Journalism Grants Offered by the European Journalism Centre

Deadline: March 25th 2013
Open to: Journalists and relevant media outlets that target audiences in one or more of the eight European countries (France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom)
Grant: €8,000 – €20,000

Description

The Innovation in Development Reporting Grant Programme (IDR) is a media-funding project operated by the European Journalism Centre (EJC). The grant programme aims to advance creative reporting approaches, thus enabling a better coverage of international development issues. The grant intends to raise awareness about these issues by having a strong impact on media audiences in eight of the European countries with the highest net official development assistance: France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

Innovative reporting projects will be awarded considerable funding, with an aim to support journalists, editors, and development stakeholders to perform thorough research and to develop new, exciting, and even experimental reporting, employing state of the art presentation methods and techniques of journalistic storytelling.

Eligibility

• Journalists and relevant media outlets that target audiences in one or more of the eight European countries with the highest net official development assistance are eligible to apply: France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Media published in any of the official languages of the admissible countries may submit an application.
• Journalists and media outlets not based in the countries mentioned above, as well as freelancers, are ONLY eligible to apply as cooperation partners of admissible organisations. A “letter of commitment” for the story to be published or aired by an eligible media outlet will be required from all applicants, once they have been invited to submit a full-fledged proposal.
• State owned or directly government-controlled entities are NOT eligible for funding.
• All projects must provide in-depth information of relevance beyond the limitations of daily news cycles. The latter must be true even if the coverage appears on the occasion of specific news events such as summits or conferences.
• Projects are required to address by theme, style, and presentation the general public, or large audience segments, or must effectively leverage important multipliers. They may be one-off publications or entire series, which must be narrative, exploratory and explanatory in nature, and may be presented in a linear or non-linear fashion including text, graphics, images, animations, interactive elements, video, audio, or film. Projects aiming at cross-country cooperation and using multiple platforms are strongly encouraged to apply.

Fundings

• Applicants must apply for a minimum grant of €8,000. For your reference, we expect the average grant given to be about €20,000. A maximum of 25 to 30 grants will be made available in 2013.
• Applicants may apply for full or partial story funding.
• Full grants may cover direct expenses for journalistic research and study trips, including travel and accommodation, possible technical costs for equipment or crew, information procurement costs (such as access to professional databases or original data gathering efforts), graphics design and visualisation, adaptation of software, and other justified costs incurred directly for the implementation of the project.
• Alternatively, partial grants can be made available to top up existing reporting budgets.
• The grant programme does NOT fund: salaries of permanent staff; indirect costs (overheads);expenses for the compilation and processing of data collections which are not eventually released into the public domain; purchases of equipment, machines, real-estate, general-purpose software licenses; bribes or otherwise unethical, illegal and undocumented expenses; activities violating the privacy of individuals; political campaigns or lobbying activities.

How to apply

You can apply by filling the online application form here. Deadline for applications is March 25th 2013. 

For more information visit the official website or go directly to the FAQs section.