The EU has been debating the topic of media ownership concentration since the first Green Paper in 1992. Thirty years later, the EU Commission is ready to tackle it again: it is commissioning a monitoring system to assess the economic, political-regulatory and technical risks of media concentration and to back it up with data from member countries.

The EU Commission (DG CNECT, Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology) has now commissioned a consortium under the leadership of the University of Salzburg to develop the pilot project in a competitive procedure. Over the course of a year, experts from 15 member countries led by project manager and communications scientist Josef Trappel will develop an indicator-based database and discuss it publicly.

Prime time

This media policy initiative of the EU Commission has come at the right time. “Media concentration has never been more prevalent than now, especially in the age of digital platforms. The EU needs to provide an adequate response,” says Josef Trappel.

The consortium will share the workload: The University of Tampere in Finland are creating the technical platform for the database, La Sapienza University in Rome is responsible for the structural indicators, University of Pompeu Favre in Barcelona for the technical indicators and the economic indicators are in the hands of the project management at the University of Salzburg.

The pilot project will coordinate its activities with the existing Media Pluralism Monitor at the European University Institute in Florence and with the NGO Reporters sans Frontières in Paris.

• The one-year project will start at the beginning of August 2021.
• The project has a budget of one million euros.

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