when no one else was
In 2005 he took that idea to the TEDGlobal stage. There he proposed funding independent media through “free press bonds”. His approach earned him recognition from TED, the Ashoka Foundation and the World Economic Forum. He later founded Indievoices, the first crowdfunding portal for independent media.
With North Base Media, he brought that logic to venture capital. He founded the firm together with Marcus Brauchli, former top editor of The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. Today its portfolio includes more than 50 media companies, with digital groups in Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Japan and Mexico. Vučinić also sits on the boards of companies in Japan, the Netherlands, Indonesia, Singapore, India and Vietnam.
Independence has to be funded too
Today’s landscape puts his question back at the center. In April, at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, he took part in a conversation about the funding crisis in journalism. The diagnosis was clear. After more than a decade of advertising crisis, philanthropy is now pulling back too, partly because of the US government’s retreat from funding. Even nonprofit journalism, which once looked like the model of the future, is going through an unprecedented crisis.
On top of that come AI agents, which answer and summarize the news without the reader ever visiting the outlet that produced the information. That is why Media Party Buenos Aires 2026 is organized under the theme “Storytelling in the age of agents” and calls for defending cognitive sovereignty: the ability to think, editorialize and decide without delegating judgment to a machine. Vučinić’s career adds a warning: that judgment is only possible if the outlet does not depend on whoever funds it.
For journalists and media leaders, his keynote is an opportunity to hear from someone who has spent three decades investing in independent media in emerging markets. For entrepreneurs, it offers a direct look from the investors’ side. Along those lines, this edition adds the Media Party Investment Club, with meetings between media tech startups and investors. Applications are open until October 20.
From October 29 to 31, the question of who funds journalism also has a place at Media Party Buenos Aires 2026. Ciudad Cultural Konex.
Register here to be part of it.
