DISCLAIMER: This edition is mostly an advertisement for a tool we built, something we’d like you to pay for, so, you know, read accordingly. (And purchase the tool!)
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 funding is highly technical, it rewards organisations that already understand the ecosystem, already sit inside consortia, already have the grant writers and the size. Often the same names win, year after year, which can be kind of annoying, especially if it’s not you. This was part of why we started the advocacy work: to make the next budget and the funding programs within it less restrictive by design. If policy is one way to lower the barrier, then the tool we are building is hopefully another.
Vibecoding for European media funding
For veteran readers this may come as something of a shock, but we work with EU funding even more than we write about it, and we write about it a lot.
We apply for it, we help our clients apply for it, we implement EU-funded projects and help others to do so. We work with funders on how to best deploy resources and, occasionally, advise European institutions on how funding programmes might work better.
Over the years this produced a patchwork of internal tools, and in 2024, for the advocacy work, a proper database of how much the EU had spent on journalism, media and the information ecosystem since 2014. That turned out to be as useful for client work and our own proposals as it was for lobbying.
Then coding tools became ambient, everyone started announcing the death of software-as-a-service, and we thought: if anyone can build software now, so can we. In May we set out to rebuild the database automatically, with a long-time friend of mine, Peter Raci, an AI data engineer at a very large software company, whom I talked into moonlighting. A closed beta went to the CSM Partnership Program in July and today we are announcing it for everyone.
EU Media Funding Explorer 0.1.1.1.0.a.1
After all this introduction, it might be a little anti-climactic, but the EU Media Funding Explorer catalogues roughly 800 EU-funded projects touching journalism, media and the wider information ecosystem from 2014 to 2026: 1,800 organisations, €900+ million in funding.
It is built on three official sources, the Financial Transparency System, the Funding & Tenders Portal and CORDIS. (One caveat up front: we consider the data complete through 2024, but none of the three sources update in real time, so for 2025 and especially 2026 there is some lag: there are projects we know about that aren’t in it yet.)
All of these databases are freely available for everyone, though they are not always the most user friendly. What we think is the added value, and what we are trying to sell you on is what we created on top, with decades of experience in EU funded projects: cleaning, reconciling and connecting the datasets, showing the relevant datapoints, identifying patterns and surfacing relationships the official databases do not contain.
Who applies with whom? What does a realistic project look like on a given stream? How much more does a coordinator take than a partner? Is a stream open or essentially sewn up?
Stream Explorer: what does applying here actually look like?
Pick a stream (Creative Europe, Horizon, CERV, the international instruments, and so on) and see the median project, the middle 50 per cent, the top 5 per cent threshold, the usual consortium size, and what leading is worth relative to joining. Journalism Partnerships opens every ~October. This is where you find out whether your ask is realistic before you write 50 pages.
Geography: who is winning in my country?
Funding by region, then by country, then the ranked list of organisations in each. The number one in Hungary is an organisation I had a leadership role in for a while; I’d like to think the two facts are related.
Players: how closed is the field?
On Creative Europe, the top ten recipients take 44 per cent of all funding. Worth knowing before you apply: it tells you whether a stream has room for newcomers, or whether your best bet is trying to become a partner to an incumbent. Concentration curve, top-10/25/50/100 shares, full leaderboard, filterable by year, region and stream.
Keywords: what does the Commission think it’s paying for?
Most projects in the source data had no themes attached, so we reconstructed them: Claude Fable (We spared no tokens!) read each project’s material against a hand-tagged example set, and we checked the results. The heatmap shows which topics got money, year by year.
Network: who runs with whom?
Every dot is an organisation, every line a shared project. Dot size is funding, a ring means they’ve led at least once, arrows point from partner to lead. Pick an organisation and the graph rearranges itself around its co-applicants. (This is the view I’m proudest of, and I’ll admit a disproportionate share of the last four months went into the animations. I can now lose five minutes dragging nodes around for no professional reason.)
Project Finder: has someone already done this?
Free-text search across every project, with filters for stream, region, country, keyword, year, consortium size and funding band. Everything opens into a detail sheet: what the project did, who was in it, who led, how the money split (flagged wherever the Commission published no breakdown and we divided it evenly), and a link to the portal page where one exists. Click any organisation for its full record: projects, streams, smallest and largest ticket, usual partners, years active.
What’s next
We are still in beta, but have a roadmap running to next May in multiple stages. Up next: open calls with excerpts, matched to the previous calls they resemble, then a partner recommendation engine, then a budgeting module.
What it costs
The Explorer is part of the CSM Partnership Program, which now costs €999 a year. That gets you twelve months of the tool and every update to it, plus a monthly one-on-one slot with me or a colleague on whatever you’re working on: funding, revenue, product, investment. We think the tool alone stands in for a few years of accumulated grant experience; the consultations, I’m told, are also worth having. Around 30 organisations are in already.
If you’re a small organisation, a local non-profit or an individual creator, write to us and we’ll find a discounted rate. If you’re a large organisation and Substack’s payment processing defeats your finance department, as it usually does, we’ll draw up a contract and you can wire the money. If you’re merely curious, there’s a guest view: one aggregated overview, everything else locked, but it should be enough to get a sense of the thing.
(Questions, comments, words of appreciation → partnership@sustainablemedia.eu)
We’ll raise the price again in three or four months, once the next stage ships, so from that perspective, you could consider the current price a discount. Our ambition, obviously, is that using the tool and the Partnership Program should be worth a lot more than the €999 it costs.
Anyway, here we are, at version 0.1.1.1.0.a.1. We think it’s good, but of course we would say that.