Financing: you cannot do it alone

Section ID Primary
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BACK TO LOCAL MEDIA

 

 

“It must therefore also be clarified whether the aim of media funding is to lead publishing houses to sustainable, self-supporting financing, or whether we as a society want to afford and support journalism that is oriented towards the common good – similar to agriculture or cultural funding.”
  • (Grubenmann & Weber, 2022, p. 29, translated from German)
This last point is less a recommendation than an observation. In the longer term, Swiss-wide local journalism that serves a diverse audience is not possible without some kind of state intervention. The state is needed in two areas: Promotion and regulation.

  • State funding: Local media should be supported more broadly – not just via start-up funding that expires after two years, but rather a form of sustainable support that promotes local journalism that is necessary and useful in terms of democratic theory. Such support can also be innovative, for example following the example of the UK, where the BBC directly supports a local journalist to cover local politics. This concept could also be adapted to state funding. It would also be conceivable to establish a local journalist project based on the model of the Federal Agency for Civic Education (Germany). This would actively help local media professionals to network (through events or the published magazine on local journalism, Drehscheibe). Some other specific support measures have already been described by Kaufmann et. al. (2019) proposed: initiatives and projects (e.g. public tenders for funding programs, individual projects, etc.), training and further education, exchange and cooperation, infrastructure (hardware, software, etc.), scouting (market observation at home and abroad) (Kaufmann et al. 2019, p. 5-6). An initial initiative in this area is currently being carried out by the Mercator Foundation under the title ‘Cooperation instead of consternation’. See the Mercator Foundation [5]

    [5] www.stiftung-mercator.ch/journal/kooperation-statt-konsternation

  • Regulation: The state must define clear rules for local communication so that the local administration and local media know what content is within their remit (regulation of the content of official communications). Otherwise, local administrative communication will continue to professionalize by producing ever more extensive content (information offerings), even including content from the Keystone-SDA news agency. This is possible in many cantons, as it has so far fallen into a legally diffused area. However, this carries the risk of further weakening local journalism and potentially independent reporting. With the disappearance of local media and the simultaneous strengthening of local administrative communication with its own media-like products, the fourth estate of democracy will be continuously weakened and will de facto disappear in the medium term. A democracy cannot function if, on the one hand, the administration increasingly stages itself in the media and, on the other hand, simultaneously assumes the function of the controlling authority and gives the appearance of neutral reporting.
  • The cantons should therefore review their regulations for municipal and administrative communication and limit the possibilities for editorial contributions from municipalities to the municipalities’ statutory information contribution. The canton of Bern, for example, has corresponding regulations ((Justiz-, Gemeinde- und Kirchendirektion des Kantons Bern, 2010) or Germany. There, the (German) Federal Supreme Court has ruled that municipal publications must be limited to factual information and must not provide “press-like reporting on social life in the municipality” in order to functionally distinguish themselves from journalistic media (Bundesgerichtshof, 2018).

 

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