After Five Years of Media Grants, MJRC Rethinks Its Funding Program

After nearly five years of channelling donor money to independent media, the Media and Journalism Research Center has revamped its journalism support work. Under its new program, Relay, MJRC no longer awards grants. It works as the research hub and adviser to a pooled fund that finances practical information services in banking, healthcare, insurance, retail and tourism, with journalism at their core.

A small retailer in Chișinău choosing a payment service wants to know what a card terminal will really cost once transaction fees, settlement terms and other charges are added up. A patient in Indonesia needs to know which hospital will accept their national health insurance, and what paperwork to bring. Someone involved in a minor car accident in Serbia discovers that understanding an insurance policy is a great deal harder than buying one.

None of these people would say they are looking for journalism. They are trying to solve a problem. Yet what they need is close to what good journalism is meant to provide: information that has been checked, put in context, stripped of promotional language and explained by someone whose first loyalty is to the user, not to the company selling the product.

That overlap is the idea behind Relay, a new program designed by the Media and Journalism Research Center (MJRC) in cooperation with a small group of investors and foundations interested in supporting new forms of information spaces where they lack.

In Relay, MJRC is the research hub and adviser behind a pooled fund that finances such projects: it studies where reliable information is missing, finds and assesses the people who could provide it, and tells the fund’s investors where their money could make a difference.

That is a substantial shift from the model MJRC ran between 2020 and 2025, when the center itself acted as a grantmaker. During those years, it concentrated on strengthening independent media working in hostile political and commercial environments. The program started with backing from the Open Society Foundations, which wanted to reach newsrooms under pressure in markets where conventional media funding was often out of reach. Other donors followed. In all, MJRC distributed around €4 million from eight major donors, mainly private foundations, to roughly 40 media organizations in about a dozen countries.

The last grants under that model went out in June 2025.

Relay grows directly out of those five years. They showed that grants can give independent newsrooms room to breathe: to hire journalists, develop products, improve management and pursue reporting that would otherwise be impossible. They also showed the limits of trying to fix structural information problems by strengthening newsrooms alone.

A well-run independent outlet can still be stuck in an advertising market dominated by politically connected rivals. It can build an excellent website and still struggle to reach people who increasingly get their information from social networks, messaging apps, search engines and AI assistants. And it can produce first-rate reporting while some of the most consequential information people need every day, about a bank loan, a medical treatment, an insurance policy or a public service, stays in the hands of the institution selling or administering it.

So Relay changes the starting question. Instead of asking which media outlet should we fund?, MJRC begins with a different set of questions: What information is missing? Who needs it? Where do people get it now? And who could provide it independently and reliably?

Sometimes the answer will still be a newsroom. Sometimes it will be a journalist, or a group of journalists, building a specialist service. But it could equally be a consumer organization, a community publisher, a technology team working with reporters, a research group, a professional association, or a partnership that brings journalism and sector expertise together.

That is the central innovation. Relay does not so much move away from journalism as carry journalistic practices into fields where they have traditionally been weak or absent.

The money sits in a pooled fund that has so far brought together 11 investors, investment funds and other financial partners active in retail, banking, fintech, healthcare, tourism and insurance. Participating funds and foundations have committed €1.2 million to date, which is a small fund, but still sufficient for experimentation. Rather than sponsoring projects in their own industries, they pool their money and use the MJRC to investigate the information problem, assesses potential projects and checks whether applicants can keep independent information separate from commercial promotion. The fund decides what to finance.

MJRC is already assessing, on the fund’s behalf, proposals submitted by applicants. In Armenia, several proposals concern retail and banking, where consumers often depend on information produced by banks, payment companies or retailers themselves. One, submitted by a group of financial journalists working with a consumer-rights group, would build an independently maintained service comparing banking products, fees and retail prices.

The Central Bank of Armenia already runs an official comparison site, fininfo.am, so the novelty is not the database itself. Journalists would investigate the products behind the numbers: tracking changes in fees, flagging misleading promotions, interviewing customers and regulators, and explaining why some products cost more and how particular practices affect consumers. The service would also cover retail prices, which no official tool tracks. The data and the journalism would reinforce each other. A user could compare bank charges and, in the same place, read reporting on how those charges are set and what to watch out for.

