Articles

Pierrick Judeaux, Director of Portfolio and EU representative at the International Fund for Public Interest Media (IFPIM), explains the critical role of funding independent journalism in low and middle-income countries, and shares his insights into the Fund’s commitment to providing flexible, long-term financial support.

Why is it important for IFPIM to fund journalism? Which outlets are eligible for funding?

Judeaux: The Fund was created as a new multilateral and independent vehicle to fund journalism in low and middle income countries. We created this new vehicle because independent media globally are facing a major economic and financial crisis. The business models that have underpinned independent journalism in past decades have been under massive pressure. And the current level of support that is dedicated to independent media is not of the scale required to meet the challenge.

What we’re seeing globally, with even more acuteness in low and middle income countries, is a lot of outlets shutting down, or being captured by private or political interests. Perhaps more frequent and less visible, but extremely important, is a slow degradation of the capacity of media organisations working in the public interest to maintain their coverage and to hold power to account. That slow degradation is deeply worrying for the future of our information ecosystems and for democracy.

All of this is happening in the context of growing threats to information ecosystems and information integrity, including disinformation, misinformation, and various campaigns and operations led by a number of authoritarian actors. For all of these reasons, we created the Fund as a way to drastically scale up the amount of funding that is being made available to support public interest media in low and middle income countries.

How do you provide support? Are you cooperating with other donors?

Judeaux: Yes, we work very closely with other media funders. We’re very conscious that there are a number of other actors that have been doing really important work in terms of supporting journalists and media organisations for a long time. So we work extremely closely with other actors that fund journalism, and local market actors, journalists, researchers, and civil society actors that follow the information space closely. It’s a very important principle for us to fully acknowledge that we don’t operate in a vacuum, and we want to make sure we use the funds and financial capabilities to be complementary to the support that already exists.

In terms of how we provide support, we’re trying to be as driven as we can by both the local context and the needs of our partners, our grantees. So the types of grants we provide will be slightly different from one grantee to the next. There are, however, a couple of principles.

The first is that we strive to provide institutional support and mid- to long-term support. We’ve realised that the need for core funding or institutional funding is really acute. There is a lot of project funding, there is a lot of short-term funding. This kind of support is very important, of course, but it most often doesn’t allow organisations to cover their core costs and to invest in the future and future-proof their organisations at a time where markets are deeply changing. So we endeavour to provide relatively long term support that gives media outlets visibility. These are two- or three-year grants that can be renewed. In the vast majority of cases, it is core institutional funding rather than project-based.

The size of our grant varies, but because of the core funding and the long-term funding, they tend to be relatively large compared to other funders. We do pay a lot of attention, however, to the risk of being too large a source of revenue for a given outlet, and so we ensure that in almost all cases, with a few exceptions, we fund no more than 30 percent of the operating costs of an organisation.

Finally, how do we identify the organisations we support? We source future grantees through four complimentary channels. We run open calls for proposals. We do a lot of proactive engagements, within countries where we work, with a lot of market actors to identify potential partners. We have a system for referrals from trusted partners, such as other funders and development organisations, to suggest partners we should support. And finally, any media organisation that is interested in collaborating and working with us can submit an expression of interest on our website. So we have these four channels to identify potential partners and then all relevant independent media that meet our eligibility criteria (which are described on our website) go through the same assessment and due diligence process.

I’ll end with a very important point. When we created the Fund as a multilateral financing mechanism, we were extremely careful to strike the right balance between creating a partnership that would mobilise many government funders while ensuring the Fund would make funding decisions independently. None of our funders can direct or influence which media organisations the Fund supports. All funding decisions are made under the control of an independent board made of independent experts who don’t serve any specific organisation or government. This was always absolutely central and non-negotiable. It allows [us] to shield donors from allegations of interference. But most importantly, that’s the only way to guarantee the editorial integrity and independence of the media organisations we support.

You have just announced a new round of support in Latin America. Are you planning to expand your programme in Europe as well?

Judeaux: The mandate of the Fund is to work in low and middle income countries. We don’t work in high income countries. In Europe we currently operate in four countries, in the Eastern Partnership: Armenia, Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine. We’re currently finalising a number of additional grants and we’ll be supporting a new cohort of partners in those countries.

We will also be looking at potentially expanding the set of countries in which we work in the near future. The fund is currently in its first phase of operations, but later this month, we’re going to be launching a campaign for fundraising and replenishment of our financial resources for the next phase of our development. As we raise additional funds, we’ll be able to expand geographically as well.

Now, coming back to the four countries where we work, we’re currently finalising the selection of a new cohort of grantees based on the global open call that we’ve launched on World Press Freedom Day [3 May]. And so, relatively soon, within a month or two, we’ll be announcing a new set of grants across those countries.

What is the most important lesson you have learned since the launch of the Fund?

