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The platform Journalift, the first to offer media development support in local languages in the Western Balkans, was launched as part of a three-year program. Despite the conclusion of the project, it continues to thrive independently. Offering free courses and a wealth of information to fortify the impact of media development in the region, Journalift has taken on a life of its own.

In the ever-evolving landscape of media development, projects often conclude with the end of their funding and implementation period. However, some elements of these initiatives take on a life of their own, continuing to thrive and make a lasting impact. One of the most prominent examples is Journalift, a digital platform born out of the ‘Media for All’ programme, jointly implemented by the British Council, the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN), Intrac, and Thomson Foundation, and funded by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO).

The primary goal of the ‘Media for All’ programme was to bolster smaller media organisations in the Western Balkans, supporting them in developing feasible and innovative business plans. Thomson Foundation played a key role by providing grants, capacity building, business support, and dedicated mentoring, recognising that mentorship is key to achieving successful results.

One tangible outcome of this programme was the creation of Journalift, a multilingual platform launched in May 2021. While the ‘Media for All’ programme concluded last year, Journalift has continued to flourish. “It has a life of its own now,” says Sanja Lazic, the platform’s Managing Editor, and Thomson Foundation’s Communications and Outreach Coordinator for programs in Central and South East Europe.

What sets Journalift apart is its commitment to breaking language barriers. Many media workers in news outlets in the Western Balkans face challenges accessing training and upgrading their skills due to language constraints, as these trainings are often offered only in English. Journalift addressed this by providing up-to-date news and valuable content in all local languages, making it the first platform of its kind in the region.

Even though new content on the platform is mostly available in English only, the target audience is wider after the end of the ‘Media for All’ programme. Now, Journalift is not exclusive to former programme grantees; it serves as a free resource platform for anyone interested in media development. The resources are tailor-made particularly for the Western Balkans and Central Europe; however, audiences from other regions also find it useful.

The platform offers a variety of written content collected through various types of activities related to media development. For example, a small media organisation in rural Serbia can share its experience and the most important lessons learned in a capacity-building programme in which it worked with the help of a mentor on business ideas. This makes it useful not only for other outlets in a similar situation but also for funders who may gain ideas about which approaches work best in the region.

“The idea is to have tailor-made content, but also to give tips, tricks and advice to all media that can implement it,” Lazic says.

The platform also offers free training, including e-learning courses covering a wide range of topics from safety to podcasting. Some courses are available in local languages as well. Additionally, webinars are organised through the platform.

With a monthly visitor count of around 8,000, Journalift has become a vital hub for media professionals. It stands out as a unique and indispensable resource, demonstrating that even after the conclusion of a project, certain elements can transcend their initial purpose and continue to shape the landscape they were created to serve.

Over the course of three decades, USAID has distributed funds in more than 40 countries. It spent US $130 million in 2022 to strengthen independent media. Olesia Gardner, USAID’s Civil Society and Media Advisor discusses challenges and partnerships, and highlights success stories, emphasising the need for dedication and local engagement in media development, as well as the vital role of media pluralism in upholding democratic values.

Why is it important for USAID to support the media?

Gardner: Media pluralism serves as a crucial tool for maintaining a robust media landscape and upholding democratic values. For over three decades, USAID has helped to fuel the growth of an independent media ecosystem across Europe and Eurasia. However, today the sector is facing unprecedented challenges to both a free press and to broader democratic progress: financial insecurity, technological change, eroding public trust, and threats from powerful political and business interests.

USAID support strengthens the competitiveness, credibility, capacity, and innovation of content creators, and equips journalists and media outlets, including investigative journalists, with the tools they need to confront these challenges. USAID programmes also foster demand for high-quality news and information and improve critical thinking skills among news consumers.

What kind of news organisations are eligible for support? In which countries does USAID fund media?

Gardner: USAID has been one of the world’s leading supporters of independent media for over three decades in over 40 countries. In the 2022 financial year alone, USAID spent approximately US$130 million to support media and the free flow of information. USAID’s comprehensive approach to supporting media systems globally focuses on supporting both the supply side, so content producers and distributors, and the demand side, audiences and the legal enabling environment.

Our programmes help support journalists to develop and grow their audiences, establish more sustainable sources of revenue, leverage digital tools and technology to broaden their audiences and strengthen engagement with them, and protect themselves from increasing digital, legal, psycho-social, and physical threats to their lives and livelihoods. USAID’s support seeks to strengthen journalistic professionalism, establish media management skills, and promote free and independent media. Among our partners are news publishers, investigative journalists, and media organisations.

Do you implement the programmes yourself, or do you involve other organisations? What is the advantage of your approach?

