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Whether grant money, especially public money has any business propping up journalism used to be a hotly contested question. But as the business model kept coming apart and newsrooms had to, ahem, consolidate, a lot of this debate kind of resolved itself.
In the US, grants come mostly from philanthropy, but Europe doesn’t have American philanthropy (or the American theory of society that produces it), so a large part of what private foundations do there, the public sector does here. There are private funders, philanthropies, and impact investors in Europe too and they are doing very important work, but if you run a European newsroom and want serious institutional money, sooner or later you end up at the European Commission.
But even if you think taking European money is fine, accessing it may still be a big problem. EU fundin…