Polish Press Agency (PAP)

The Polish Press Agency (Polska Agencja Prasowa, PAP) is Poland’s national news agency. Its history dates to 1918, when a group of journalists established the Polish Telegraphic Agency. Under communist rule PAP operated as a state-owned outlet and served as the official mouthpiece of the regime. After 1990 it gained greater operational independence while remaining owned and part-financed by the state. Since December 2023 it has operated under the legal name Polska Agencja Prasowa S.A. w likwidacji, a company in liquidation, with Marek Henryk Błoński as liquidator; the State Treasury holds all of its shares, the Minister of Culture and National Heritage exercises the shareholder’s rights, and the registered share capital is PLN 52.7 million

Media assets

News services: Codzienny Serwis Informacyjny, English News Service, Daily News, PAP Biznes, Market Insider, Serwis Makro, Serwis Makler, Serwis Nauka i Zdrowie, Kalendarium Wydarzeń PAP

Photo, graphics and video: Codzienny Serwis Fotograficzny, Baza Zdjęć PAP, Serwis Infograficzny, Serwis Wideo

Monitoring and communication services: Monitoring Mediów PAP, information distribution, media and transmission services, Centrum Prasowe PAP, Klub Samorządowy, advertising services

Portals and open services: pap.pl, PAP Biznes, Serwis Samorządowy, Serwis Zdrowie, Nauka w Polsce, Dzieje.pl, PAP MediaRoom, EuroPAP News

Ownership and governance

The Act on the Polish Press Agency of 31 July 1997 converted the agency into a state-owned joint-stock company, registered in 1998, and requires the State Treasury to retain all of its shares. The management board of between one and three members, including its president, is appointed and dismissed by the National Media Council (RMN), as are the three members of the supervisory board and the members of the advisory programming council. The statute is set by the minister responsible for the State Treasury, with changes requiring the request or consent of the RMN. The same model applies to TVP and Polish Radio, whose governing bodies the RMN also appoints. The National Broadcasting Council (KRRiT), the five-member constitutional broadcasting regulator, is a separate institution with no jurisdiction over a news agency.

After the elections of 15 October 2023 the coalition of the Civic Coalition, Third Way and The Left, led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk, began reforming the public media. In late December 2023 President Andrzej Duda vetoed a bill on state media subsidies, describing the coalition’s actions as an illegal seizure of public media. On 27 December 2023 the culture minister placed TVP, Polish Radio and PAP into liquidation, following the dismissal of the previous management before Christmas.

On 20 December 2023 Marek Błoński, a PAP journalist of more than 20 years who had headed its Katowice branch and served as deputy editorial director of PAP Media between 2014 and 2015, was appointed president of the agency in place of Wojciech Surmacz. Paweł Kostrzewa was appointed to the management board. The opening of the liquidation was entered in the National Court Register on 29 January 2024 and Błoński became the agency’s liquidator.

PAP identifies Marek Błoński as director general and liquidator, Paweł Kostrzewa as deputy director general and Justyna Leszczyńska as the liquidator’s authorised representative. It identifies its supervisory board as Mikołaj Grzegorz Kozak, chairman, Bartosz Piotr Przeciechowski, deputy chairman, and Krzysztof Sokołowski, secretary, and its programming council as nine members chaired by Bogusław Chrabota.

On 1 October 2026 Paweł Rozwód was appointed deputy director general alongside Kostrzewa, with responsibility for multimedia and digital content, cooperation between editorial teams and the agency’s bureaus, institutional partnerships, and the implementation of artificial-intelligence tools. He joined PAP in 2007 and was deputy editor-in-chief between 2014 and 2017.

Karol Nawrocki, supported by Law and Justice, succeeded Duda as President on 6 August 2025. His frequent use of the presidential veto has complicated the Tusk government’s legislative agenda, including efforts to reform public media. A draft amendment to the Broadcasting Act published in December 2025 would abolish the licence fee, abolish the RMN and transfer its powers over the public broadcasters to an enlarged KRRiT. The bill had not been sent to the Sejm by September 2026. The European Commission’s 2026 Rule of Law Report, dated 17 July 2026, records that the liquidation initiated in 2023 is ongoing with liquidators appointed directly by the Minister of Culture, and that the governance of public service media structures continues to reflect political choices.

