This may be the EU’s biggest media funding mistake

Analyzing the effectiveness of the Guardian’s fundraising techniques, funding roadmap from Civitates and 13 open calls.

Welcome!

This week on the Media Finance Monitor:

• This may be the EU’s biggest media funding mistake

• Civitates unveils their new media funding roadmap with a strong emphasis on CEE

• Analyzing the effectiveness of the Guardian’s fundraising techniques

• New media fund for German speaking countries

• Publishers create content for one group of people and expect another to pay for it

• Join our conversations about the most pressing issues for CEE media

• 13 active calls (4 new)

Our team is growing, and we are delighted to welcome Zsofia Bulla as a Senior Associate. She brings over 20 years of experience in project development and management, having coordinated key media projects supported by the EU, USAID, and private philanthropy. Zsofia, it’s great to have you on board.

This may be the EU’s biggest media funding mistake

If we've had a conversation in the past year, you've likely heard me discuss the EU's media funding policies with some excitement (and/or frustration, depending on the day). At the Center for Sustainable Media, we do many things in the CEE space, but one of our most important goals is advocating for more resources for independent newsrooms and publishers in our region.

To achieve this, we need facts. Facts on how the European Commission is spending money on media and how publishers are using European funds. We have several ongoing projects aimed at establishing these facts and last week, the Media & Journalism Research Center (MJRC), led by Marius Dragomir, published a crucial piece of research on this subject.

MJRC analyzed 95 EU-funded projects worth EUR 295 million between 2018 and 2024. In terms of the geographic distribution of the money, here's what they found:

I’ll give you a moment to count all the former Eastern Bloc EU member countries on the diagram.

I created a table based on the MJRC figures, incorporating RSF press freedom rankings and World Bank GDP (PPP) per capita data for the top recipients and some CEE countries.