Guide for Members of the Media Project Evaluation Committees

The guide is created at a moment when journalism and media associations, which have been monitoring and criticizing the co-financing process of media content in the public interest for years, are almost completely excluded from the decision-making process.

Their place in the committees is increasingly being taken by experts proposed by newly established organizations or those close to the current authorities, whose biographies have received the highest ratings in the administrative process.

Therefore, in preparing this guide, we envisioned the ideal committee member: someone with unquestionable professional references and integrity, who understands the law, is familiar with the media landscape, and who — regardless of the circumstances — comes to defend the citizens' right to access accurate and timely information relevant to their lives and communities.

This guide does not start merely from an analysis of project documentation — it begins with the question of what kind of information the citizens of this country deserve and how the committee can contribute to ensuring that public money truly serves that purpose.

Pluralism is not a matter of the number of media outlets. If everyone reports on the same topics, from the same sources, for the same audience — a multitude of titles does not mean diversity of information.

Public money plays a role here. Project co-financing exists, among other reasons, to fill the gaps that the market does not cover: topics that require time and resources, audiences that are rarely addressed, perspectives that seldom have a voice in the public space. Every project you evaluate could be — or not be — that contribution.

We see project co-financing of media content as one of the key instruments to support media pluralism.

You can download the guide at this link.

The manual was created as part of the project of the Association of Independent Electronic Media "Participatory Monitoring of the Implementation of the Project Co-Financing Process," which is supported by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs through the MATRA program. ANEM is solely responsible for the content of the analysis, which does not necessarily reflect the official views of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.