In its consultation submission of February 2026 PAP argued that the draft does not recognise its status as a public media service provider under the European Media Freedom Act, whose definition it reads as covering any provider entrusted with a public mission under national law rather than broadcasters alone. The submission records that while the draft would apply independence rules to PAP’s management and supervisory board members comparable to those for the broadcasters, the final appointment decision would rest with the Minister of Culture rather than the KRRiT, and that PAP’s programming council would remain purely advisory, with the two council representatives nominated by the minister to the selection committee appearing to the agency to be a mainly symbolic solution. PAP proposed removing the provisions concerning it from the broadcasting amendment and preparing a separate statute setting out its status, a governance model, stable funding and a redefined public mission. The proposed ministerial appointment model has not taken effect.

Source of funding and budget

Under the Act, PAP must disseminate the positions of the Sejm, the Senate, the President and the Council of Ministers, and allow other central state bodies to present their positions on matters of significance. It draws revenue from fees for its news services and other commercial sources, and may receive a state subsidy for current operations connected to that public mission. The subsidy may not exceed the difference between the necessary actual costs of the public-mission activities and the revenues related to them. The agency must keep separate accounts for its public-mission and commercial activities and report quarterly and annually, with the reports and the settlement of the subsidy available to the RMN.

In 2024 PAP recorded revenue of PLN 65.67 million, 0.1 per cent higher than in 2023, on net sales of PLN 68.23 million; the difference between the two figures reflects a negative adjustment of PLN 2.57 million for changes in inventories of products. Its operating loss widened from PLN 3.55 million to PLN 7.7 million and its gross loss from PLN 2.15 million to PLN 5.56 million, while the net loss narrowed from PLN 3.7 million to PLN 2.83 million, chiefly through a swing in the income-tax line. Domestic revenue rose from PLN 62.66 million to PLN 63.77 million and foreign revenue fell from PLN 5.36 million to PLN 4.46 million. The state subsidy was PLN 22.62 million.

In 2025 PAP recorded net sales of PLN 76.36 million, an increase of 11.9 per cent from 2024, while operating costs rose to PLN 109.72 million. The agency reported a loss on sales of approximately PLN 38.5 million, reflecting continuing pressure on the profitability of its operations. General news services generated PLN 20.73 million, economic services PLN 9.87 million and photographic services PLN 8.03 million. Wages rose from PLN 52.48 million to PLN 58.58 million and external services from PLN 25.67 million to PLN 27.3 million. The state operating subsidy amounted to approximately PLN 22.15 million. The agency employed 410 people at the end of 2025, of whom 282 were journalists, against 415 and 291 a year earlier.

PAP nevertheless recorded a net profit of PLN 63.1 million, compared with a loss of PLN 2.83 million in 2024. This resulted chiefly from the sale in December 2025 of property at ul. Mińska 65 in Warsaw, plot 17/1 of approximately 27,800 square metres, to the publicly financed Instytut Przemysłów Kreatywnych. The reported transaction value was approximately PLN 125 million and the agency recognised a gain of PLN 115.78 million on the disposal of fixed assets, within other operating revenue of PLN 146.7 million; income tax of PLN 21.5 million was paid. The former culture minister Piotr Gliński criticised the sale, questioning the transfer of money between public institutions; those are political claims rather than an established finding of financial wrongdoing. The property sale was a non-recurring transaction, and PAP’s 2026 budget projected a loss of approximately PLN 9.9 million despite anticipated growth in sales to PLN 80.9 million against operating costs of PLN 119.4 million.

PAP has described the annual subsidy arrangement that the draft amendment would preserve as an anachronistic model of an annual entity subsidy. It notes that the bill creates a multi-year funding mechanism for the public radio and television companies but not for the agency, that it identifies no funding source for PAP, and that annual budgeting does not provide the financial predictability required by Article 5(3) of the European Media Freedom Act, hampers planning for technology investment and weakens the agency’s independence from the executive.

