The European Commission has selected three cross-border media consortia to receive a combined €7.4 million in grants to report on European Union affairs over the next two years, in what Brussels is describing as a significant expansion of its effort to build a shared European public sphere.
By Creatives Unite Newsroom
The awards, announced on 1 April 2026 and drawn from the Commission's Multimedia Actions budget line, follow an open call for proposals published in July 2025. Each of the three projects will operate as a so-called European Media Hub — a pan-continental editorial network pooling journalists from multiple countries and languages — and each carries a formal guarantee of full editorial independence from Brussels.
The first consortium, Project BEAM, is coordinated by Arte, the Franco-German public broadcaster. Gand will produce a mixed portfolio of audiovisual documentaries and long-form articles on EU-level developments. Its partners include Internazionale, the Italian current affairs weekly, and Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's leading liberal daily.
The second project, PULSE 2, is co-ordinated by the Centro per la Cooperazione Internazionale / Osservatorio Balcani Caucaso Transeuropa (OBC Transeuropa), an Italian think tank and media organisation with longstanding expertise in eastern European affairs. It will focus on investigative and analytical cross-border journalism conducted largely online, with participating newsrooms including HVG of Hungary and HotNews of Romania among its confirmed partners.
The third consortium, Lens EU, is co-ordinated by OKO.press, the Polish investigative outlet, and will deliver weekly podcasts and in-depth newsletters aimed at making EU policy accessible to diverse audiences across the continent. Its confirmed members include Agence France-Presse (AFP), the French news agency, and TVNET, the Latvian digital broadcaster.
The grants, co-financed at a rate of up to 95 per cent of eligible costs, will run for approximately 24 months. The Commission specifies that consortia must bring together a minimum of five organisations from five different countries — EU member states, candidates, or potential candidates — ensuring the hubs are genuinely multilateral in character.
The Multimedia Actions programme, which funds this strand of work, has been allocated a total of €21.1 million for its broader 2026 activities, encompassing support for media pluralism, audio journalism and digital reporting across the bloc. The European Media Hubs call accounts for the largest single component.
The Commission said the objective was to strengthen independent, multilingual coverage of EU institutions and their effect on citizens' daily lives — an ambition that reflects growing anxiety in Brussels about the fragmentation of European media markets and the retreat of pan-continental public interest journalism. Find the full documentation on the call, including the 2025 financing decision and the funding opportunities overview, is available on the Commission's digital strategy portal.