In Moldova, the proposals focus on retail and fintech, in particular on what smaller merchants know when they switch to electronic payments. For many, the switch is no longer optional. Shops and service outlets with annual sales above 500,000 lei must now offer cashless payment or face fines, and the central bank’s MIA instant-payment system, which it says costs merchants roughly half as much as other methods, now competes with card terminals. A project from a business-journalism team working with a group of small retailers and independent fintech specialists would explain transaction fees, contract conditions and the differences between payment services, in both Romanian and Russian.

Here too, journalism is central. The project would not simply repackage what payment companies say. Reporters would test providers’ claims, compare contracts, investigate complaints and document small merchants’ experiences. That reporting would feed a reusable information service distributed through merchant associations, community publishers and digital tools. Someone choosing a payment system would get both the practical answer (what will this cost me?) and the independent reporting needed to understand why.

The proposals from Turkey cover banking, fintech and healthcare, and show even more clearly why Relay treats journalism as part of the information infrastructure. One, from a consortium of health reporters, data journalists and healthcare professionals, would create a source-linked directory of healthcare services, eligibility rules and access procedures.

A conventional directory can tell a patient where a service exists. Journalism can ask why access differs between regions, whether official waiting times match reality, which services are chronically unavailable and whether changes announced by the authorities have actually happened. In the Relay model, the two sit side by side: users get an answer to the immediate question, while journalists keep investigating the system that produces it.

Another Turkish proposal, from a team of financial reporters and civic technologists, applies the same principle to banking and electronic money. An AI-assisted interface would answer basic questions about products, but every important answer would link to verified sources and be backed by reporting on regulatory changes, disputes and market practices. When a question strays into financial advice or calls for professional judgement, the system would stop rather than improvise.

That distinction is important because Relay is not trying to replace journalists with AI. It is instead testing whether AI can improve the delivery of information whose reliability still depends on human reporting, verification and editorial judgement.

In Tunisia, the projects under review combine tourism and fintech. One application, from a network of local journalists, tourism researchers and small tourism businesses, would provide independently maintained, multilingual information on accommodation, local services, transport and payment options.

The service could help a visitor find a locally run guesthouse or check whether a payment method is widely accepted. The journalism would examine the economy behind those choices: which businesses dominate online visibility, how commissions charged by large booking platforms affect local operators, where tourism revenue ends up and which communities benefit as visitor numbers grow.

The product, in other words, would not become just another booking guide. Its journalism would explain the market the guide helps people navigate.

The Indonesian proposal applies similar logic to healthcare. Submitted by a collaboration of health journalists, community media and public-health specialists, it would help people understand how to get treatment through the national health insurance system, using mobile, messaging and voice interfaces as well as text.

The service could answer questions about where treatment is available or which documents are required. Journalists would investigate the recurring failures behind those questions: hospitals turning patients away, gaps between official entitlements and actual access, regional inequalities and shifts in health policy.

That makes the service itself a source of journalism. If thousands of users keep asking why a particular treatment is unavailable in a certain province, the pattern may point to a story. Information flows both ways: journalism improves the service, and the service shows journalists what to investigate.

In Colombia, the proposals deal mainly with fintech and financial understanding. One application, from a financial-literacy organization working with investigative journalists and rural community publishers, would produce source-linked explanations of credit, fees and payment products that cooperatives and local media could reuse.

Journalists would report on lending practices, aggressive marketing, complaints against providers and the real-world effects of financial regulation. Instead of treating financial literacy as a classroom exercise detached from power, the project would pair the question how does this product work? with the journalistic one: who benefits from the way it works?

That pairing goes to the heart of Relay. Many information services explain systems as if they were neutral. Journalism brings scrutiny, conflict, accountability and evidence about who gains and who loses.

