The Media Support Fund, in order to promote media pluralism, diversity of opinions and national cultures, and accessibility of socially relevant, culturally relevant information in society, including information accessibility for persons with disabilities, by providing state support to producers and/or disseminators of public information, and by ensuring the rational and reasonable use of public funds, hereby publishes the decision of the Fund’s Council of 20 June 2024 on the allocation of funds and the results of the evaluation of all the projects that participated in the competition. A total of €5,931,380 was earmarked for partial State support for producers/disseminators of public information. For the first time, operating support was granted to cultural periodicals and regional media, as well as to scholarships for journalists. The Fund’s Council allocated €1,928,668 to support these activities back in April. In May, €68,000 was allocated for journalists’ scholarships.
The percentage available for the programmes is set out in the Fund’s rules:
| Programme (priority area) | Proportion of funding, %. |
| Cultural media and cultural periodicals | 36 |
| Regional media | 38 |
| News, investigative and educational journalism | 21 |
| Media in the languages of national minorities and the Lithuanian diaspora | 5 |
The projects were evaluated by expert panels. The Council took decisions on the award of co-financing on the basis of reasoned conclusions submitted by the expert groups, setting out the list of projects proposed for funding and the amount of funding to be allocated, and the list of projects proposed for exclusion. Some projects that were positively evaluated by the peer review were reduced or excluded from funding, taking into account the funds foreseen in the specific programme, the relevance of the project in the overall context, the reasonableness of the estimate, the overall assessment of the expert groups following the discussions during the expert group meetings (the individual assessment of the experts as set out in the scoring tables may be different from the consensus assessment of the expert groups, which was used by the Council as a basis for the assessment).
Projects that did not meet the requirements set out in the Fund’s rules for the submission of projects were not submitted for expert evaluation.
275 projects were submitted by producers/disseminators of public information under the programmes provided for in the Law on Public Information, of which 198 were supported.
The experts’ scores (the average of the panel’s scores) and the abbreviated descriptions of the projects that have received funding, which applicants have included in their application, are published on the Fund’s website.
Applicants who have received funding are invited to sign contracts with the Media Support Fund no later than 22 July.
We thank all the applicants who participated in the call and wish them success in the implementation of their projects and look forward to their participation in the next Media Support Fund calls, which will be launched already this year by the decision of the Council of the Fund, taking into account the priorities of the development and expansion of the culture of information society and the priorities of strengthening the information security and resilience of society.
