Telex's sixth transparency report

It's been our custom to publish a transparency report every six months to inform our readers and supporters about Telex's achievements, progress and finances. As Telex is largely funded by our supporters, we believe it is important to regularly and transparently report on how much money we have and how we are using it. Anyone who wishes to support us and can afford to do so can do it here, it's just a few clicks away. Thank you very much!

As we wrote in our first, second, third, fourth and fifth transparency reports, it is not at all common for a Hungarian 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 being spent. A lack of transparency has become especially prevalent in the media. Given that our story is quite an uncommon one, and most of the funds used to operate Telex come from our donors, it is only natural for us to disclose the details of our finances.

Of course, we regularly inform our readers throughout the year via communiqués, newsletters and Telex News as well. To receive our weekly English language newsletter, subscribe here!

We restructured our management setup

Telex was launched in October 2020, and since then, we have been working hard every day: building a newspaper and a publishing company from scratch, growing it with an app, podcasts, events and even an academy. As we have grown, so has our workload, and all of this happened in a stressful environment: the Covid-19 pandemic posed a major challenge to the operation of the paper, as did inflation, the journalistic challenges brought by the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, and adding to the difficulties of journalistic work, there were the attempts to discredit us or attack us via technical means.

A while ago, we realized that in order to function even better and produce an even better newspaper, we needed to change the structure we developed two and a half years ago. It was therefore decided to restructure our operations and the entire organization.

As an important part of this process, a new editor-in-chief, Tamás Német, took over leading the editorial team in June 2023. The positions of the previous editor-in-chief, Szabolcs Dull, have been separated at his own initiative; Szabolcs stayed on as Telex's director and has also become the managing director of Telex Academy.

Our new editor-in-chief, Tamás Német, is one of the best-known faces of Telex, and has previously served as editor of the political, economics and public affairs columns. Our goal is to further enhance the content of Telex and make it even more colourful under his leadership. Tamás has the support of all the editors, the management and our previous editor-in-chief, Szabolcs Dull, and as is our custom, the entire editorial team gave their opinion on the decision before his final appointment. Of the 94 eligible to vote, 91 voted in favour of his appointment, two against, and one person abstained.

Telex belongs to those who are making it

Last year, the limited liability company that publishes Telex became a private limited company. This was the first step towards what we promised from the start: that Telex would be owned by its employees, i.e. those working at Telex would be the owners of the publishing company. This process, which is unique and unprecedented in the Hungarian media (each Telex employee will become a share owner) is taking even longer than we expected.

As we have written before, the main objective of the transformation is for Telex to remain the property of its employees for good. This will be fully achieved, as only Telex employees will receive shares, and we intend to continue to use legal means to ensure that the company doesn't fall into the hands or under the control of any politician or oligarch. As requested by the editorial board, 75 percent of the shares will be owned by Telex employees (divided equally) as employee shares. The remaining 25 percent of the shares will be distributed as ordinary shares among the members of the board of directors – Szabolcs Dull, Márton Kárpáti, András Kárpáti and András Pusztay.

If a shareholder should leave the company, their shares may be acquired by the private limited company or by Telex employees. Just as in the past, the company will not be paying dividends on the funds received as subsidies in the future either.

We are currently at the last technical stage: the necessary increase in the company's share capital has been carried out, and we are waiting for this to be registered at the Commercial Court, after which the shares will be distributed.

Telex's domestic column was the most widely read in its category among Hungarian news websites in May and June

1,861,976 unique visitors – this is how many people read Telex's domestic column in May, making it the most visited one in its category in Hungary according to the official provider of digital audience measurement, Gemius.

This is an important milestone for the paper: when we launched two and a half years ago, we only dared hope that we would become an unavoidable player in the Hungarian public arena within such a short time. We kept up the good form and the first place in June: once again, Telex's domestic column was the most read in its category in Hungary.

Public figures use Telex as a reference point

The fact that we are regarded as an indispensable and reliable news source by a significant number of public figures is also a sign of our paper's importance.

In recent months, we provided extensive coverage of the investigative material and the circumstances surrounding the most serious Hungarian corruption case of recent times, the Völner-Schadl case. The transcript of a phone conversation between primary defendant György Schadl and the President of the National Judicial Office was of special interest to us. In it, Schadl referred to a Telex article about the court system, and is quoted as saying: “There's nothing you can do. You can't even file a lawsuit against them to request a correction, because what they wrote is absolutely correct.”

In June, we sent a letter about an upcoming change in education to the relevant ministry. To our surprise, the response we received – by accident – also included the whole email exchange between ministry employees discussing what exactly their response should be. One of the messages was from Zoltán Maruzsa, State Secretary for Public Education, who responded to a question by saying “you would be in great difficulty if you had to tell the absolute truth all the time.”

When asked about it, Gergely Gulyás, the PM's Chief of Staff commented on the incident at a government briefing by saying that "This just goes to show how dangerous it is to correspond with Telex." Nevertheless, we will keep asking questions.

We reported from Ukraine, Turkey and London

We consider it important to be on the ground wherever important things are happening. Naturally, reporting from abroad costs a lot of money, but we use donations from our supporters to provide first-hand coverage of major world events.

Last year, we reported from Ukraine several times after the war broke out, and this spring our colleagues brought several reports on the Ukrainians’ experience during this time, with our colleagues even going very close to the front lines.

We covered the coronation of Charles III from the ground in London and went to Rome to report on the funeral of Benedict XVI. We reported from Istanbul and Ankara about what Turks think of President Erdoğan and the opposition's chances – covering Erdoğan's re-election from Turkey.

