Society

Sul Informação receives support from Journalism Fund Europe to combat “news deserts”

By • December 19, 2023 - 14:51

In total, only 25 projects were financed at European level

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O Sul Informação will receive funding of 23 thousand euros from Local Media for Democracy project (LM4D), to develop a new interaction tool with readers, to be launched in 2024.

The funding, which will be allocated under this program co-financed by the European Union, will allow our newspaper create a tool of direct contact between the public and the newsroom, which allows the sharing of news information and the verification of facts, thus combating misinformation and fake news.

The project "Got News for Us” also aims to combat the news deserts that exist in the region, by creating a line of contact between the populations of municipalities in the Algarve that have less news coverage, due to the absence of social media or poor news coverage in their territories.

In total, the fund will distribute around 600 thousand euros to 25 projects presented by newspapers and media teams. freelancers from 25 European countries and guarantee mentoring, with the aim of «increasing its reach and strengthening its financing models, in order to better serve its communities», according to the fund's promoters.

«[These] projects (…) will contribute to the development of the media and democracy. This is a difficult time of change for regional media, as the way of reaching the public, as well as the principles of creating and distributing content, are changing significantly”, said one of the initiative's juries, whose winners were revealed this Monday, December 18th, in a statement from the organizing entity.

The jury that evaluated the applications chose projects “that develop their activity in so-called information deserts and specific local communities, with the aim of revitalizing local media”.

To do this, the members of the jury, whose identity is anonymous, were based on an unprecedented comparative study on information deserts in the European Union, carried out by the Center for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom (CMPF), the final version of which will be published next year.

Besides the Sul Informação, there are two more Portuguese regional newspapers that will receive support from this fund, the 7Margins, based in Lisbon, but with a project «to serve the community of Trás-os-Montes: 7Montes,» and the Cistercian region, a local publication from Alcobaça, Nazaré and Porto de Mós.

The remaining projects were presented by media outlets from Poland (6), Romania (3), the Czech Republic (3), France (2), Slovenia (2), Lithuania (1), Spain (1 ), Greece (1), Latvia (1), Bulgaria (1) and Slovakia (1).

In total, 104 media outlets and 41 teams of journalists from 22 European countries applied for this funding.

O Local Media for Democracy is an 18-month project co-financed by the European Union and launched by a consortium of partners: the Journalismfund Europe, the Center for Media Pluralism and Freedom (CMPF), International Media Support (IMS), and the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ). To date, the LM4D project has supported a total of 42 media outlets and/or groups of journalists with more than one million euros.

 

All winners and links to projects:

Freelancer teams

  • Czaban Robi Raban (Piotr Czaban & Małgorzata Rycharska) – Poland
  • Ferrol360 (Alicia Seoane & Marta Corral) – Spain
  • I live (Brigita Sabaliauskaitė, Jurgita Naglienė & Daiva Bartkienė) – Lithuania
  • Okraj (Klára Filipová, Simona Janíková & Jan Žabka) – Czechia

 

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