Pluralistic Media for Democracy: Strengthening Europe’s Independent Media Landscape

BRUSSELS/COPENHAGEN – With a focus on local and regional outlets, community media, investigative journalism, and public interest news organisations, the Pluralistic Media for Democracy project aims to foster a vibrant and diverse media landscape, and will allocate over €2 million to support and strengthen independent media across the European Union and beyond via grants and capacity building.

Journalismfund Europe and International Media Support announce the launch of an innovative project, “Pluralistic Media for Democracy”. Through strategic support in innovation, business sustainability, and audience engagement, the programme will empower media organisations to continue their critical role in upholding democracy and fostering informed public discourse across Europe.

“If you want to strengthen democracy and re-engage people in policy-making, you need to reinforce the foundations. A bottom-up approach. That’s why we need to make smaller local media more strategic and effective.” Ides Debruyne, Managing Director, Journalismfund Europe.

The programme will provide €1,400,000 in financial support through a Media Pluralism Fund to at least 40 local, regional, community, and investigative media outlets that operate in “news deserts” or areas experiencing strained media pluralism. In addition to the funding, selected media will benefit from a tailored capacity building and mentorship programme aimed at increasing innovation and creativity in business models, journalistic production processes and distribution processes as well as better audience reach and increased viability and resilience of the targeted organisations.

Dr Clare Cook, head of journalism and media viability at IMS, said: “Around the globe we witness first hand the traumatic pressures put on media as they commit to serving their local communities with public interest journalism while advertising drains to bring platforms and audience fragmentation continue to fan the precarity of their business models. Now more than ever we need systematic programming which can strengthen the sustainability of plural media ecosystems.”

“Taking what we have learnt from Local Media for Democracy we will work with community, local, regional, investigative and organisations delivering public interest news to drive forward innovation and impact, ” she adds.

An introductory webinar is taking place on 6 November at 2PM CET to provide more about information about the media pluralism fund and the tailored capacity building and mentorship programme. Register here (insert link).

The project is co-funded by the European Commission (Creative Europe). It started on 1 October 2024 for a period of 24 months. Two calls for proposals will be published in October 2024 and March 2025 for local and regional outlets, community media, investigative journalism, and public interest news organisations located in areas where media pluralism is strained to apply. 

Another project called Local Media for Democracy was completed in 2024. The 42 supported initiatives can be found here. A report with key findings and recommendations of relevance for future programming of this kind can be found here.