Funding Open to Engage Your Audience: Calling Media Outlets in the Balkans and Visegrad Countries

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Media outlets from 10 Balkan and Visegrad countries are invited to apply for grants, training, mentoring, and access to BIRN’s innovative audience-engagement digital tool.

Photo: BIRN

The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) is calling on media outlets to involve their audiences in reporting by applying for Audience-Engaged Journalism Grants.

This innovative approach places the audience as a direct and active participant in content creation, fostering trust and stronger relationships between media outlets and their communities, ultimately making them more credible and reliable sources of information.

Do you want to engage your audience and build trust within your community while addressing underreported issues? Submit your original story proposal and share details about the community you wish to engage.

Who is eligible to apply?

Media outlets from the following 10 Balkan and Visegrad countries may apply: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Czech Republic, Poland, Serbia and Slovakia.

What are we offering?

  1. Grants for individual stories of up to €4,000.
  2. Grants for cross-border stories of up to €8,000.
  3. Four-day online training on audience engagement.
  4. Mentoring throughout the project.
  5. Access to a digital tool to enhance audience engagement.

In this circle BIRN will fund up to nine media outlets to strengthen their reporting and investigate underreported issues within diverse communities. Stories focusing on marginalized communities, youth and women are strongly encouraged.

Media outlets will utilise the audience-engagement tool developed by BIRN to crowdsource, gather and analyse data from their communities. Audience-engaged journalism seeks to bridge the gap between newsrooms and their audiences, transforming journalism into a service that directly responds to the needs of the community.

About the project

The Audience-Engaged Journalism Grants are part of the project Media Innovation Europe: Independence Through Sustainability (MIE). This two-year initiative is led by the International Press Institute (IPI) and its consortium partners, The Fix Foundation, BIRN and Thomson Media (TM). The project focuses on building networks, providing consultancy and offering guidance to participating newsrooms.

The first edition of Media Innovation Europe was launched in June 2022 to invigorate the European ecosystem for independent and local journalism. As part of this initiative, media outlets produced a range of audience-engaged stories, some of which you can read here:

  1. Image-based sexual abuse in Kosovo
  2. Mapping illegal landfills in the Balkans
  3. Secret hospital registers in Hungary
  4. Transgender and non-binary Serbs document job discrimination

How to apply?

To learn more about the grants, click HERE to read the full call for applications. After reviewing the information, follow the link to access the application form.

BIRN will also organise two information sessions, and registration is open:

  • Information session: 3 October 2024 at 9:00 (CET), register HERE.
  • Information session: 4 November 2024 at 14:00 (CET), register HERE.

Deadline for application is 27 NOVEMBER 2024.

For further updates, follow BIRN on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

For clarifications, contact the Project Coordinator: [email protected].