5️⃣ Coordination of Support
Improve co-ordination of support to the media and information environment.
In brief — Principle 5: Coordination of Support
Fragmented media support waste resources and undermines independent journalism — better coordination is essential for impact.
Streamlined frameworks across EU institutions, donors, and Member States can cut duplication, ease reporting, and build trust.
Effective coordination turns oversight into coherence — strengthening credibility, independence, and efficiency in media aid.
"Sometimes a brilliant idea has already been done by someone else 18 months ago… so having a more formal, regular exchange between European donors would be useful.”
- European Commission employee
Why it matters
Effective coordination is the backbone of meaningful media support. When donors, EU institutions, and implementing partners work in silos, valuable resources are lost to duplication, overlapping procedures, and conflicting requirements. Independent media, which must answer first to their audiences, staff, and ethical standards, are often the ones paying the price, diverting scarce time and energy from journalism toward administrative survival.
Better coordination ensures that funding reaches those who need it most, that reporting and compliance are streamlined, and that evidence, learning, and accountability are shared across the system. In a sector defined by limited resources and high risk, coordination is not bureaucracy — it is a safeguard for independence, credibility, and efficiency.
🏛️ Political Level (European Parliament & Council)
At the political level, the European Parliament and the Council have a unique opportunity to set expectations for coordination across the EU’s democracy, media, and external-action policies. Parliamentary committees and Council working parties can align budget negotiations, oversight, and legislative initiatives to avoid fragmentation between funding lines such as Creative Europe, Global Europe, and the upcoming Democracy Shield.
Yet, the need to demonstrate visibility and accountability for public spending can unintentionally add new layers of reporting, earmarking, and thematic initiatives, which increase the workload for both the Commission and beneficiaries. By promoting joint monitoring frameworks, pooled-funding mechanisms, and cross-institutional reviews, the political level can turn oversight from a compliance exercise into a driver of coherence.
In practice: adopting Council Conclusions and EP resolutions that call for shared donor frameworks, proportional eligibility thresholds, and systematic publication of coordination outcomes would help ensure that additional funding translates into genuine impact rather than administrative churn.
🇪🇺 European Commission (DGs & Secretariat-General)
Within the European Commission, coordination requires both horizontal and vertical integration. Different DGs — CONNECT, JUST, INTPA, NEAR/ENEST, MENA — each manage specialised instruments with their own cycles, partners, and evaluation systems. While this diversity brings expertise, it can also result in parallel calls, redundant due-diligence checks, and incompatible reporting templates.
The Secretariat-General can play a central role by promoting harmonised templates, pooled audits, and shared MEL (Monitoring, Evaluation & Learning) frameworks across DGs. Several interviewees stressed that inconsistent procedures force even well-established media organisations to maintain multiple compliance systems at once — a drain on both capacity and trust.
Building joint pipelines, synchronising calendars of calls, and introducing burden caps (limiting the share of staff time spent on administration) would immediately reduce duplication. Embedding coordination into the Commission’s Better Regulation agenda and inter-service taskforces would also ensure that media support aligns with digital, competition, and rule-of-law priorities.
External Action (EEAS, DG INTPA, DG ENEST/NEAR, DG MENA, EU Delegations)
For EEAS and external-action DGs, coordination determines credibility on the ground. Delegations are responsible for implementing Brussels-funded programmes while managing their own local calls and partnerships. Limited staff and differing visibility requirements often make it difficult to align objectives or exchange information with other donors.
Interviewees across regions described an environment where multiple donors fund similar activities in the same country, each with different reporting formats, languages, and visibility demands. Local media partners struggle to reconcile these expectations. Strengthening donor-coordination huddles, shared databases of ongoing projects, and joint assessments can significantly reduce waste and risk.
Good practice includes pooled-funding windows where EU Delegations, Member States, and other partners co-finance shared objectives under a single reporting framework. Delegations should also maintain coordination logs, documenting overlaps, joint initiatives, and lessons learned, feeding this intelligence back into Brussels programming.
Ultimately, coordination at field level allows EU external action to speak with one voice — while still respecting the diversity and autonomy of local media ecosystems.
🌐 Member States and Cultural Institutes
Member State embassies and cultural institutes — such as Goethe-Institut, Institut Français, Cervantes, and the British Council — bring valuable networks, trust, and flexible small-grant capacity. Yet, when bilateral projects operate without coordination with EU Delegations, they can unintentionally duplicate efforts, compete for visibility, or overwhelm the same partners with parallel procedures.
By co-funding EU-managed pooled mechanisms and establishing local donor compacts or memoranda of understanding, Member States can ensure that national initiatives strengthen rather than fragment the wider ecosystem. Cultural institutes, in particular, can act as neutral conveners, hosting safe spaces for peer exchange among journalists, civil society, and donors. To avoid the perception of politicisation, visibility and branding decisions should be coordinated with Delegations, with flexibility where safety or independence is at stake.
Last updated
Was this helpful?