DW Akademie at the M20 Summit in Johannesburg
Media organizations, political decision-makers and tech companies came together at the two-day M20 Summit in Johannesburg to tackle pressing challenges facing journalism worldwide: ensuring information integrity and improving media viability. The M20 initiative aims to elevate media issues on the official G20 agenda. The summit was organized by Media Monitoring Africa and the South African National Editors’ Forum (SANEF) alongside the official G20 program under South Africa’s presidency.
Laura Moore, Head of DW Akademie Research and Evaluation, joined a panel to share five key recommendations for G20 governments:
- Establish multi-stakeholder national commissions or task forces to investigate challenges to media viability in their country’s own context and propose actionable solutions at policy level.
- Spend 0.1% of GDP on direct domestic support for independent professional news media. This support must be provided on a legal, fair, transparent and equitable basis, with safeguards against real or perceived ways of influencing editorial content.
- Spend 1% of Official Development Assistance (ODA) on direct international support for public interest journalism and its enabling environment, particularly in countries with low- and middle-income economies, as part of broader support for democracy, transparency and good governance.
- Ensure full transparency of government advertising as well as fairness and equity in how and to whom it is allocated.
- Develop competition and platform policies that enable journalism to thrive in digital markets, including those that promote fair revenue sharing between digital platforms and news organizations.
South Africa is currently the G20 host country and will also host the G20 Leaders' Summit in Johannesburg in November 2025. The M20 is an independent initiative to ensure issues relating to media integrity and healthy information ecosystems are reflected in the G20 policy agenda. DW Akademie was an official partner of the M20 Summit and is part of the M20’s global advisory group.
