Stars4Media NEWS Call for projects

• Eligibility criteria:
  – Medium-sized and large media organisations: smaller organisations and tech companies can also join as long as they partner with a larger news organisation.– Composition of participating teams: A wide variety of media professionals! The project teams must involve a mix of people.
  – A typical project includes two media organisations, based in two different participating countries. 
• Type of funding: Programmatic
• Target countries: All EU member states; Iceland; Norway; Liechtenstein; Albania; Bosnia and Herzegovina; Montenegro; North Macedonia; Serbia; Georgia, and Ukraine.
• Application language: English

Stars4Media NEWS is a pan-European funding and coaching programme that supports European news organisations to achieve long term Business and Newsroom transformation. The programme is co-financed by the Creative Europe scheme of the European Commission and is implemented by a consortium of four partners: Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), the project coordinator, Europe’s MediaLab (Fondation EURACTIV), the World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) and the European Journalism Centre (EJC).

Stars4Media NEWS will provide financial support and in-depth coaching as well as peer-to-peer knowledge transfer for cross-border collaborative projects.

Stars4Media NEWS welcomes projects in 2 main areas: Newsroom Transformation and Business Transformation. Selected projects can receive up to €100, 000 for a full project, mostly cash, plus some free, tailored coaching and training. 14 Projects will be selected to enter an EXPLORE Phase: experimenting  innovation ideas, with a benchmarking partner in another country. 9 of these 14 projects will then be selected to continue in a BOOST Phase: deeper and wider in the development and implementation of their ideas. All projects selected (in both phases) will be able to benefit from ad-hoc and in-depth coaching from recognised experts in the newsroom and business transformation.
Participating companies will cooperate cross-border with another media organisation for a period of 4 to 10 months.

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