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Public interest media are essential to democracy and to development: ensuring people have access to trusted information, understand their rights and responsibilities and those of their leaders. Yet they have never been more under threat from political and legal pressures and economic downturn.

The Protecting Independent Media for Effective Development (PRIMED) consortium is working with media partners in Bangladesh, Sierra Leone and Ethiopia – three very different contexts – on editorial development, training and support to build resilience to political and economic pressures. Our research and evaluation across this project will build on the PRIMED consortium’s existing extensive knowledge, and further the media development sector’s understanding of what works in creating sustainable independent media.

This work has never been more urgent: the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have intensified pressure on public interest media outlets around the world, even as their critical public role becomes even more clear as the antidote to a raging ‘info-demic.’

Led by Â鶹ԼÅÄ Media Action, core consortium partners include , and the . Further support is provided by  and .

• In Sierra Leone, where the lively and diverse media scene is in economic crisis, and rarely a source of trusted and impartial information, PRIMED provides intensive support to selected media outlets to improve professional standards, audience understanding and operating models and skills. Amid attempts to introduce independent media regulation, PRIMED helps to inform, support and moderate dialogue among sector stakeholders to help shape legislative, regulatory and legal processes toward a more independent, and more trusted and impartial, media environment.
• In Ethiopia, PRIMED supports efforts to establish a new public interest media tradition in a country that has been witnessing a democratic transition but remains fractured along political, economic and ethnic lines. PRIMED is helping to build technical expertise, professional editorial standards, and stronger institutional and financial foundations to help develop existing media partners into public-interest models.
• In Bangladesh, rapid economic progress toward lower-middle-income status has not been matched by growth in public-interest media. We are supporting media partners to develop stronger audience insights and more professional and relevant content, more efficient production, and broader offerings across multiple, revenue-generating platforms. This approach makes the case for media in the public interest as key to economic viability, contributing to a future in which media outlets may be financially independent and less prone to co-option.

PRIMED has a flagship learning component focusing on knowledge sharing across the globe, generating evidence on what works (and what doesn’t) to support media viability, coalition building, gender and the media, and public subsidy.

Our learning is shared through research briefings, videos, policy reports and analysis, blogs, webinars and podcasts, through our consortium and our communication and coordination partners: and The (links to third party sites).

PRIMED is funded by the .

Read our November 2020 press release formally launching the project.

And read our press release from the UK- and Canada-hosted Global Conference for Media Freedom conference in July 2019.