HORIZON-CL2-2026-01-DEMOCRACY-04
Sustainable Paths to Media Viability
Programme
Sustainable Paths to Media Viability
| Field | Details | Field | Details | Field | Details |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Status | Open For Submission |
Opening Date | 2026-05-12 |
Closing Date | 2026-09-23 |
| Target TRL | Working Prototypes & Platforms | Type Action | Innovation Action |
Type Grant | Lump Sum Grant |
| Submission Model | Single-stage | Geographic Target | Pan-European Media Networks |
||
| Budget per Bid | €3.50M to €4.00M |
Expected Slots | 3 slots available | Total Allocation | €12.00M |
Note: The deadline closes strictly at 17:00:00 Brussels time. Part A contains an integrated budget form replacing the legacy Excel upload requirement. The call strongly encourages partnerships spanning media ecosystems, tech firms, and Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH).
🎁 Expected Outcome by the EU
- 📰 Reinforced Digital Transformation: Accelerate the technological evolution of the news media industry by generating resilient, inclusive business models that anchor democratic stability.
- 🗳️ Empowered Citizenship: Equip citizens—particularly those facing systemic disadvantages—with tools to access verified info, mitigating algorithmic fragmentation and promoting a fair democracy.
- 🎯 Emerging Creator Accountability: Foster a trustworthy information ecosystem by actively engaging online content producers and influencers to increase reliance on verified journalistic principles.
🏗️ Scope Summary
Applicants are invited to collaborate directly with news media organizations from inception to build workable prototypes, industrial applications, and interoperable standard frameworks across two primary action clusters:
🤖 Technological & Algorithmic Intervention
- Journalistic Content Recognition: Design industry-led crawlers, browser plugins, common taxonomies, and metadata standards to categorize and prioritize content abiding by professional principles.
- AI-Driven Monetization Services: Deploy AI models to build revenue-generating architectures, including dynamic paywalls, proprietary ad-tech metadata generators, search aggregators, and copyright revenue trackers.
- Trust-Oriented Recommender Systems: Develop transparent recommender engines that mitigate “infotainment” bias, presenting plural viewpoints and ranking quality information over unverified opinions.
🧠 Behavioural & Systemic Interventions
- Behavioral Data Science: Leverage behavioral interventions (nudges, gamification, educational indicators) to counter misinformation, analyzing how reader habits shape trust between human-curated and AI-driven news delivery.
- Social Media Creator Integration: Advocate for transparency and source-disclosure mechanisms among online creators, federating media segments along a joint innovation agenda.
🔗 Infrastructure Requirements: Where applicable, consortia should leverage data and services through European Research Infrastructures federated under the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and relevant institutional Data Spaces.
🛣️ Strategic Alignment
This Innovation Action (IA) centers on near-market, technical adaptation to keep journalism economically viable in AI-intermediated information spaces. By building proprietary ad-tech architectures and structured metadata systems, the call aims to shift news media away from reactive, click-driven models toward robust, sovereign distribution platforms.
Our work bridges technical metadata standards with structural media governance to prevent systemic data fragmentation across digital public squares.
We provide the underlying governance, RegTech capabilities, and architectural frameworks necessary to anchor an AI Environmental/Reputation Governance Harness.
This software platform layer (bridging RegTech and FinTech) provides the exact tracking infrastructure required by this call’s monetization and auditing mandates. By engineering transparent, user-centric metadata frameworks and ad-tech tracking protocols, our architecture verifies compliance with professional standards, ensures trust indicators are hardcoded into data storage, and provides advertisers with brand-safety feedback without creating algorithmic silos.
🤝 SCVCS’ Core Areas of Collaboration
We are utilizing our research frameworks to establish structural bridges with partners targeting the following call mandates:
🔏 Metadata Standards & Data Sovereignty: Implementing structured metadata registries and crawler taxonomies. We apply the International Data Spaces framework to ensure that newsroom content, when accessed by large AI aggregators, maintains trace ownership and captures appropriate copyright revenues while preserving data sovereignty.
🌊 Socio-Technical Trust Cybernetics: Applying systemic models to analyze public trust dynamics across human-curated and AI-driven delivery networks. This converts behavioral science theories into operational, transparent metrics within algorithmic recommender engines to foster inclusive democratic spaces.
🏫 Co-Creation Testing Environments: Partnering with regional media segments, tech platforms, and information science networks to build “Living Lab” style environments. These spaces allow journalists, community groups, and ad-tech companies to collaboratively iterate and test workable prototypes under real-world economic pressure.
We are actively seeking to connect with:
- 🇪🇺 EU-Based Consortium Leads: Media houses, academic research institutions, or ad-tech pioneers looking to integrate clear socio-technical engineering, systemic governance metrics, or RegTech monetization auditing into their Part B proposal layout.
- 📰 Independent Media Ecosystem Actors: Sectoral media groups, public broadcasters, or independent creator networks seeking to anchor multi-perspective news aggregators or dynamic paywall prototypes.
📬 Action Item: To review joint deployment strategies or exchange Participant Identification Code (PIC) profiles, please reach out via our Contact Page.
Official Reference: HORIZON-CL2-2026-01-DEMOCRACY-04 - EU Funding & Tenders Portal