European Commission Call for Prosal: Media Ownership Monitor

• Eligibility: 
• The call is open to:
  • A “sole” applicant (several legal entities forming together one legal entity or ‘sole beneficiary’)
  • A grouping of entities (consortia) – with the entities forming this consortia having or not entities affiliated to them.
• Proposals may be submitted by any of the following applicants or combinations of:
  • non-profit organisation (private or public);
  • international organisations;
  • universities;
  • educational institutions;
  • research centres.
• Only applications from legal entities established in the following countries are eligible: EU Member States.
• Funding amount:
  • Total budget available: 1.000.000 EUR (one million euros).
  • Maximum co-financing rate: 90% of eligible costs
• Type of funding: Programmatic
• Target countries: European Union Member States
• Application languages: English

The European Commission is launching a Call for proposals for the Pilot Project “Media Ownership Monitor”.

The Media Ownership Monitor project will create a tool to better inform policy and regulatory interventions that support media freedom and pluralism, by clearly delineating where ownership lies, making potential issues more visible and thereby helping to improve the understanding of the media market. Concretely, the Monitor will provide a country-based database containing information on media ownership, assess systematically relevant legal frameworks and identify possible risks to media ownership transparency.

• Create a publicly available country-based database containing data on the main media outlets that shape public opinion and the corporate entities and individuals which own or otherwise control them. The database will have to cover at least ten European Union countries, including at least several countries with identified media ownership transparency risks. The database is expected to cover as many relevant national, regional and local news media as possible. Online news media will also need to be covered. The applicants are invited to indicate the number and types of media they intend to monitor as well as the criteria for selecting them.
• Include contextual narratives of the country-specific environment and a detailed legal assessment which lends itself to comparative analysis;
• Building on the existing work of the Media Pluralism Monitor, the project will analyse and monitor a wide range of risk indicators in the legal, economic and technical domains, focusing on media ownership and control; Applicants are invited to describe the rational for selecting the risk indicators and the methodology they intend to use.
• Ensure dissemination of the results via a dedicated online platform, launch events, press conferences and appropriate social media coverage. The use of interactive databases, maps and data visualisation is encouraged. Applicants are invited to describe their dissemination strategy and ways to ensure that the online platform they intend to set up is user-friendly and accessible.