CFPs: Microgrants for Small Newsrooms

This grant and mentoring programme as part of the ongoing PluPro project aims to empower 50 local independent media outlets. The goal is to foster resilience and viability through capacity-building activities, design-learning innovation, and a repository of case studies and best practices.

Funding Information

• In 2024-2025 the total grant budget is €250,000 to distribute over two application rounds (€125,000 per call). Maximum amount per media outlet: €5,000.
• A grant can cover two types of costs:
  • Working time
  • Expenses

Eligible Activities

• Activities should focus on a specific area of business development that has the potential to expand audiences and make the particular media outlet more sustainable in the long run.
• Grants, for example, could allow newsrooms to commission in-depth audience research for the first time, create a new editorial offering for a new set of users, redesign a website to display trust-building information about the editorial process, or experiment with new methods for covering particularly polarising topics. That list is not exhaustive, and they welcome many other topics.

Ineligible Costs

• Following expenses are not eligible for a grant:
  • Investment goods (such as IT equipment, mobile phones, etc.), overhead and office costs, production costs, food and beverage, per diems.

Eligibility Criteria

• This grant programme will be open to small- and medium-sized, local, and independent media outlets (legal entities) in EU member states and participating countries in the Creative Europe Programme, with a particular emphasis on countries with a medium- or high-risk rating according to the Media Pluralism Monitor.
• The media outlets must be legal entities officially incorporated at least one year before the application deadline of the grant call.
• Media outlets should already have made journalistic content available to a general public at least one year before the application deadline of the grant call.
• The project should be clearly defined in time (the maximum term of the project may not exceed 2 months).
• The grant request does not intend to finance the regular operations, but to support well-defined innovative projects that go beyond regular operation.
• The legal entities should have a turnover of less than 1.5M EUR and shouldn’t be part of a group or consortium with a consolidated turnover that exceeds an amount of 3M EUR.

Judging Criteria

• The jury of the grant programmes will evaluate each project proposal separately according to the pre-set assessment criteria:
  • Feasibility of the project, timeline and budget.
  • Adaption of design-learning strategy in project testing and development;
  • Potential to increase audience through methods new for that media outlet;
  • Potential to add a consistent, new revenue stream;
  • Potential for learning opportunities, i.e. testing a prototype before investing money and time into a large-scale venture;
  • Team structure and skills of the applicants.
  • Management buy-in.

For more information, visit Journalismfund Europe.