Polish publishing leader Maciej Hoffman dies after decades of copyright advocacy

Publishing leader and chamber founder dies

Maciej Hoffman, a long-serving advocate for Polish journalism and print media, died on 22 August 2026. The announcement was published on the official website of the Polish Chamber of Publishers, an organization previously known as the Chamber of Press Publishers. Hoffman served as a co-founder, board member, and long-time general director of the chamber throughout several decades of transformation in the media industry. He also co-founded the Association of Journalists and Publishers Repropol, where he served as the organization's first president. The chamber's management board acknowledged his extensive career, commemorating his dedication to protecting copyright standards and sustaining print journalism in the digital era.

Legislative advocacy and copyright protections

Hoffman represented the publishing sector in the Polish parliament during legislative work on revisions to the Press Law. In those parliamentary discussions, he focused on defining the legal status of publishers within the copyright value chain and establishing publisher neighbouring rights. His institutional efforts extended across multiple industry organizations over several decades. Within Repropol, Hoffman also served as vice chairman of the Audit Committee before stepping down from active leadership in September 2022, when Grzegorz Cydejko was elected president of the organization. At that time, Hoffman was named an honorary member of Repropol. He also became an honorary member of the Creative Poland Association, a collective dedicated to safeguarding moral and material rights across artistic, literary, journalistic, scientific, and innovative fields.

Position on digital content aggregators

During debates over digital copyright reform in 2016, Hoffman spoke against the practices of content aggregation services and press-clipping firms. He argued that commercial aggregators operated by monetizing material produced by independent news organizations without contributing to the underlying operational expenses.

Aggregators earn from advertising next to other people's content, but they do not invest in its creation. They also reduce readership and traffic on the websites of publications, and thus advertising revenue. Where are publishers supposed to get money to create new content? All we want is for whoever incurred the production costs to recover at least a portion of those expenses.

Print market decline and newsroom cuts

Hoffman linked the growth of uncompensated aggregation to broader financial difficulties across Polish print journalism. He pointed out that between 2005 and 2016, print circulation in Poland dropped by more than 1 billion copies, resulting in cumulative revenue losses exceeding 2.5 billion PLN for domestic publishers. He noted that lower print runs increased distribution expenses per reader while eroding the advertising revenues that funded investigative reporting. Hoffman warned that these compounding financial pressures forced publishing houses to implement cost reductions, primarily through staff layoffs that diminished editorial capacity.

This means that publishers have lost more than 2.5 billion PLN. If you consider that the lower the circulation, the higher the cost of reaching the reader and the lower the revenue from advertising sales, it is not difficult to see why publishers are in such poor condition. The consequence is the degradation of the press, because lower revenues are followed by cost cuts, primarily in employment.