Real News for Romania’s Media Desert Regions

Target group

The project aims to expand Context.ro outreach in Romania’s three poorest regions and news deserts: Moldova, Oltenia, and Muntenia. These three regions are affected by significant social disparities, economic emigration, politically-controlled media, and extremist-populist rhetoric.

Goals of the project

By exposing corrupt practices, and illegal misuse of public and EU funds, our reports aim to raise public awareness and boost local civic engagement and transparency, which in the end, improve local and social-economic conditions. Our disclosures about malign players who economically control these news deserts aim to improve and clean the informational space and ecosystems. We will provide the new audiences with a piece of alternate, professionally-documented information; we will develop their critical thinking will generate awareness about transparency and a more involved civic engagement and further economic development.

Implemented activities 

The funding helped the media to reach Romania’s three poorest regions (Moldova, Southern Muntenia, and Oltenia) to inform and raise awareness about corruption, misuse of public and EU funds, and poor governance issues which are causes of their poverty and poor public services. They used an expert-guided social media campaign to obtain an enhanced outreach and created a weekly newsletter in the readers’ mailbox.

Impact addressing news deserts

Thanks to the Local Media for Democracy grant programme, they promoted information of interest in the three targeted desert news areas based on their regional relevance and social impact, with articles focused on various topics affecting the living standards and the poor local communities: child and human trafficking; poor medical services which included patients’ deaths and fires in hospitals; misuse of public and EU funds which impacted schools, kindergartens, water infrastructure, services in communities; corruption and masterminded bids with public and EU funds which left targeted with underdeveloped road infrastructure; lack of transparency on the use of EU funds; unrecovered funds that should have gone to local budgets; illegal misappropriations of public forestry areas, etc. They hope now that the outreached audiences are more informed, know better their rights, and for improved public services for their communities.