BRUSSELS - On 3 May 2008, the Pascal Decroos Fund for Investigative Journalism — the Belgian organisation that would later grow into Journalismfund Europe — launched mediakritiek.be ("media criticism", in Dutch), at a time when media criticism was almost entirely absent from public debate in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking region of Belgium. The initiative has since been discontinued, but the site remains fully accessible via the Internet Archive, at web.archive.org.
A forum for media professionals — and their audience
Mediakritiek.be was aimed primarily at journalists and media professionals. The Pascal Decroos Fund invited them to critically weigh up both their own work and that of their peers, and to respond to analyses submitted by others. At the same time, the platform was open to any visitor with a strong opinion on the mainstream media.
That combination was meant to turn the forum into a lively source of reflection — and, the editorial team hoped, a useful archive for journalism students. Which piece of reporting worked, and which didn't? How did the public react to a particular broadcast? Why did a certain method succeed, or fail?
Quality over quantity
The Pascal Decroos Fund deliberately did not pursue high visitor numbers as a goal in itself. The ambition behind mediakritiek.be was depth: comment and reaction on journalistic publications and reports that themselves aimed for some degree of substance. Among other things, the site featured analyses of projects the Fund itself had supported financially, with the explicit intention that authors would highlight both the strong and the weak points of that work.
The guiding principle was constructive sharpness rather than demolition: "blunt axes" had no place on mediakritiek.be, but a sharp knife could occasionally be used — provided the criticism was well-argued, constructive and informed.
What was on the site — and how much of it
Mediakritiek.be mainly collected opinion pieces from the Flemish and Dutch press on media and journalism: business models, new media, self-regulation, innovation, copyright, press freedom, privacy, crowdfunding, censorship, the right to be forgotten in online press archives, and more. Each author had a short biography on file, with links to their personal website or social media — a useful profile-building tool for early-career journalists.
By the end of 2012, the site had published 1,189 contributions from 455 different Flemish and Dutch authors — roughly 264 articles a year, or one for every working day. That year, the site recorded 53,188 unique visitors and 123,377 page views, averaging 146 unique visitors a day, with peaks of up to 1,175 in a single day. Figures that, as the Fund itself put it at the time, showed mediakritiek.be had become "a household name in the Flemish press world" — and, alongside that, an archive regularly cited by communication and journalism students in their dissertations.
An editorial team that curated as well as invited
The editorial team behind mediakritiek.be worked proactively: it sought out topics itself and encouraged readers to respond. At the same time, it acted as a filter — submissions were vetted, sifted and organised, and not everything sent in made it onto the site. Abusive rants were systematically kept out.
To give published material a wider reach, the editorial team also sought partnerships, including with the Dutch platform DeNieuweReporter.nl, a comparable media-criticism site in the Netherlands.
Luc Huyse as patron
The project gained an authoritative figurehead: sociologist Luc Huyse, emeritus professor at KU Leuven (the University of Leuven, one of Belgium's oldest and largest universities), took on the role of patron of mediakritiek.be. In that capacity, he watched over the quality of the initiative.
Its place in the history of Journalismfund Europe
Mediakritiek.be was one of several Flemish projects run by the Pascal Decroos Fund, the organisation that would go on to become Journalismfund Europe. The platform illustrates that, from early on, the organisation's work went beyond simply funding investigative journalism financially: it also invested actively in reflection on the quality of journalistic work itself.
That ambition remains relevant today. Media criticism is still not a fully established feature of the Flemish media landscape. Of the major Flemish media outlets, only the public broadcaster VRT (the Flemish equivalent of the BBC) has an ombudsman. One place where criticism of Flemish media can still be found on a regular, structural basis is the website of the Raad voor de Journalistiek (the Flemish Council for Journalism, a press council comparable to the UK's IPSO or the Netherlands' equivalent body), specifically its published rulings on complaints. The independent investigative journalism platform Apache.be also regularly covers media criticism. In its time, mediakritiek.be was one of the few initiatives attempting to fill a similar, structural role.
The project didn't end for lack of readers, but for lack of funds. The site ran largely on dwindling support from private donors and was never a fixed line item in the annual subsidy agreement between the Fund and the Flemish government. Journalists and publishers were never paid for their contributions, but the editorial work itself — tracking Flemish media output, approaching authors, formatting and enriching texts, moderating comments — required a structural half-time role. When Flemish subsidies fell and donation income halved towards the end of 2012, the Pascal Decroos Fund approached partners to try to keep the project afloat. That external support ultimately failed to materialise, and mediakritiek.be went offline in early 2013.
The website nonetheless remains fully accessible via the Wayback Machine: web.archive.org/web/20130124194151/http://www.mediakritiek.be.