More and more people are "tuning in" to watch Telex

Telex doesn't only publish articles, but we produce videos as well, with our YouTube channel currently boasting 172,000 subscribers. Almost one million people have watched the five videos we produced on the Völner-Schadl case.

The 16 videos produced in the last six months on the events related to Hungarian education (reports, interviews, portraits) have had more than 2.7 million views total, including our report on the demonstration in front of the PM's office which ended with the crowd being tear-gassed (417,000 views) and our video on the meeting between President Novák with protesting teachers and students (328,000 views).

The Telex Film Club has launched

We launched a film club at the beginning of the year. This spring, we had monthly screenings of films that had not yet been seen by the public, followed by a good discussion about what we had seen.

The host was always Dávid Klág, and the venue was Budapest’s Toldi cinema: we showed Four Souls of Coyote, Other People's Children, The Night of the 12th and Asteroid City. We plan to continue the Film Club in the autumn.

Telex Academy is in full swing

We launched our training center, Telex Academy last year and it has been a great success. Our free workshops have been running continuously since January, with twenty student workshops and several teacher training sessions already completed. The work of the academy will continue in the next academic year too, with courses for students focusing on media literacy development and teacher trainings, set to begin in September.

Telex Academy is operated by the nonprofit Ne Hallgassunk Ltd. We submitted the idea for our two-year media literacy program to several different open tenders and finally won the grant of the American Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL). This amounts to $740,740 over a two-year period. These funds are not used to run Telex, but are entirely and exclusively dedicated to covering the cost of our free programs for youth and to the launching of the academy.

Since April, our readers can also listen to Telex

We launched four podcasts simultaneously right after Easter, with new episodes published each week: Téma discusses public affairs, Ízfokozó focuses on gastronomy, After features interviews with Hungarian musicians, while Nyomozó is an in-depth true crime podcast featuring a legendary Hungarian criminal case.

Although Nyomozó has now come to an end, we have just added two new podcasts, Rákeltérítő and Kisbolygó. The first one explores a difficult, but important subject: the struggles of people affected by cancer, while in the latter we discuss green issues in a people-centred, solution-focused way.

The technical realisation of the podcasts was supported by the Google News Initiative with 43 million HUF, while our true crime podcast was supported by the Dutch Veronica Foundation with 6300 euros.

Our podcast studio and Telex Academy moved into their own property

An important new development is that thanks to our supporters, we raised enough funds to buy our own property where the Telex Academy trainings are held. We built a studio within the same property, and this is where our podcasts are recorded.

Our editorial office is still rented, but in the case of the academy and the podcast studio, we found it more cost-efficient to buy our own property rather than rent one. The apartment was purchased by Van Másik Zrt, Telex's publisher.

We revamped our app

The Telex app recently received a major overhaul. It has a number of cool new features that were missing from the first one, and which were requested by our readers, as well as loads of small refinements, which make everything better and much smoother.

The new version is currently available in the Play Store and the App Store.

Telex journalists received several prizes

Telex journalists Gergely Nyilas and István Huszti won the Hungarian Press Award this year. Gergely Nyilas reported from Ukraine as a journalist and István Huszti as a photojournalist. They left for Kyiv immediately after Russia attacked Ukraine, in order to provide Hungarian readers with credible information from the scene. Altogether, they spent more than three months in Ukraine throughout 2022, which is considered unique in the Hungarian press. They reported from different regions of the country: Kyiv, Odessa and Kharkiv – even a few hundred metres from the frontline. As the writing and the images in their articles and videos form an inseparable unit, Szabolcs Dull nominated them for the Hungarian Press Award together.

István Huszti also won the grand prize of the 41st Hungarian Press Photography Awards with his series on the hardships of war. He also won all three prizes in the photo report category. Another Telex photographer, János Bődey was awarded in the Art (series) category, coming third with his still life series on the preparations for war. Noémi Napsugár Melegh won second place in the category of social portrayal (series) with her photos of a homeless couple living on the margins of the Roma community.

Noémi Napsugár Melegh also won the prestigious Hemző Prize. The portfolio she submitted included, (among many other themes), a series of images portraying the lives of disadvantaged young people in rural areas. Her photos focus on the problems of the Roma community, poverty, exclusion, the lack of opportunities within and outside the community, all of which are reflected in the path to adulthood of these young people.

Telex journalist Dániel Bolcsó was awarded the Academic Journalism Prize on the first day of the annual general assembly of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The justification states that Dániel Bolcsó received the award for his high-quality educational and science-promoting work over the years, for his nuanced, yet easily understandable presentation of a wide range of complex technological and scientific topics, as well as for his analytical writings on various aspects of the coronavirus epidemic in recent years, which have significantly contributed to informing the public at large, with a special focus on debunking pseudoscience and fake news.

At the 16th Kecskemét Animation Film Festival (KAFF), Máté Fillér was awarded a special award for applied animation as well as the special prize of the student judges. The award was granted for his Telexicon video entitled "Covid breaks decades of economic taboos".

It's also worth noting that Luca Pintér and Orsi Ajpek's article about a same-sex couple, István and Tamás, who became parents through adoption was shortlisted for the European Press Prize.

Financial reports

And now for transparency in numbers: first you can browse the financial data of Telex's publisher Van Másik Zrt., followed by the data of our non-profit company, Ne Hallgassunk Nonprofit Kft. (owned by Van Másik Zrt).

Van Másik Zrt.

Ne Hallgassunk Nonprofit Kft.

2021. 02. 05. – 2023. 05. 31.