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EU institutions spent more than €1 billion for media- and journalism-related activities between 2014 and 2024, with €758.3 million classified as support-oriented funding. Annual funding nearly quintupled over the period, while funding remained concentrated among a relatively small group of organisations and countries.

The European Union is a significant source of funding for media and journalism. Through development cooperation, research programmes, culture and citizenship funding, and its own communication budgets, the EU supports independent media, press freedom, media literacy, journalism research, and a range of related activities. At a time when media organisations are facing growing economic pressure, understanding where this funding goes provides an important starting point for examining its role in the sustainability of independent media.

Tracing the Flows, a new study by the Media and Journalism Research Center (MJRC), does exactly this: it maps EU funding connected to media and journalism between 2014 and 2024.

The study examines €1.0615 billion in beneficiary-level contracted amounts recorded in the EU Financial Transparency System (FTS). The underlying dataset contains 6,103 beneficiary entries naming 2,166 entities across 105 countries. “The data gives us a large amount of information: beneficiary, country, programme, responsible department, subject of the grant or contract, dates, and monetary values. It makes it possible to reconstruct a detailed picture of where contracted funding goes,” explains Flora Alfiero, a freelance journalist who co-authored the report.

The study focuses on the structure of the funding rather than its impact. It maps the scale and loop evolution of EU expenditure, its geographical distribution, the programmes and departments through which money flows, the organisations receiving it, and the different activities covered. It also makes an important distinction between funding intended to support media- and journalism-related activities and spending on communication and analytical services commissioned by EU institutions.

What the EU Funds

Of the €1.0615 billion recorded in the dataset, €758.3 million is classified as support-oriented funding, while €303.1 million relates to services procured for EU institutions. The latter includes communication campaigns, media buying, events, monitoring, research, and other commissioned work.

The distinction is not intended to suggest that one type of expenditure is more valuable than the other. Rather, it makes it possible to examine different funding functions separately. For researchers, policymakers, and media organisations, this provides a clearer picture of what the EU’s media-related funding actually consists of. The study records contracted amounts rather than money ultimately paid, so the figures may differ from final payments.

Procurement itself is divided into four mutually exclusive categories: advertising and media buying (€114.2 million), communication and events (€133.0 million), media monitoring, commissioned studies, and opinion research (€53.8 million), and IT services (€2.1 million). In total, 40 entities have records in both support-oriented and procurement categories.

The €758.3 million support-oriented figure offers a closer approximation of EU support for media- and journalism-related activity than the full dataset. It should not, however, be read as a measure of direct newsroom support, the study warns. The category also includes universities, research projects, audiovisual and film activity, media technology, and other media-related interventions.

A Steep Rise in Funding

The data shows a significant increase in funding over the period covered. Annual funding rose from €37.5 million in 2014 to €186.2 million in 2024. Growth was particularly substantial after 2021, with the annual total increasing by 66.9%. “The data shows the acceleration very clearly, but it does not allow us to establish a single causal explanation,” explains Alfiero. “The timing is certainly notable,” she continues. “The step-change occurs around 2022, and that is consistent with the expansion of EU commitments around strategic communication and independent media in the Eastern neighbourhood following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But our dataset alone cannot demonstrate that the invasion caused the increase.”

The figures capture the expansion of EU activity in areas including media development, journalism support, research, audiovisual production, information resilience, and strategic communication.

The geographical picture changes depending on which forms of expenditure are included. France, Belgium, and Germany together account for 51.8%, but when procurement is excluded, their combined share falls to 35.8%. This reflects, among other factors, the concentration of contractors, institutions, and consortium coordinators in major European administrative and media centres. “I expected some concentration, given the location of EU institutions, but the degree to which it has not shifted at all over time was interesting. The money grows substantially, the map does not move.” says Alfiero. She believes that “the structural advantage of proximity to EU institutions is still visible, and still largely uncorrected.”

One element of this structural advantage is that “organisations based in Brussels or with a Brussels presence know the procedural language, have established relationships with Commission officers, and are positioned to participate in grant cycles in ways that organisations elsewhere are not,” she adds.

Who Receives the Funding?

Funding flows primarily through external-action and research instruments. The size of individual awards varies considerably. The median positive-value record is €68,480 across the full dataset and €90,577 among support-oriented records. Many beneficiary allocations within multi-partner projects are relatively modest, while a small number of very large records push the average substantially above the median.

Grouping by beneficiary entity, the ten largest recipients in the full dataset hold 29.4% of the total. The largest is Havas (€101.0 million), a media-buying agency classified as procurement, followed by the European Endowment for Democracy (EED, €49.0 million) and Kantar (€26.6 million, media monitoring). The support-oriented top ten is composed of media-development organisations, press-freedom bodies, broadcasters, and universities: EED, the German Corporation for International Cooperation (GIZ), International Media Support, BBC Media Action, Internews, and the European University Institute among them.

“These are legitimate actors, but they are not newsrooms. Investigative journalism units are largely absent,” Alfiero says, adding that “the EU funds the study of media, the support of media infrastructure, and the communication of its own institutions far more visibly than it funds the practice of accountability reporting. Our data can identify those patterns, but it cannot tell us whether a particular allocation was effective or whether it reached the places where it was most needed,” she adds.

From Funding Flows to Needs

The study does not assess individual grants, beneficiaries, or funding programmes, nor does it attempt to measure the impact of the activities financed. Its aim is more basic: to make a complex public record easier to understand, separate different forms of expenditure, and provide a transparent and reproducible baseline for further research into European funding for media and journalism.

“Our study maps where the money went; it does not measure the level of need in different countries or media markets,” Alfiero explains. She is cautious about producing a map of “funding” against “need,” but she believes there are important signals. “Journalist safety is a good example. The EU has passed resolutions, issued statements, and built political capital around press freedom as a value. The resources allocated specifically to protecting journalists who face threats, legal harassment, or physical danger are negligible by any measure,” she says. “Press freedom commitments sit inside external action programmes designed for third countries, research funding flows through Horizon with its own logic and eligibility criteria, and institutional communication budgets get recorded alongside genuine media support in the same transparency system,” she continues. “There is no single framework that treats the sustainability of independent journalism inside the Union as a policy objective.”

Alfiero also believes that direct, accessible funding for organisations “doing the actual work,” so local newsrooms, cross-border investigative units, outlets in markets where advertising has collapsed and public broadcasters have been captured, is still missing.

“The intermediary model where large NGOs and multilateral bodies distributing EU funds downstream is not inherently wrong, but it could add distance between the money and the journalism. And I think future discussion should move beyond simply asking how much money is being spent. We need to be able to follow the money into the actual activity: what kind of journalism is being supported, where it is being produced, who ultimately benefits, and what happens after the contract is awarded,” she concludes. “The next step is to connect this funding map with evidence about outcomes.”