Gardner: At USAID, we achieve our mission by partnering with individuals and organisations around the world. Working together, we find innovative and cost-effective solutions to pressing global challenges. We have been experimenting and encouraging partnerships as these bring together various expertise, personalities, and resources to achieve the most impact. For example, the Central Europe Media programme is a partnership between Zinc Network and IREX. The Media Trends conference in Budapest [in December 2023] was a success due to partnership with the Center for Sustainable Media. In Bulgaria, we have organised two workshops for journalists in partnership with the Association of European Journalists (AEJ).

Thinking of media support programmes in Europe, what are the biggest challenges you have to face?

Gardner: The economic sustainability of media outlets continues to be a major challenge. The question arises how traditional and emerging media can maintain relevance and financial viability in this ever-evolving landscape where entertainment and information consumption patterns are rapidly changing. We operate in an environment where holding the powerful to account is increasingly difficult, and where state actors routinely interfere with the advertising market, starving independent media to favour those willing to toe the government line.

Through our media support programmes we aim to create space and opportunities for news organisations to access different experiences, tools and thinking. In Central Europe, for example, we conducted an audience research, which was presented broadly to independent media in five countries. The feedback we received showed that the research helped better understand the audiences and also the importance of data-driven technologies in reaching outside the audience bubble. The overwhelming response to the research also showed a big appetite among the journalism community to introduce surveys in their work.

What was the biggest success story among your projects?

Gardner: USAID has lots of success stories to share, but I will focus on the ones achieved by the Balkan Media Assistance programme (BMAP). USAID launched the first iteration of BMAP in September 2017 with the objective of enhancing the professionalism and sustainability of media in the Balkan region by working with renowned and promising news media outlets to improve their digital content quality, business processes, and collaboration. The success of BMAP, which closed in July 2022, led to the launch of a second iteration of the programme, entitled Balkan Media Assistance Programme to Foster Organisation Readiness While Advancing Resilient Development (BMAP Forward), which unfolded in February 2022.

BMAP was designed and implemented by 10 media outlets spanning Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia. The successes of the BMAP programmes have been multi-faceted and far-reaching. All of its key partners have seen marked increases in their programmatic advertising revenue, significantly boosting their financial sustainability. For example, Bosnia-based media outlet Oslobođenje saw an increase in monthly programmatic advertising revenue of 206 percent, going from $2,770 at the start of the programme to $5,680 by the end of the programme. Meanwhile, Vijesti, an outlet based in Montenegro, increased its advertising revenue by 1,300 percent going from US$1,100 in revenue per month to US$10,200. Media partners participating in BMAP also emerged with a more robust network and stronger relations with other media outlets.

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

Gardner: Media development is a fascinating area, but it also requires dedication, patience and financial commitment. Sound analysis of the media and its environment in a country is needed before planning a new media development intervention to map the media outlets and the operational environment, donors and what type of assistance they provide, to identify the gaps in technical assistance and funding.

Our experience has proven that local consultants are in most demand […] as they already understand the local context, speak the language, and most importantly because of trust. Finally, the media development programmes tend to be the most successful when guided by the principles of locally-led development where partners are involved in defining their own vision for success; whereas the donors remain flexible and attentive to the needs for the partners.

Miguel Castro, head of Global Media Partnerships at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, shares his thoughts about partnering with large, mainstream media organisations, what the foundation looks for in their partners, the biggest challenges when working with such outlets, and how they measure the success of their projects.

The Gates Foundation is one of the largest spenders on media partnerships among philanthropies. Why is this field so important for the Foundation?

Castro: I’m not really sure whether the foundation is among the largest philanthropic investors in media anymore, the data is always very difficult to crack. We are definitely a large funder, no question about it, but in the last few years there has been an increased investment by philanthropic organisations that have not been traditionally investing in the media space, and there is very little tracking about all of that. But we do have a significant portfolio.

Ever since 2011, when the Foundation decided to centralise its work with media organisations through grantmaking in this unit called the Global Media Partnerships, there have been a couple of elements that substantiate this strategy. One of them has to do with helping media organisations who care about global health, development, and gender equality.

We feel that, in a sense, there has been a market failure of really high quality journalism on these issues. It is assumed that it does not bring in large audiences, although these assumptions have been challenged over the years, and we felt, and we still feel that the overall share of journalism that touches the social issues that are important for underserved populations is very small. So we have always wanted to address that market failure, by subsidising good quality journalism with organisations that share the same values and objectives.

