As part of the NewsSpectrum fellowships programme, IPI is publishing “A Media Call to the Future”, a needs assessment of minority- and regional-language media in digital transition in Europe.

Minority- and regional-language media have long been central to the media ecosystem, particularly across the diverse linguistic landscape of Europe and the European Union. They bring a unique offering to their community, positioning them well to adapt to the opportunities of the digital transition, including the pivot to reader revenues.

They also face specific challenges in this adaptation process as media platforms increasingly globalize, traditional audiences age, and news consumption habits shift.

As part of the digital transition, minority- and regional-language are confronted with changes in audience demands and business models as well as distribution challenges. The result? It’s driving a rethink about everything about themselves from their audiences and the journalism that best suits their needs through to the products they use and the distribution tools that best find their communities where they are. This demands specific attention and support to ensure minority-language media can grasp the opportunities of the moment.

This new needs assessment seeks to identify the needs of minority-language media with a particular focus on Europe and the European Union. It has been prepared by the International Press Institute (IPI), a global network of journalists, editors, and publishers, in collaboration with the European Association of Daily Newspapers in Minority and Regional Languages (MIDAS). It is based on eight deep interviews with minority-media news leaders and media thinkers and five written survey responses.

At the core of the challenge is: how do minority- and regional-language media in Europe transition from a one-way source of news TO their communities in an information-constrained environment into multi-directional voices OF and FOR their communities in a time of information abundance and in a way that will shore up their sustainability?