Editorial independence

The Act on the Polish Press Agency requires reliable, objective and comprehensive reporting and prohibits the agency from coming under the legal, economic or other control of political, ideological or commercial groups. PAP has a statutory nine-member programming council, appointed by the National Media Council and chaired since May 2025 by Bogusław Chrabota, which may assess the agency’s performance of its public mission and issue opinions. The council is advisory rather than an independently elected body of journalists. Editorial operations are managed separately, under editor-in-chief Wojciech Tumidalski, with three deputy editors-in-chief and departmental editors including a head of the fact-checking department.

PAP has long balanced state funding against varying degrees of political pressure. It strengthened its independence in the early 2010s, but the National Media Council Act of 2016 placed its governing bodies under a body controlled by the governing party, and the council appointed a programming council dominated by conservative journalists. The agency has retained a reputation for professional reporting and has employed respected journalists.

Following the December 2023 management changes, PAP moved away from the governing arrangements established under the previous administration. No systematic independent content analysis demonstrating a sustained pro-government editorial line under the present management was located for this update. Unlike television and radio broadcasters, PAP does not fall under the KRRiT’s broadcast-content monitoring framework. Its statutory programming council provides an advisory mechanism, but no independent assessment of the agency’s editorial output comparable to those conducted for the public broadcasters was identified.

The European Commission’s 2026 Rule of Law assessment recorded a decrease in polarising and biased content in public service media over the preceding two years, while reporting increased polarised coverage of political issues and a continuing high risk to the independence of public service media.

AI and digital policy

In August 2026 PAP established a Multimedia and Digital Content Editorial Department, headed by Tomasz Więcławski with Jakub Panek as his deputy, responsible for video production, the pap.pl service, social-media distribution, Studio PAP, PAP Life, Infopakiety and special projects, from topic selection through production, distribution, archiving and analysis. Announcing it, the liquidator and director general said that the agency was introducing artificial-intelligence tools, including creative solutions, while maintaining full editorial responsibility for published material, and that fact-checking would be developed within multimedia formats.

In October 2026 PAP began introducing MultiPAP, a platform combining text, photographs, video and infographics for professional clients, and the appointment of a second deputy director general in the same month placed the implementation of artificial-intelligence tools within that post’s responsibilities.

These developments establish an operational position of retaining human editorial responsibility for AI-assisted content. No comprehensive publicly available rules specifying disclosure or labelling requirements for categories of AI-generated material were identified for this update.

Classification rationale

The Polish Press Agency is classified Independent State-Managed (ISM), provisionally. The State Media Matrix section of the previous entry recorded State-Controlled while its closing assessment moved the agency to ISFM, and the 2025 global findings recorded ISM; this update resolves those discrepancies in favour of ISM.

PAP is wholly owned by the Polish State Treasury and remains subject to politically exposed governance arrangements. Under the Act on the Polish Press Agency, the National Media Council appoints its governing bodies, including the management board, supervisory board and advisory programming council. Those statutory powers remain in place despite the December 2023 intervention by the State Treasury shareholder, which replaced management and placed the company into liquidation.

The agency differs financially from Poland’s public broadcasters. It generates most of its ordinary operating resources through commercial sales of news and related services. The statutory subsidy supporting its public mission amounted to approximately PLN 22.62 million in 2024 and PLN 22.15 million in 2025, substantially below the threshold of 50 per cent of the annual budget that the State Media Matrix applies to predominant state financing.

The large profit recorded in 2025 resulted from a non-recurring sale of property to another publicly financed institution. That transaction provided substantial resources but does not, without additional evidence, establish that PAP’s recurring operations are predominantly state-funded.

PAP’s governing statute requires objective and comprehensive reporting and expressly prohibits political, ideological and economic control. Its programming council provides a formal advisory mechanism, although its members are appointed through the National Media Council. No systematic independent assessment demonstrating sustained editorial direction by the incumbent government was located for this update.

These findings support the Independent State-Managed category. The state exercises substantial ownership and governance powers, but direct operating subsidies have not been shown to constitute the majority of the agency’s recurring funding, and sustained state-directed editorial control has not been established.

The classification remains provisional because PAP continues to operate in liquidation, its supervisory arrangements remain disputed and the legislation intended to replace the present appointment system has not been enacted. The agency has also questioned whether the proposed reforms provide sufficient institutional and financial safeguards under the European Media Freedom Act.

October 2026