How to sustain exile media: 70s edition
Lessons from a Toronto apartment, 1971-1994
Exile media outlets, some of which I have worked for, tend to describe the same two-sided problem. They cannot reach their intended audience inside the country they fled, which means that the audience cannot generate revenue for them. Funders want impact inside the home country. The only non-grant revenue available is from the diaspora outside the country. Those are different audiences with different information needs. The outlet is torn, and the tear shows up everywhere: in the editorial mix, in the analytics dashboards, in the staff meetings about what the next pitch deck should say. It is also easier to keep grant-surfing than to solve, because the audience is incidental to the transaction and everyone leaves the meeting having done their job.
Build like exile is permanent
Almost every modern exile media outlet I have worked with operates on an unstated assumption that the situation is temporary. The regime will crack. The war will end. The journalists will go home. Funding cycles are written around this. Editorial strategies are written around this. People accept salaries and conditions they would never accept indefinitely because the indefinite part is silently bracketed. It is a five-year plan that has been a five-year plan for fifteen years, and nobody around the table has the heart to update the slide.
Czech exile publishers in 1971 had no such comfort. Husák had finished normalization. Brezhnev had seven years behind him and another decade ahead. Helsinki was four years away and nobody at the time read it as regime-ending. The mood among post-1968 Czech émigrés was not “let us hold the fort until we go home.” It was closer to “we may never see Prague again.” Josef Škvorecký was 47 when he founded the press. Zdena Salivarová was 37. 68 Publishers was the result. The fall of communism was a happy ending they had not planned around.
Test question for any outlet claiming to be sustainable: would the business still work if the regime you fled never falls? If the answer is no, you do not have a business. You have a campaign with a press release schedule.
The Toronto model
In autumn 1971, Josef Škvorecký and Zdena Salivarová started 68 Publishers from their apartment at 260 Wellesley Street East in Toronto. The name commemorated the Prague Spring. Over 23 years they published 224 titles, a figure documented in the Slovník české literatury entry on Sixty-Eight Publishers. The roster is most of the Czech literary canon of the period: Hrabal, Kundera, Klíma, Vaculík, Havel, Seifert (who won the Nobel in 1984 with a 68P book on his record), plus the Škvoreckýs themselves and dozens of others. They closed in May 1994, having decided after 1989 that a publisher of banned Czech books was no longer needed. They did not pivot. They stopped.
Four structural features made the press durable, all with a 2026 equivalent
A direct subscriber relationship, not a platform-mediated audience. Czech and Slovak émigrés in North America, Western Europe and Australia subscribed annually to the press’s output. Print runs were small, 1,500 to 2,000 for prose and 500 to 1,000 for poetry, matched to the subscriber list.
The 2026 version of that relationship is between the outlet and the diaspora it serves, anchored in a community whose information needs the outlet actually meets: where the new arrivals settle, how to navigate residency and asylum systems, which professional networks are forming, how to send money home, how to talk to family on the inside without putting them at risk. The diaspora is not a marketing funnel for homeland coverage. It is a population in motion with practical, unmet daily needs. The Škvoreckýs understood that the Czech émigré in Toronto or Sydney was not subscribing out of charity for Prague. They were subscribing because 68 Publishers was the publication that took their cultural life seriously. Build the outlet around what the diaspora needs to know to live well in exile, not around what the funder wants to hear about the homeland.
Specialist capability in a technological niche the market needed. In 1977 the press converted to a non-profit governed by a board chaired by H. Gordon Skilling. At the same time the Škvoreckýs started a separate for-profit company, Prague Typesetting, that did Czech-diacritics typesetting for paying clients across the Toronto Czech and Slovak market and served 68P at cost. In the pre-DTP era, Czech-language typesetting was a real technical problem. Most North American typesetters could not handle háček and čárka correctly; the few who could were charging accordingly. The Škvoreckýs identified the gap, built the capability themselves, and turned it into a small business serving a wider émigré market that needed Czech-language printing for newsletters, community bulletins, church materials and academic publications. It paid for itself, subsidised the press, and could not be reproduced without learning Czech.
The 2026 equivalent is identifying a technical capability your diaspora needs that no mainstream provider does well, and building it as a small operation that serves your readers, serves other diaspora institutions and earns its keep. Translation pipelines optimised for your language pair. Secure document-handling for sources inside the home country. Circumvention tooling that works on the regime’s current censorship setup. A media monitoring system that reads the home-country press in the original language and surfaces what matters. The point is not to become a software company. The point is that the most defensible capability an exile outlet has is usually a technical one the mainstream market does not serve, and turning that capability into a service is how the Škvoreckýs paid the bills.
An author network as distribution. The press did not run advertising. It did not need to. Kundera, Hrabal, Vaculík, Klíma and the rest of the roster lent their names, gave readings at émigré cultural centres in Toronto, Munich, Sydney and New York, and brought the audiences they already had inside Czech and Slovak diaspora networks. The author roster was the acquisition channel.
The 2026 equivalent is treating contributors as audience-acquisition partners, not as a labour input. If your contributors are not bringing their own audiences with them to your outlet, you have a paid-content arrangement, not a network. 68P chose writers in part because of the readers they came attached to.
A portfolio of overlapping products sharing one infrastructure. The press co-published the literary quarterly Parabola from 1971 to 1975 and the political and cultural magazine Západ from 1979 onward. Subscriber lists overlapped substantially. The same Toronto operation served all of them.
The 2026 equivalent is portfolio thinking from year two: a newsletter, a podcast, an events series, a small reference database, all sharing one audience database, one editorial backbone, one finance function. Most modern exile outlets run a single product, usually a website, and bolt on a newsletter five years later when they discover that website traffic is not a business.
The asymmetry that made it work
The diaspora paid full price for books they would mostly keep on their shelves. Readers inside Czechoslovakia got the same books for free. Books were smuggled across the Iron Curtain hidden in luggage, disguised in detective-novel dust jackets, slipped into boxes of washing powder. Once inside, the print run multiplied through underground circulation. A 1,500-copy run in Toronto became tens of thousands of actual readers in Prague, Brno and Bratislava. Many copies were retyped as samizdat. StB files repeatedly link one confiscated copy to dozens of readers.
Jiří Gruntorád, who served four years for “subversion of the state” and later founded the Libri Prohibiti library, described the books as bandages on open wounds.
The paying audience and the impact audience were different people. The Pittsburgh émigré subsidising the Prague reader was the design, not a flaw. The diaspora knew it and paid anyway. The alternative was watching Czech literature die under normalization.
Most modern exile media will not accept this. They pitch themselves as serving the homeland audience and then get squeezed when that audience cannot or will not pay. The Škvoreckýs treated the diaspora as the customer and the homeland as the mission, and refused to confuse the two. The diaspora subscription was the financial base of the entire operation. The homeland reach was what the financial base existed to fund.
You still try to reach the homeland audience. You keep trying. The modern equivalent of the smuggling networks is mirror sites, Tor, Telegram channels, USB sticks, content that travels well on diaspora WhatsApp groups. You try every channel.
Why diversity beat consolidation
68 Publishers was not the only Czech exile press. Index in Cologne was founded the same year, ran the same 23 years, served the same diaspora, drew on the same banned-author pool. Pavel Tigrid pushed repeatedly for a merger, warning that two parallel exile publishers could not sustain themselves. The merger never happened. By the 1980s a third house, Alexander Tomský’s Rozmluvy in London, was active too. Three small Czech exile presses, none of them rationalising the others out of business, all of them complaining about each other.
Michal Přibáň’s 2023 archival study of 68P and Index, V různosti je síla (Strength in Difference), finds that the refusal to consolidate was the resilience. Different editorial profiles, different politics, different home-country networks, different distribution geographies. Havel deliberately published with all of them, the way a diplomat distributes invitations.
The system survived because no single failure mode could take all of it down at once.
Funders consolidating exile media into a few flagship grantees are reducing system resilience and they do not realise it. A healthy exile media ecosystem is several different small outlets with different editorial profiles, different funding mixes, different audience segments.
The institutional buyer is a third audience
Beyond the diaspora and the homeland, there is a third audience the 68 Publishers model did not have access to but a 2026 exile outlet does: institutional buyers who need country-specific intelligence and will pay institutional prices for it. Banks with stranded assets, compliance teams at multinationals, law firms, embassies, country-risk desks. They cannot get this reporting from a Washington analyst who has never set foot in the country. Exile journalists can produce it, and a few already do. The Bell is standard reference material for Western policy analysis on post-2022 Russian asset transfers. El Toque’s daily informal-market exchange rate for the Cuban peso is cited by Reuters, AFP and EFE and used as the operating reference rate by businesses inside Cuba.
The products are concrete and unglamorous: sector briefings, ownership and sanctions tracing, curated data feeds. It is the journalism the newsroom already produces, repackaged for a different buyer at a different price point, with structural separation between the public mission and the commercial product. The 68 Publishers analogue is Prague Typesetting.
What funders should focus on now
Funders carry a quiet theory of change that needs naming. The theory: more independent information reaches people in the police state, those people develop democratic preferences, the preferences eventually translate into political change. This is the premise behind most exile-media grantmaking. It is also wrong, and the wrongness is now visible enough that pretending otherwise is itself a problem.
People in autocracies are not under-informed. They know how their country is run. They know who is stealing what. They know which institutions are captured. The Russian middle class has functioning VPNs and reads Meduza when it wants to. Iranians know exactly what the regime is. Cubans know the official exchange rate is a fiction; their refrigerator tells them every morning. Belarusians knew the 2020 election was stolen because they had counted the votes themselves. Information is not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is the cost of acting on what you already know, and that cost is set by the security services, not by the availability of accurate reporting.
You can see this most clearly in Iran. In February and March 2026, US and Israeli strikes killed Supreme Leader Khamenei along with much of the senior military and political leadership. The regime named his son as successor and continued. If killing the head of state does not move the floor, a Telegram channel is not going to. The metric stack that follows from the old theory of change (homeland reach, VPN circumvention rates, in-country page views, “impact” measured by proximity to a hypothetical democratic transition that is not coming on the funder’s timeline) is measuring the wrong thing.
What exile journalism actually does is different and more valuable. It documents what is happening in real time, with primary sources, in a way that survives the regime. It maintains the language, the professional standards and the institutional memory of independent journalism so that when something does change, the country has a functioning press to inherit. It serves the diaspora’s information needs, which are real and currently underserved.
So the funder ask is simple. Stop funding exile media as an instrument of regime change. Start funding it as durable independent press infrastructure for a diaspora and a profession that will both exist regardless of what happens at home.
Fund infrastructure: security tooling, legal defence funds, relocation support for journalists in immediate danger, technical staff and engineers who do not romance the byline but keep the systems running. Most exile newsrooms are dangerously under-engineered.
Help build the revenue lines that will eventually replace the grants. Subscription product managers, institutional sales staff, payment infrastructure, B2B research arms. The fastest way to reduce an outlet’s dependence on grants is to fund the commercial-product capacity that gets it off grants.
Stop pretending sustainability is about audience metrics. Sustainability is about whether the organisation can pay its people next year without you. If your grantee outlet has no plausible path to that, fund them honestly as a permanent cost of doing business rather than dressing them up as a near-future success story.
The Škvoreckýs ran 68 Publishers for 23 years from a Toronto apartment and a former factory building, with no grants and no foundations. They kept Czech literature alive, distributed banned books into the homeland through every smuggling channel they could find, and shut down the press the year they decided the country no longer needed them.
In May 2026, José Nieves and El Toque, working with a coalition of more than 36 Cuban media outlets, civil society groups and diaspora organisations, ran an online survey that gathered 42,263 valid responses on political opinion in Cuba, 58% from inside the island and 42% from the diaspora. The findings (encuestascuba.net) are the largest and most detailed dataset of its kind in years. Producing a 42,000-response Cuba-wide political survey from a Miami newsroom is what an exile outlet at full capacity looks like.
Feel free to get in touch if you have comments, questions or ideas.
aliasad.mahmood@gmail.com