Inside an old apartment block in central Budapest, journalists at independent newspaper Magyar Hang, which translates as "Hungarian Voice" in English, work in every available corner of the small office.
But getting the weekly paper printed is a task in itself.
Zsombor György, the newspaper's editor-in-chief, told RTÉ News that they could not find "any printing house brave enough to print" the edition in Hungary.
As a result, 12,000 copies of the newspaper are printed in the Slovak capital Bratislava each Thursday and then driven back by truck to Budapest before being posted to subscribers across Hungary.
Magyar Hang is a liberal-conservative publication whose journalists take Hungary’s populist Fidesz-led government to task in the paper's editorial columns.
It is one of a shrinking number of independent media outlets in Hungary and employs about 35 journalists.
Funded almost entirely through subscriptions, the website gets about two million views each month.
The bread and butter of the publication's reporting focuses on corruption cases, rural issues and the environment.
Like print newspapers, big and small across the globe, Magyar Hang has had to adapt to the times and offer video content and podcasts, as well as its weekly printed edition.
When I visited the paper's editorial office in late May, its videographers and political journalists were filming an interview with a former Fidesz education minister, who is now critical of the current government.
Media freedom in Hungary should not be confused with the plight of independent journalists in dictatorships like Russia or China.
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Reporters in Hungary are not arrested for reporting the news. However, it is still challenging.
Mr György said that his reporters are unable to gain entry to government press conferences and that government officials mostly "don’t answer our questions which we send by mail".
Enikő Albert, a political reporter with the paper, said that when she and her colleagues send requests to attend the government’s weekly press conference, the reply they often receive is: "There are no seats", or "the room is full".
"We cannot really report on their politics or the government's policy. It's very difficult," said Ms Albert.
International media watchdog Reporters Without Borders ranks Hungary as 67 out of 180 countries worldwide on its press freedom index. Albania, Greece and Malta are the European countries with lower scores. Last year, Ireland was ranked in second place worldwide.
"We have two totally different media systems in Hungary. One is 'captured media', or pro-government media. The other one is very similar to any European media system with independent journalists and editorial teams," said Professor Gábor Polyák, a media expert and head of the department of communication at Budapest’s Eötvös Loránd University.
Public-service media in Hungary offers a pro-government stance on political issues such as opposing EU migration quotas and military support for Ukraine. Critics label it as propaganda.
"You cannot separate Fidesz and the state. So, if we are speaking about Fidesz propaganda, then we are speaking about state propaganda, because the state is serving the interests of the party," said Prof Polyák.
He said that it is common practice for government departments in Hungary to not reply to questions about its policies from the country's independent media.
According to a study in 2022 by Hungarian media watchdog, Mertek Media Monitoring, Hungarian public-service media and pro-government media outlets account for the lion's share of revenue across the industry.
In contrast, net revenues for independent media outlets accounted for 21% of Hungary’s media sector.
The watchdog classifies independent media as outlets where fewer than one-third of annual revenue comes from state advertising, and its ownership structure is not affiliated with a political party.
That definition means that there are between 20 and 30 independent outlets in a country of almost 10 million people. Some are small, employing only a few journalists. Others are large organisations like German-owned RTL.
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Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Hungarian print media was dominated by left-wing titles, a vestige of the Communist era.
When Fidesz returned to power in 2010 - the party had previously governed from 1998 to 2002 - it went about installing a loyal public media and enacted a new media act.
The act established Hungary's National Media and Communications Authority to regulate the media sector. Fidesz appointees dominate the five-person council and are appointed for nine-year terms.
Asserting influence over sections of the private media sector took longer.
During the early 2010s, Hungarian billionaire Lajos Simicska, a former close friend of Viktor Orbán's, bought up private radio and television stations and newspapers which backed Fidesz.
By 2018, Mediaworks, a conglomerate viewed as sympathetic to the government, had bought out all of the country's regional newspapers.
That same year, after Fidesz's resounding parliamentary election victory, the owners of eight media companies donated more than 400 media outlets - television and radio stations, and online news services - to the new non-profit called the Central European and Media Foundation (KESMA is the acronym in Hungarian).
One month after the merger, the government signed a decree that exempted KESMA from future investigations by the state body that oversees competition on the basis that it was of "strategic importance at a national level".
The management of KESMA was handed to an entrepreneur considered loyal to Fidesz.
The last big purchase by a pro-government company of an independent outlet occurred in 2020 when businessman Miklos Vaszily bought a 50% stake in independent news service Index.hu.
Its former editor-in-chief was soon sacked and many of its journalists resigned.
The staff at Magyar Hang in Budapest is made up of journalists who had lost their jobs at other newspapers in 2018.
Reporting news could be become more difficult for Hungarian independent media.
The vague wording of Hungary's Sovereignty Protection Act, passed into law last December, plans to allow a state body to investigate organisations that receive foreign funding and, in theory, that could include media outlets.
The new regulations on foreign funding could affect independent outlets more adversely because they are more likely to receive grants from European and American NGOs.
The European Commission has opened an infringement procedure against Hungary after ruling that the new act contradicts EU law.
Hungarian state institutions also primarily advertise in media that are loyal to the government, whereas they rarely advertise in media that are critical of state bodies, providing pro-government media with a financial advantage.
Marius Dragomir, a media scholar who leads the Media and Journalism Research Center at Universidade de Santiago de Compostela in Spain said that "media capture" was one of the biggest threats to independent media in Hungary.
"Independent media are struggling to survive because they don't have access to public money and they don't have access to advertising money," said Mr Dragomir, who has researched Hungary's media sector for a number of years.
Magyar Hang is mostly funded through subscriptions because it struggles to find advertisers to fill its pages, let alone state advertisers.
The polarised nature of Hungarian media is also reflected in how voters from opposing political camps view alternative news sources.
Oppositions voters place higher levels of trust in independent media outlets such as RTL Klub, Telex and 444.hu, whereas government party voters are far more likely to trust M1, the public television service, and Kossuth Rádió, which is also public. There is very little centre ground.
We need your consent to load this Datawrapper contentWe use Datawrapper to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage PreferencesHungarian governments employing public media for their own messaging is nothing new, István Kiss, the executive director of the conservative Danube Institute, told RTÉ News.
"This was the case during the socialist governments, and this is the case during the Fidesz government as well."
He believes that across print media, Fidesz has a "slight majority", whereas in television there is an even split between pro-government and opposition outlets. Online media, he said, is dominated by "anti-government or opposition forces".
The Hungarian government's internal communications office, which handles press inquiries, did not reply to emailed questions from RTÉ News regarding Hungary's media sector for this article.
