Local Media for Democracy

• Eligibility criteria:
  This grant programme is open to legal entities with a registered seat in one of the EU27 countries or teams of journalists (physical persons) having their legal residence in the EU27 (including the 9 EU outermost regions).
• Type of funding: Programmatic
• Target countries: Europe
• Application language: English

The Journalismfund.eu is now accepting applications for its Local Media for Democracy Grants Programme.

This media funding scheme injects €1,200,000 in financial support to local, regional, and community media who are struggling to serve the public interest in places where access to information has significantly decreased. The selected media will also receive technical and mentorship support (managed by International Media Support) to improve their organisational capacity, journalism innovation, and business sustainability.

These news desert areas can be a geographic or administrative area, or a social community, where it is difficult or impossible to access reliable, diverse and independent local, regional and community media. In other words, news deserts can emerge not only where there are no media outlets, but also where there are newsrooms captured by economic, political or other interests.

The following types of activities are eligible for the Local Media for Democracy Grants Programme:

1. Inviting experts to develop a sustainable business media plan.
2. Attend training for their journalists, editors and media managers on related issues
3. Support for editorial innovation and audience engagement actions.
4. Support to business innovation actions (e.g. diversification of revenues)
5. Business strategy: for media who need coaching on their business strategy and planning.
6. Community engagement and growth: development of audience strategies in particular knowledge of regional audiences.
7. Native advertising: development of partnership content and advertorial product offers.
8. Experiment with native advertising to increase overall revenues.
9. Innovation and agile development: identification of an area for innovation and agile development. Innovation and experiment in order to find new routes for growth or resilience.
10. Expertise to establish an official structure to form a local media.
11. Investing in technical tools and development (only the depreciations on investments will be accepted as cost).

Click here to book an individual session.

This is part of a larger programme supported by the European Commission.

See here to learn more and apply.

Access the Fundraising Guide for expert advice on how to improve your fundraising applications and to identify prospective donors.