Telex's fifth transparency report

Another six months have passed and, as promised, we are again reporting in detail on the development and financial background of Telex. As Telex is mainly supported by our donors, we believe it is important to report regularly and transparently on how much money we have and how we are spending it. Anyone who wishes to support us and is able to do it can do so here, it's just a few clicks away.

As we wrote in our first, second, third and fourth transparency report, it is not common in Hungary for a media company (or any company) to report in more detail than required by law on how much money it has, where that money comes from and how it is spent. However, as our story is not a usual one, and the money we use to run Telex comes mostly from our supporters, it is only natural for us to disclose the details of our finances.

Because this is not just our story, but also that of our supporters.

Our last transparency report was published in July – let's see what has happened since then! Of course, we regularly keep you up to date with all these happenings in Telex News and the most important stories are shared in our newsletter, which you can sign up for here.

Let's start with the most important: the LLC company that publishes Telex has become a private company limited by shares. This is the prelude to what we promised from the start: that Telex would be owned by those who work at Telex, i.e. the Telex employees would become the owners of the publishing house. This process is in its final – technical – phase, and shares will be created soon, after which the employees can become shareholders. This is virtually unique in the Hungarian media market, and we are very proud of this arrangement. It's an important guarantee of our independence: because Telex is owned by its employees, there is no one above our heads and no one from the outside – neither politicians nor oligarchs – can interfere in the production of the paper.

The Telex Foundation has been established! In October, our editor-in-chief Szabolcs Dull established the Telex Foundation for a Free Press, which aims to preserve and support the diversity of the Hungarian press, including, of course, the financial and professional support of Telex.

The latest Telex newsletters have been launched! We are constantly thinking of ways to give our readers even more. We produce hundreds of articles a week, with news stories rotating through the front page in different positions, as we work to keep readers up to date on all the important stories. But not everyone is the same, we all have different reading habits. Some readers check the news several times throughout the day, others dive into a few articles over their morning coffee or scan the news before bed. And sometimes, amid the rush of the week, there is no time to read a longer piece, and one might miss an important news item, or the latest edition in their favorite column. To solve such problems, we've created new newsletters (for our Hungarian readers) that anyone can subscribe to now, and based on reader feedback, we'll continue to expand and improve them in the future.

In October, we launched a campaign to show why it is expensive to run a major daily online news site, why maintaining an ever-growing newsroom with lots of plans costs so much: we showed why operating Telex costs 2400 forints per minute. A lot of people understood this and have sent money to support many, many minutes of our work. Since the start of our campaign in October, thousands of new supporters have joined our existing community of tens of thousands of supporters, funding more than 10,000 minutes, or the equivalent of roughly one week of Telex's operation.

Thank you!

The number of our readers continued to grow in the third quarter of 2022. In September we had an average of 628,000 unique visitors per day, and our readers spent well above the market average time reading Telex. During the student protests in October, we had over 900,000 people reading our reports in a single day. In October there were days when we were the most read news portal in Hungary among 15-50 year olds in Hungary. We believe that quality content and time, rather than naked pictures and worthless tabloid news are the key to reaching many readers.

Our internship programme has officially ended. In the autumn of 2021, we advertised ten internship positions, and had five hundred applicants. We worked with the 10 selected young people for almost a year, and as a result, nine of them are now working for Telex. We believe in the importance of bringing in the next generation and nurturing the fair and critical journalists of the future.

New colleagues have joined us: Júlia Halász from 444 joined our video team. Dániel Zách, the former editor-in-chief of Alapjárat, and the former leading face of Totalcar, has also joined us, and is mostly writing articles on the subject of transportation and traffic for Telex. As we generate a lot of data, we hired Bálint Antal to organize, process and interpret it all. Nikoletta Nagy joined us from 24.hu in September. Another important change is the appointment of our colleague Miklós Jenei as Head of Marketing.

Our colleague István Huszti won the photography category of this year's Honorka Hégető Award, created in memory of RTL's former editor-reporter who died in a car accident in 2003. According to the judges, in his award-winning photos, István Huszti faithfully depicts the destruction and pain of Russia's war on Ukraine.

The Észkombájn book is out! The authors of Telex's eponymous column, with thousands of educational articles and three books of the same name behind them, have compiled the best of the column. (Some of these have also been published in our English column: for example, this one, this one, or this one.) Of the 100 articles in the book, ten were written exclusively for the book, thirty have been significantly expanded, and every other article was illustrated by Telex's own graphic designers.

We have also published our second collection of short stories, entitled The Half-Read Book and Other Stories. Available from the Telex webshop, the publication features 28 short stories by 24 Hungarian contemporary writers, including some which have never been published before.

Telex's hiking guide column, Szépkilátás, has been launched. Szépkilátás used to exist as a blog on blog.hu, but its content has now essentially moved to Telex, along with the entire archive, and the blog is no longer updated there. The archive contains over a hundred hiking route recommendations, and it is also possible to browse among the hikes based on their level of difficulty.

We've added a few new things to our webshop, super cool winter stuff has arrived, and lots of great gift ideas can be found here!

In the summer we premiered our second major self-produced and shocking documentary about the shady business behind dog breeding in Hungary, and in the autumn we premiered our documentary about the BDSM subculture in Hungary, which we spent two years making. Just last week we held the premiere of our documentary on the revival of the legendary Hungarian band Kispál és a Borz.

We're very proud of Telexikon, there's nothing similar to it in Hungary. For example, in one of its episodes we showed how the events of the world market affect the price of an average Sunday lunch and all of our wallets. Although it's not a very cheerful topic, it's one that affects everyone. The latest Telexikon episode looked at the housing crisis in Hungary.

One of Telex's biggest and most important outings so far was the one day we spent at "Ördogkatlan Fesztivál" (a cultural and music festival) in early August. We were curious to see what the audience there would think of us, and we were also interested to see what we could do in a festival environment.People who were there, as well as the organizers, the hosts and we all agreed that it was all truly wonderful.

The latest important step in the life of Telex is the launch of our training center, Telex Academy, where in the coming years we will offer a wide range of courses covering various areas of media. The plan for a training centre is as old as Telex, and we have a whole lot of ideas: from practical, everyday media skills to master classes and media literacy workshops, Telex Academy will offer a wide range of courses in the coming years. In fact, we intend to cover everything that fits at the interface of education and media. We will have both free and paid classes. The idea for our programme was submitted to several different public tenders, and it was finally funded by the American DRL (Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor) with 740 740 dollars for two years. This money is not given to Telex's publisher, but to the non-profit Ne Hallgassunk Kft, and the funds will not be used to run Telex, but to fully fund the free program for youth and to establish and launch the training center.

In our next transparency report, you will see the figures for the Zrt. Below is a summary of our finances from our start-up until the company's transformation: