Why are there so many Romanian cybersecurity journalists?

On any given day, over a half-dozen journalists from Romania produce a lot of infosec news articles. But why are there so many?

Image by Narcis Ciocan from Pixabay

I've been writing Metacurity in one form (it used to be a hard-to-maintain Wordpress-based website) or another (now as a Substack newsletter) for years, scouring the web for cybersecurity news. I've read the works of every significant writer on the cybersecurity beat dozens, if not hundreds, of times.

And periodically, a question has idly popped into my mind: why are there so many Romanian cybersecurity journalists? During any given week, and most frequently during any given day, more than a half dozen journalists in Romania are delivering the latest news in English on a range of cybersecurity developments, mostly technology-oriented posts, articles, and newsletters that drill down into the details of malware, threat actors, security research reports, and more.

These journalists include Sergiu Gatlan, Catalin Cimpanu, Lucian Constantin, Eduard Kovacs, Ionut Arghire, Ionut Ilascu, and Andrada Fiscutean. All of these journalists have written for various significant publications covering cybersecurity, including Bleeping Computer, Security Week, CSO Online, Ars Technica, Motherboard, The Record, and others.

Romania is not a large country. According to some sources, it ranks 61^st in population worldwide. It is not an English-speaking country for the most part. Less than a third of the population speaks English by some accounts, although I’m told that visitors to Romanian cities are often surprised by how well Romanians understand basic English. Moreover, English is a top subject of study by younger Romanians.

Compared to other European countries of comparable size, such as the Netherlands, where most of the population is fluent in English, the number of cybersecurity journalists represented by Romania seems outsized. (I'm hard-pressed to come up with a single Dutch journalist who writes regularly in English on cybersecurity but let me know if I missed someone). Compared to Germany, a country five times the size of Romania and where the vast majority of the population is fluent in English, Romania again is significantly overrepresented. (Germany has a handful of cybersecurity journalists, specifically Hakan Tanriverdi, a prolific investigative journalist who mainly publishes in German.)

So why do Romanian journalists account for a disproportionate amount of English-language cybersecurity news reporting? To answer this question, I emailed the journalists to ask them to explain. The answer is simple and likely obvious to cybersecurity veterans, but it was new to me.