European Journalism Centre, News Integrity Initiative and Civil join forces in support of people-powered newsrooms

Today, the European Journalism Centre launches its “Engaged Journalism Accelerator,” an initiative that will provide grants, coaching, and peer-to-peer learning for community-centered newsrooms across Europe.

The News Integrity Initiative is supporting the Engaged Journalism Accelerator with a 2-year, $1.5 million grant (which we announced last fall). Civil, a decentralized marketplace for sustainable journalism, is providing additional funding as well as optional access to Civil technology and mentoring support.

EJC poured months of careful research and listening into designing the Accelerator, to understand the specific, ongoing needs of European newsrooms. Notably, they learned that most promising models for sustainability are the ones which have “community engagement at the centre of their ownership, reporting, distribution, impact and revenue.”

As a result, the Accelerator will boost 10–15 of these promising, public-focused newsrooms with grants and comprehensive coaching and evaluation, while also bringing innovative community engagement strategies, business development support, and peer-to-peer learning to the wider news ecosystem EJC serves. (See EJC’s announcement for the full Accelerator details.)

Catalyzing news and information projects and organizations that help the public feel powerful is what we do. These are some of the activities and outcomes we hope to accomplish with this grant:

• continue to deepen our understanding of the challenges that community-focused newsrooms face, and the solutions they are testing;
• document and share successful community engagement activities so that they may spread far and wide;
• support risk taking;
• continue to demonstrate the connection between community engagement, trust and revenue;
• strengthen the European Journalism Centre and its ability to provide ongoing capacity-building support to newsrooms across Europe; and
• build a coalition of existing and new funders to support community-centered journalism.

If you are interested in following along with EJC and the Engaged Journalism Accelerator, you can sign up for one of their newsletters and read more about their work here:

If you’re curious to learn more about Civil, they have a newsletter as well.

And all this year, the News Integrity Initiative is celebrating innovative, community-focused journalism (case studies, toolkits, provocative interviews and more) on our Year of Listening website.

The News Integrity Initiative is a philanthropic fund and a global coalition of newsrooms, nonprofits, technologists, and academics to foster mutually trusting relationships between journalists and the communities they serve, while also tackling the spread of disinformation, and nurturing respectful and inclusive civic dialogue. NII is a project of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

For more information, please visit: www.newsintegrity.com.