Come together – Strengthening community media in Europe

ended

Community media organizations have a vital role to play in building a more truthful and trusted media landscape across Europe. This role is recognized in leading research, as well as in numerous official documents of the European Commission. However, changes in the media field as well as social crises in the last 15 years have significantly weakened community media organizations and made it harder for them to operate in a sustainable way. In response to the widespread reduction of public funding, community media organizations have needed to experiment with new funding and audience development models. With this project we will create this space. Come Together is based on partnership and peer-to-peer learning between individuals within community media organizations located in six countries. In order to find new sustainability models, rather than developing new knowledge per se, we will bring existing knowledge from within these organisations to the surface to create new possibilities. We therefore will create a community of practice who through cooperation, exchange and work in partnership towards our main objective to permanently strengthen community media organisations by improving their business models, developing their audiences and exploring new ways of disseminating content. We want to achieve this through five specific objectives: (1) developing better revenue models, raising the financial sustainability and resilience of all organisations involved; (2) sharing the good practices and know-how between partners regarding the financial models and audience and community development; (3) establishing a joint education programs for young and aspiring journalists from communities we serve; (4) sharing the lessons and findings of this project with all stakeholders with special focus on other community media in Europe and (5) raising the visibility of community media content among news readers across the EU with already established dissemination tools of partners.