How much media funding is enough?

Today: €715 million in historical EU media spending, why budget negotiations are heating up, two papers that reframe the funding debate, and your chance to weigh in on policy priorities.

I was always fascinated by mountains.

I grew up and spent most of my life in downtown Budapest. Our 3rd floor balcony had glorious geraniums and on a clear, sunny day I could see all the way over to the balcony on the opposite side of the street to admire their geraniums, a good 12 meters away. I was always a city kid, nobody ever called me the Bear Grylls of Újlipótváros (the residential part of town where we lived). A moth flying too close to me still induces considerable anxiety. But despite (or perhaps because of) all this, I always liked mountains.

After spending time in the Julian Alps, I annoyed the hell out of people around me with my grand theory about the relationship between the natural environment and human psychology. My thesis: living in the city makes you self-absorbed, while living near some grand wonder of nature gives you perspective, a sense of scale, and inevitably forces you to confront your own insignificance. Most people listened impatiently, then told me I needed to spend more time on a mountain, preferably far away from them.

Working around the 2028-34 EU budget gives me a similar feeling of vertigo, though thankfully without being exposed to wildlife.

Talking to an enthusiastic medium-sized publisher about their newsletter strategy before lunch, then having an afternoon meeting about whether €1.6 billion over seven years would be enough for the EU’s media sector, it’s quite a humbling whiplash. Product development can be exciting and complex, but trying to add anything meaningful to debates about topline EU allocations requires a completely different sense of scale and perspective.

Today we’re diving into several interconnected pieces of this massive puzzle: our new research revealing €715 million in EU media spending between 2014-2023, the current state of budget negotiations where things are heating up around AgoraEU, two important papers arguing for treating media as essential infrastructure, and a new survey we’re launching to map stakeholder priorities for the information space.

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If you are new to the EU budget negotiation process, start here:

• We need to change the way journalism is funded in Europe

• How to persuade the EU to spend hundreds of millions on journalism no one seems to care about?

• The Motion, the Myth, the Multiannual Framework

• The new EU budget promises a big boost for journalism. It’s probably too good to be true.

• An in-depth look at the most important media funding programs proposed in the new EU budget

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€715 million: A decade of EU media investment