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The European Commission launched a call for proposals to setup and develop European media platforms aimed at improving Union citizens’ access to trusted information across the Union. Projects should stimulate ways to develop technical systems to enhance and expand a quality news content based on European rights and values.

Platforms should explore ways to produce and share cross-border news in multiple languages, reaching as many citizens as possible with contextualized information, relying on existing online supply when necessary, and to support cooperation at European level with the aim to increase the availability of original services and journalistic programmes, helping them to reach a new audience.

As a result, citizens will have access to quality content in multiple languages, representing the different geographic regions of Europe, helping to increase their trust in quality news content online.

A project proposal must consider two aspects:

– technological: it should include technical tools, aimed at facilitating translation methods, text to text, speech to text and speech to speech, technologies based on artificial intelligence and open source, search engines, transparent algorithms or content recommendation systems;

– editorial/organizational: it should be reliable in its ability to allow and then be able to count on a cooperation between media organizations and technology developers.

The content should be of general interest and ensure that citizens have access to quality pluralistic information from different multilingual sources. Content providers such as museums and libraries can be included in the offer if they adhere to the same values and if the use of their materials brings a clear added value to the content offer.

Project proposals must provide a provisional model of the planned platforms; they must describe the methods of editorial supervision, controls (e.g. to ensure independence) and content standards.

The call for proposal is addressed to:

– enterprises in the journalistic media sector;

– media technology developers;

–  other organisations active in the media sector (museums, libraries, where the use of their materials brings clear added value to the content of the news broadcast and to the provision of fact-based programmes).

The territorial focus of the action is the European Union Member States. Proposals must gather news media organisations from at least five EU Member states. Only applications from legal entities established in the EU member states are eligible under this call.

The allocated budget is 5.980.000 euros. The maximum co-financing rate of is 80% of the total eligible costs. The Commission expects to fund 2 to 3 proposals, with an expected duration of 12 months. The maximum amount per grant has been set at EUR 3,4 Mio. The expected duration of projects is between 12 and 15 months.

Official documents can be found here

Written by: Margherita Genua

Submitted on: September 6, 2021