Media support in Ukraine: Donors should focus on helping capable outlets

Editor’s note: this article is published as part of The Fix’s partnership with X LMF. Held annually in Lviv (Ukraine) by NGO “Lviv Media Forum”, LMF has been the biggest media conference in Central and Eastern Europe since 2013. 

The research team of NGO Lviv Media Forum surveyed several dozen donor organisations and over sixty media outlets for the study “The Donor Landscape of Media Support in Ukraine.” This is the first attempt to analyse trends in donor support for Ukrainian media. We found out how this support is structured, how dependent the media are on grants, and what both the media and donors expect from each other. Both sides need to communicate more and consider each other’s priorities, but the most important thing is to stop using grants as a life-support system for media outlets that lack other revenue streams and aren’t willing to put in the effort to change.

The all-out war with daily rocket missile attacks and artillery shelling. Economic crisis, a massive drop in revenue. Loss of content distribution networks. Huge outflow of staff and loss of audience due to internal displacement and emigration. Change in audience behaviour towards social media and messengers. During Russia’s full-scale invasion, all these challenges combined should have decimated the Ukrainian media market, which wasn’t very healthy or viable to begin with. This didn’t happen – of the roughly five thousand media outlets in Ukraine at the beginning of 2022, only two hundred closed (while dozens of new ones were founded). This is the result of increased financial support from international foundations and foreign governments, initially aimed at saving the media. But this trend is changing.

As of early 2024, over a hundred donor institutions – from major international organisations like Internews and the National Endowment for Democracy to relatively small humanitarian foundations or initiatives – were providing material support to Ukrainian media. For donors, helping the media is a tool to strengthen social institutions, promote democratic values, and counter vices like corruption and disinformation. So often, the only way for media outlets to get a grant is to declare goals that align with the donors’ priorities. In practice, for many Ukrainian outlets, the real main goal is to get money because they have no other income sources during the war. Half of the surveyed media are more than 50% dependent on grants, and over a third are more than 75% dependent. Notably, the media primarily seek institutional support, meaning funds they can use at their discretion. Project-based support, where money is given for specific purposes – content production, events, covering certain topics – is uncomfortable for them.

The danger of this situation is not only that the volume of support will eventually decrease and there won’t be enough money for everyone. By acting as a “life-support system” for hundreds of sites, newspapers, TV and radio stations, donors have inadvertently preserved and spread widespread ailments: poor-quality content, outdated formats, unwillingness to use online tools and other modernisation methods. Instead of the “change if you want to live” principle, which could have eventually healed the media market, the “get a grant if you want to live” principle took over. Especially since some foundations in the first year of the all-out war were literally handing out money to anyone who needed help.

Now donors are becoming more demanding. Their typical requirements for grant recipients are to be “high-quality,” “independent,” have a high level of project and financial management, report promptly, and demonstrate social impact. Impact proof is usually based on reach data; “quality” is assessed by experts engaged by donors, and less often by special monitoring organisations; regarding “independence,” donors often take the publisher’s word for it. Meeting other requirements is a serious challenge for the media.

Before the big war, a significant part of Ukrainian media existed as “creative teams” and did not try to develop as businesses. Editorial, operational, and financial management in such teams was typically concentrated in one person. They were used to getting most of their income from one source – advertising, content sales, subsidies from the owner, or the local budget. On an overcrowded and poor market, they had few growth opportunities.

For some media teams, the transition to grant funding became a powerful impetus for change and development. They took advantage of grant programs to learn new approaches and content formats; expand their teams by bringing in project managers and fundraisers; update their online platforms; research their audience and create or develop a community (club) of readers. Although becoming self-sustaining, let alone profitable, is almost impossible under current conditions, these media aim to diversify their revenue streams and build a financial model that will give them a chance for stable growth in the future. Every fourth outlet we surveyed said they would like to reduce the share of grants in their revenue structure, returning to more natural ways for media to earn money. They might be able to do this when the war ends and the Ukrainian economy starts to recover.

But even now, these media can offer donors not just project execution but full-fledged partnerships to achieve common goals. These media have a chance to become leaders in their regions or niches, the most important communicators for local communities, and save parts of the country from becoming news deserts. They often develop simultaneously as civil society structures, taking on functions of government oversight, anti-corruption, countering disinformation, and public monitoring of recovery processes. They consistently cover complex and sensitive but socially important issues: veteran and IDP adaptation, mobilisation and demobilisation, reforms, and the implementation of democratic standards in the society. In our opinion, such media are the ones most deserving of a ticket to the “ark” that will take them to the new, post-war Ukrainian media market.

The donor community should focus on supporting capable, motivated teams ready for change, focused on development and growth. And refuse to take on the “ark” passive, technologically outdated, low-quality media focused solely on survival and maintaining the status quo. Supporting capable players will give the Ukrainian media environment a chance for radical improvement, much needed for shaping a democratic society united by effective communication.

Source of the cover photo: Aman Tyagi via Unsplash

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