Call for Change

How funding support can work better

Short, unpredictable projects create churn, drain capacity, and prevent planning, retention, and growth.

• Prioritize multi-year core institutional funding that covers staff, rent, and essential operations.
• Ensure predictable, staged disbursements so teams can plan, grow, and retain people.
• Encourage simple, living workplans that can evolve without penalty as contexts change.

Heavy, complex administration steals time from reporting and is often disproportionate to grant size.

• Simplify application and reporting and adapt them to actual small newsroom capacities.
• Align requirements with grant scale and newsroom capacity (proportionality by design).
• Allow flexible budget reallocations within reasonable limits and with streamlined approval.

Current support often prioritizes metrics and branding over sustained reporting and real community relationships; visibility rules can overburden small teams and, in sensitive contexts, even increase risk.

• Prioritize sustained journalism and real community impact over purely quantitative indicators and social reach.
• Support day-to-day editorial work, not just one-off thematic projects.
• Fund initiatives that build lasting media–community relationships.
• Support alternative channels for genuine community building, rather than pushing dependence on mainstream platforms.
• Keep visibility requirements proportionate and context-sensitive; avoid lengthy manuals and excessive branding.
• Ensure visibility does not increase risk in sensitive contexts by signaling foreign affiliation.
• Acknowledge shared effort and local ownership fairly in all crediting and communications.

Local, community, and minority-language media face structural barriers when competing with larger organizations, mostly due to capacity and technical reach/impact gaps.

• Create dedicated funding lines for local/community/minority-language media.
• Adjust eligibility thresholds and match requirements to local realities; include micro- and starter grants.
• Provide calls, forms, and support in local languages (Bosnian, Serbian, Albanian).
• Offer optional light-touch coaching for first-time applicants.

Threats, attacks, and urgent reporting needs require rapid, reliable support that current systems rarely deliver.

• Establish rolling emergency funds with fast-track approvals for threats, attacks, and breaking stories.
• Support legal aid (including for SLAPP cases), digital protection, and psychological assistance for journalists and editors.
• Enable quick access to funds for equipment repair and technical resilience.

Partnership should be a two-way relationship, not a label. Decisions too often remain top-down and exclude local expertise.

• Create space for meaningful discussion and shaping priorities together, sharing key decisions, and agreeing adjustments through regular dialogue.
• Involve local media representatives in defining priorities and evaluation criteria.
• Introduce clear feedback and appeal mechanisms with simple, time-bound processes.
• Support for coaching and training works best when it is requested and co-shaped by newsrooms, rather than provided by default or along preset development paths.

Sustainability is too often framed through startup or commercial logic, sidelining public-interest missions and community value.

• Support community-based, hybrid, and cooperative models aligned with public interest.
  
• Reward collaboration, experimentation, and learning (including shared tools and syndication).
  
• Back diversified revenue strategies that do not compromise editorial independence.
  
• Provide patient, long-term support tied to public value, not just short-term growth metrics.