Judeaux: The one thing we are hearing constantly from almost all our partners is how important unrestricted institutional funding is and how critical it is for them to adapt to the future and survive in contexts where they are facing a lot of pressure. That’s true in all of the Eastern European countries that I just mentioned, and it’s true globally as well. It’s the single most frequent piece of feedback that we get from the partners we work with. The acknowledgement that there is really a market gap when it comes to providing that kind of unrestricted, flexible, long-term funding, is the most important lesson to date.

What are the biggest challenges you have had to face so far?

Judeaux: We need to make difficult choices all the time. We have raised a significant amount of money for the first phase of operations, close to EUR 60 million, but this is a drop in the ocean compared to the needs. Independent journalism outlets that do really important work for society need funding, and hard decisions have to be made, because there are a lot more needs than actual funding available.

Yet the unmet need remains vast. Following the launch of two calls for proposals, the Fund received expressions of interest from over 600 organisations, requesting grant funding worth a total of US$ 120-130 million. These calls were limited in scope and applied to only a small subset of countries. Globally, the level of demand is many times higher. Scaling up the capital available for public interest media remains of paramount importance.

A second challenge, I think, has been that a lot of media organisations are now asking themselves questions around how to adjust their editorial practices to meet the audience where it’s going to consume content. That’s particularly true in case of younger audiences. We’ve tried to identify those actors that pay particular attention to trying to find ways to cater to the needs of younger audiences. This is part of a broader approach of the fund, to ensure that audience needs are at the core of how media organisations think about their work. We are trying to ensure we identify media organisations that do the best job possible to address the needs of younger and underserved audiences.

We’ve learned a lot of lessons as a community, but it’s still very complex for many organisations, especially those that have existed for some time, to design and execute a strategy by which you not only think about your distribution and your marketing, but also about the types of formats, the topics you cover, also the composition of your newsroom, and make sure you have more diversity and representation within your newsroom.

The shift that’s required to make sure you talk to everyone and address all audiences is far bigger than just thinking about meeting people on social media. Identifying and supporting those organisations which try to go through that transformation has been a challenge, but it’s a very promising area of work.

Finally, in many markets it’s hard to see a future for sustainable independent media without deeper, more structural changes. That’s why we also invest in supporting initiatives that look to create new ways to finance journalism and change the rules of the games that shape the environment independent media operate in. For instance, we’re supporting the creation of several new National Journalism Funds, such as in Sierra Leone and Brazil. We’re also working closely with actors that design models and advocate for fairer value sharing between big tech and the media.

What was the biggest success story in your programme?

Judeaux: There have been a number of media organisations we’ve supported that have highlighted that we’ve allowed them to survive and continue to play a really important role for the community in difficult times, whether it is one of the oldest community radio stations in South Africa, called Bush Radio, or whether it is independent media in Georgia, Netgazeti, or Mtisambebi. We have a number of cases where our partners have highlighted how critical core flexible funding has been to maintaining the ability of these outlets to continue their work.

However, it is not only survival that the grants provide. We also have a number of, I would say, early success stories where we see media organisations that are able to pilot innovation and roll them out in a way that’s proven very successful. Let me share a few examples.

One area relates to the point I was making earlier around transforming newsrooms. For instance, Himalmedia in Nepal has improved its reach and coverage of underreported issues affecting marginalised communities, facilitated by a fellowship programme for young journalists from underrepresented backgrounds.

Experimentation with new revenue streams has been another area of transformation to support growth and independence. For example, in Colombia, Mutante launched its production arm, Mutante Estudio, which within a year has already generated about 10% of its revenue in 2023.

Finally, we’ve also seen several of the media we support experiment very successfully with new formats and distribution strategies and grow their audiences rapidly. In Eastern Ukraine, News of Donbas’ new tailored content for social media has quickly generated a significant increase in traffic. Videos on its YouTube channels were seen over 40 million times in the first three months of the year and their newly created TikTok channel has also rapidly accrued millions of views.

Do you have any special advice for organisations that have not funded journalism yet, but are thinking about doing so?

Judeaux: I have three pieces of advice. First: do it! Do it because the integrity of our information ecosystem and the existence of independent trusted voices in the countries where your foundation or your institution is working is critical for almost anything else you want to achieve, whether you’re working on issues like social justice or climate change, you name it. It’s certain that having a healthy information ecosystem is central to achieving your goals, so investing in stronger independent media is actually instrumental in advancing your objective as a foundation or an institution.

Second, there are lots of ways to do this. Maybe you don’t feel like you have the bandwidth or the desire to create an entire programme and to build the capacity to do this, because media funding is quite complex, in the sense that you need to understand not only media, but also the politics in a given country. You need to be very careful about media capture. So if you either want to protect yourself, or don’t want to build the entire infrastructure to do this, then there is an existing structure called the International Fund, a pooled global funding mechanism that allows for organisations that care about information integrity, but might not want to develop an entire programme on media funding to be able to do that very efficiently and quickly.

Then third, invest in local capacity. The field of media development and media support has evolved a lot over the past couple of decades, and the funders that are doing the best work are those which invest in local resources and local capacity, because media is so complex and so embedded in the fabric of society and politics. Being able to work and to be driven by people that live in these environments is extremely important.