While many donors focus on supporting outlets in financial need, the Gates Foundation forged partnerships also with mainstream media organisations, such as The Guardian, Der Spiegel, El Pais, Financial Times, or Al Jazeera, among others. What is the idea behind these partnerships?

Castro: Whether the organisations we work with are for profit, or not for profit – that’s not the key question. The media organisations we work with should be mission driven. Their mission cannot only be financial return. Of course, that is a legitimate quest by any media organisation, and we want them to succeed and be sustainable, but it is not our priority.

We work with organisations that are driven by a mission that has to do with the role that we believe journalism plays in societies in being a service to society by informing its citizens. How is this impacting the development of communities across the world? That’s what matters to us. And we work with the most effective partners that we find, and often they are commercial organisations that have larger audiences. They’re more sophisticated in their approaches, have a greater understanding of engagement strategies, care about impact in the same way as we do. We have done a significant amount of partnerships with mission driven commercial organisations and in many cases, the very first relationship that they ever had with philanthropy organisations was with us.

Philanthropy is not the solution for the sustainability problems of media organisations. The media sector continues to struggle financially. We, philanthropies, at our best are at the forefront of the quests for social justice, even if it is just defining conversations, informing political debates. It doesn’t matter too much what type of organisation it is, for profit, or not for profit, if there is a mission alignment on what the role of journalism is.

What is the scope of these grants for mainstream media: do they focus on certain projects, reporting about certain topics, skill-building, maybe organisational development?

Castro: We call these relationships partnerships for a reason. They are never one thing only. There is this debate about core funding versus project based support, but I think it’s never one thing or the other. You can do core support and be project led, by providing a great deal of support for the necessary infrastructure. It is more about the design of the grants and how the funding is utilized.

So even though we do have grants and relationships that focus on sustainable development goals, or global health security, or gender equality, within that, there is always support for organizational development, there is always capacity building. Many grants pay for improving the capacity of an organization to understand their impact and their engagement and their audience, sometimes even developing products. On a few occasions we have actually provided catalytic start-up funding for the creation of an organisation.

It is always a result of smart design, and it is an important factor that we have long term commitments to our partners. Since 2018. all our grants are for three years or longer. In three years, even if it is project based funding, there is a lot of organizational development that happens.

What was the biggest success story among these partnerships with mainstream media, and in general, how do you deem a project successful?

Castro: There are a lot of success stories, I could go in many directions. In terms of impact, we have a pretty high ratio of satisfaction and success, because we invest a lot of time in due diligence at the beginning of the conversation to get to know our partners and for our partners to get to know us. Then the grantees have the capacity to do what they do best: journalism.

We track impact jointly with our grantees. We have done a lot of work with a lot of people and a lot of grantees, and have piloted a lot of things to get to a pretty solid framework to understand the performance of our partners and for the partners to understand how their journalism is achieving what they want to or not. Among other tools, we work with the American Press Institute, which has a tool called Metrics for News, which we subsidise for grantees for their media analytics.

We have regular conversations about how their journalism is doing, and its impact. And we learn from them how it is impacting their editorial approaches. I think impact should be an important question for every journalism organisation: understanding how your audiences consume your content, what they do with the knowledge that they acquire seems to me quite a fundamental question. So we have helped media organisations to do that in the most sophisticated way possible for quite a long time. And at the same time, it helped us to understand if we were using our resources in the most effective way.

If you had to mention one project as a flagship one, what would it be?

Castro: I was very happy with an unusual cooperation. In 2019, The Guardian, Spiegel, El Pais and Le Monde got together for a year-long series to examine the lives of refugees arriving to Western Europe. Migration was a really hard topic, and they came together with a project that included longform, multimedia, in-depth, amazing journalism from all four of them called The New Arrivals.

They shared resources, ideas, each of them produced a different output to their audiences in their own language. That was amazing to see. We facilitated it by providing funding, because at that time there was a lot of very domestically focused, highly political coverage and very little storytelling about what is happening to the individuals.

It was amazing for two reasons: for the quality of the journalism, for the storytelling, but also because these organizations demonstrated that they could work together. I think there should be a lot more like this, and it’s a shame that it’s 2024 and we do not see tens of projects like that.

What was the biggest challenge you encountered when working with these large organizations?

Castro: These organizations never had philanthropies on their radar. In Western Europe, and in the US. philanthropies are highly regulated. You are accountable to a strong regulatory environment for your tax status, etc. You develop these partnerships with editorial teams. But then it comes to a point when someone should develop  a proposal, and it stops being an editorial question. Someone in the building has to do that, to develop the administrative and accounting infrastructure. It is a struggle for media organizations because they are not used to it. So the first grant is always very hard. It is a bit of a cultural shift.