The Serbian proposals extend the model to fintech and insurance, a small and concentrated market. Three insurers wrote almost 60% of premiums in the first half of 2025, and households still account for a very low share of premiums, according to the central bank. Price competition is weakest exactly where most people meet insurance first. Compulsory motor cover is priced by insurers but under the National Bank of Serbia’s close watch: in 2022 it forced them to reverse a 22% increase, and they must now notify it 60 days before any tariff change.

The proposal, submitted by a team of investigative journalists working with insurance specialists and consumer advocates, therefore focuses less on finding the cheapest compulsory policy than on what policies actually cover. It would let users compare voluntary products such as comprehensive car (kasko), home and health insurance, understand exclusions and search dense policy documents in plain language.

The journalism around the service would examine rejected claims, recurring disputes, premium changes, regulatory gaps and the ties between insurers, brokers and the banks that sell policies alongside loans. Claims handling is a live issue: it was the main focus of the central bank’s conduct inspections of insurers in 2025. A driver checking whether a particular kind of damage is covered by their kasko policy might find not only the contractual answer but also reporting on how often similar claims are refused, and why.

This is where Relay differs most clearly from conventional consumer-information projects. It does not treat practical information and journalism as separate products. The information service answers the question: what do I need to know now? The journalism asks: why is the system like this, who controls it, who benefits from it and what happens when it fails?

Together, the funders of the MJRC’s new program believe, the two can produce something more useful than either a conventional news site or a conventional service platform on its own.

There is an economic argument, too. Independent journalism has spent years looking for revenue beyond advertising and philanthropy. A newsroom that runs a trusted banking-information service, healthcare navigator or insurance database may build relationships with users that are quite different from those created by publishing news alone. Some of these services could eventually support subscriptions, licensing, partnerships or other income.

But Relay does not assume every project must turn a profit. It asks instead whether a service can become resilient enough not to vanish the moment its first grant runs out.

The broader scope also explains why MJRC is changing how it measures the projects it assesses for the fund. Its previous program used an Impact Index designed mainly for media organizations. It measured four things: policy and civil-society impact, collaboration between journalists, progress towards a viable funding model and audience growth. A related Grant Value Index compared the size of a grant with the impact points it generated.

Those indicators worked when the thing being supported was a newsroom. They say less when the project is a healthcare information service delivered through WhatsApp and voice calls, a comparison tool used by small retailers, or a banking database whose most important achievement is that its information is consistently correct.

Relay therefore keeps parts of the old evaluation system and adds new measures: whether a project meets an identified information need, whether its answers are accurate and properly sourced, whether it reaches people through several channels, whether its finances are becoming more resilient and whether the model could work elsewhere.

It also deliberately gives extra weight to projects in places where the information deficit is most severe, and to organizations receiving institutional funding for the first time.

The formula behind this, the Relay Impact Index, is set out in the box below. The principle is simpler: a project should be judged not only by how many people encounter it, but by whether it gives them information they previously lacked, whether that information can be trusted and whether the service has a reasonable chance of surviving.

The approach also carries risks. The closer Relay moves to banking, insurance, healthcare, tourism and retail, the easier it becomes for a public-interest information project to slide into marketing. A supposedly independent banking service can turn into a customer-acquisition channel. A tourism platform can favour businesses that pay for exposure. A healthcare tool can end up reproducing the priorities of the institutions supplying its data.

That is why MJRC’s assessment process, called Groundwork, comes before the fund commits any money.

Researchers, always recruited locally, start by identifying the information need and the people affected by it. They map the organizations already producing information and the channels through which it travels. They examine who controls the relevant data, where the gaps are, how AI and digital platforms shape access to it, and whether the applicant has the expertise and independence to build something better. Only then does MJRC advise the fund on what should be tested and what evidence would show that it works.

For a media organization, Groundwork may reveal that its journalism is strong but that it has misread what practical information people actually want. For a technology team, it may expose the opposite problem: an elegant product built without the reporting capacity to verify the information underneath. Relay is designed to bring those two sides together.

MJRC’s old program started with independent media organizations and asked how to make them stronger. Relay starts with an information problem and works backwards. Sometimes that route will end at a newsroom. Increasingly, it may end with something that does not look like a newsroom at all, but still depends on journalists to make it trustworthy.