Also, if you are a journalist, you want to be fully, absolutely independent. There is always a healthy skepticism about funders. But as these partnerships evolve, you build trust, and then it becomes a normal and actually enriching relationship for everyone involved.

Do you have any advice for other funders?

Castro: One of the reasons why Journalism Funders Forum exists is to help foundations that are interested in working with journalism to do it in the most effective way. It can be incredibly effective. Stories are a commodity for both journalism and social organisations. Trust is a common currency. We want audiences and everyone to trust what we do, and we want to earn that trust by doing the right thing.

There are rules of the game, there are approaches that work, and approaches that work less. Journalism organizations that are new to philanthropy have to make an effort to understand what is at stake. And at the same time, philanthropic organisations that have been doing funding in other spaces for decades need to understand what is unique and what is different, and what are the rules of the game when working with media organizations. Ours are creative and editorial independence, the integrity of the journalism produced, and transparency from all parts involved.

And when that happens, it is beautiful. When journalism and philanthropies or civil society organisations with advocacy mandates come together, respecting the rules of the game of advocacy and philanthropy and policy and journalism, this is when everyone is most impactful and ultimately societies will benefit. So it is an invitation to organisations and the philanthropy space to consider journalism funding in the most mature and sophisticated way possible.

Philanthropic support for media and journalism has been growing in recent years and is seen as a way to strengthen democracy and civic engagement. However, there are still many challenges and opportunities for both funders and recipients of this support.

On 28 April Philea, in collaboration with GFMD, organised the 13th edition of “Philanthropy for Ukraine” sessions with a focus on journalism in the context of the war. During the session, four Ukrainian media experts shared their insights on the challenges and opportunities for international donors to support the media.

Ievgeniia Oliinyk, Program Director of the Media Development Foundation, shared about the MDF’s experience of collaborating with local media outlets by presenting the main findings of their new annual research on the state of local news outlets in Ukraine. The report shows that regional media have survived and resisted the war, despite the massive staff turnover, the constant threat of violence, the propaganda and misinformation, and the lack of resources. The MDF report also praises the role of regional journalists in documenting war crimes, debunking fake news, telling human stories, and helping Ukrainians stay sane and informed. It calls for more support and solidarity from the international community, the government, and civil society to protect and empower regional media as a vital pillar of democracy and peace. Ievgeniia also highlighted the importance of avoiding news deserts in Ukraine and providing additional support to the regions with such a tendency.

Discussing the state of the media at a national scale, Andrey Boborykin, Executive Director of Ukrainska Pravda, shared the newspaper’s experience. He noted that advertising spending across Ukraine has declined due to the economic crisis and the war, and this has forced Ukrainska Pravda to fundraise with the international donor community, which was not something that they were actively involved in before the war.

The media viability concept has to be rethought in the context of Ukraine, where media outlets face economic hardships and need to adapt to a changing and challenging environment, noted Olga Myrovych, the CEO of Lviv Media Forum. She argued that supporting the Ukrainian media is vital for the country’s recovery and justice and that the international community should recognize and amplify the voice of Ukrainian journalists and editors. Olga also addresses the issue of mental health among journalists in Ukraine, who have been exposed to trauma due to the ongoing war. In particular, Lviv Media Forum has offered psychological support to more than 150 media professionals to help them cope and restore their psychological resilience.

Continuing the discussion on the main issues that affect the media industry in Ukraine, Jakub Parusinski, Co-founder and Editor of The Fix Media, and CFO of The Kyiv Independent, highlighted that one of the main problems that media organizations in Ukraine encounter is the lack of qualified journalists, editors, project managers, sales managers and other media professionals. The current generation of journalists has suffered a significant attrition rate due to psychological breakdown, volunteering causes, frontline work, and the inability to work in the sector. This problem is exacerbated by a demographic problem in Ukraine, with only a quarter of a million graduates a year, down by half from over half a million in 2010. How can media organizations overcome this shortage? Jakub suggests that shared service centres could be a solution. He also argues that the media themselves should invest in training programs, work with universities, and create career development opportunities for their staff.

Another challenge that media organizations face is how to reintegrate veterans as content creators, audiences, and workers. Jakub Parusinski believes that media can play a vital role in helping veterans reintegrate into society. A third issue that media organisations have to deal with is how to connect with the millions of Ukrainians who had to flee abroad. Parusinski argues that the media has a significant responsibility to preserve Ukrainian culture and ties within Ukrainian communities and fight against Russia’s attempt to destroy it.

Based on their experience of being a recipient of media support, speakers shared their ideas and advice on how philanthropic or foundation support for media and journalism could be improved:

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